#905 - William von Hippel - Why Modern Life Can Feel So Empty

24:37And 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 stay safe. What is some of the other universal rules? Bizarrely, I can't make heads or tails out of this one. Maybe somebody, and I've never met anyone who knows the answer, women also do the cooking. So I don't know what that is. People of conjecture, well maybe it's the process of giving her the meat from the hunt is a form of connection, but I can't, it's possible. I've never heard a compelling answer. sharing the proceeds of that makes good sense because most hands fail.

25:16So you want an insurance policy where everybody gets to eat at least something. 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 memorization, like spatial memorization close by. Maybe they know what herbs go in the pot more effectively or something. I mean, I'm really grasping at Strowsay that she knows the difference between time and sage because she can remember it more effectively. I'm like, yeah, that's really interesting. That's really interesting. And women are more connected. You know, men are more autonomy -ish machines and women are more connected machines.

25:56Both need both. And maybe that connection compels you as part of the process where you're preparing for I don't know. I have no idea. I'm only. Yeah, I like your time sage explanation now. We'll go with that one. materialism. How materialistic did you find out hunter gatherers? Well, that's a funny one. So, you know, hunter gatherers essentially own nothing and for a host, not nothing, but very little. For a host of reasons, it's hard to make things when you're a hunter gather because you don't have the modern equipment. Be it, you got to carry it 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 it the other 363.

26:37And then the final reason for that is remember I mentioned this mandatory sharing of meat. Well, does mandatory sharing of anything if you own more than one or two of them? Because it's a society where everybody has to work together. And so what that means, it creates this really remarkable lifestyle where this rule about meat sort of gets spread across to everything. And so if I own two or three shirts, you could 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 wonderfully equal in the sense that everybody shares everything with each other.

27:12But this, and 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 the Sandic dot where the zool guy and Hodzai, I think he was, had been given a sweatshirt from a tourist. And he's talking to the anthropologist who visits the group and he says, I meant to share 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 kind of can't blame the guy, right? You know, he's probably feeling old and cold sometimes and he just wants to keep it.

27:44We see this in a lot of different domains. I remember I worked with this, I worked up on this remote island in Northern Australia with the Anandiliaqua people, and 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 gathered them up, catalog what they are, and then we can see where 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 and everything. And so you're ragging this like rubbish out of the sea.

28:16Anyway, these guys were doing an amazing job, and I was talking to their manager after we're gonna go, yeah, so they do an 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 could if I watch you really nice breakfast when you arrive in the morning and they're like, oh, I'd love a really nice breakfast.

28:43And so, you know, they're just as materialistic as we are. All humans are materialistic. And in fact, anthropologists said that when they arrive, they're constantly saying, well, look, you've got two of those. I'd like to have one of them. I actually need these, right? And so 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, well, that Chris Wimson'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?

29:11And you can assure us for it to give to them, right? There has to be an incentive. It's such an interesting game that was played there. So let me give you a thing that you can consume without the conspicuous consumption of the rest of your group seeing you consume it. There must be hunter gatherer 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 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, it was kind of sparse.

29:47overall, he's buried juice all over his face. Yes, that's exactly right. That happens all the time. And the classic example is honey. Honey is the, they 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 our ancestral 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. You come home, cover it. And you're just a little tired of feasts. But everybody knows that about each other, right? And so you say to me, oh Bill, I think I'm going to wander off today, and I'm thinking, Chris is after honey, and I'm like, hey, babe, I'm with you.

30:27Because at least now you and I are going to score it together, right? And there's even some interesting animals that help us find honey because then we make a little bit of mess, and then they get some too. And so there's these interesting cross -bis, these cooperation. And I see one of those birds near you and I see I'm hanging with Chris today because I think he's got plans Because they know for well that you know they they today what they catch today But they're gonna eat right then and there what they get when it's really really good. What was that story about egg shell beads? So yeah, egg shell beads are a great example.

30:57So This this comes to a tradition that's quite related to what we've been talking about before and it's among the Kung San in the Kalahari desert And so they have this tradition which I don't even know how to pronounce Hootsaro or something like that. I'm not quite sure I would say. But what that tradition is is that they've got a set group of a network that sometimes there can but by and large their 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 and I know your campus somewhere over there sometimes hard to find each other because we all wander around.

31:32What about you? 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 reconnect with you. You'll do the same for me. One of the most common gifts that you would give is these beads that are made out of ostrich eggshells. They're pretty and they travel well. They're kind of like our equivalent of money. They're easy to put in your pocket, so to speak, and they're really nice. So 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.

32:13Okay, I have my pizza because you've got no choice But I've got no choice too We're gonna look up for each other no matter what if we're part of that network And one of the interesting things about those networks is that they can be super broad And in fact, they almost all was 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, or what we believe the reason for that is that, you know, I think you could go very pear -shaped in my region of the world, the farther away you are, the better chances are that you're part of the world is still okay.

32:48And 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. No, they're eakin at a living and 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 They're opposed in some ways. Yeah, they are opposed And so if you come back to this argument I was making about autonomy and that we develop a sense of autonomy in order to develop competence That's how we decide the area where we have best prospects if we're Mario Puzzo 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 go for it Right we put everything on the line and try to make it as a writer or whatever we see our competence well So a son autonomy is in service of competence.

33:42It's what gets us there now Now 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, sneaking up on the hunt, doing whatever it is that I do that I think makes me special. And that often requires a lot of self -focused attention, a lot of you say, hey man, I'm going to go to the party and I say you go, I've got baskets to shoot or I've got baskets to weave, you know, whatever my competence is, right? And so the upshot is that the more I develop components, the more I have to sacrifice my connections.

34:16And that's certainly the case in today's world. I mean, if you look at what school has 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, it's what we see somebody hold and warm in this context. So cold is our and warm refer to our natural tendency and ability to connect.

34:47And so if I connect easily and in a friendly manner to you I'm a warm person. So you meet me on the bus and and you say, you know, oh, excuse me and he's done and I go, and I just don't pay any attention to you. I'm not friendly and warm. I'm like, oh, of course, maybe I'd be happy to move over It's good to see you. Yeah, these trains are wobbly hard to read. You know, whatever. I I just engage with you then I'm being warm. And people vary dramatically now, warm or cold they are, they vary dramatically and 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 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?

35:28I'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's warm and you go, yeah, I bet they're very good. And you meet somebody who's cold and you go, oh, I bet they're pretty competent because on average, that's true. That's a, I wonder whether that can be manipulated in a job interview to go in and seem overly cold and like an absolute killer. My abilities are completely terrible, but I mean, seemed like he was such a serious actor. Exactly. You'd want to make it, what would be the perfect thing is if I could say, you and I, you mine potential boss.

36:06You 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 confidence machine. A quick aside grooming isn't just about looking good. It's about feeling good and the right tools make all the difference. That's where man escapes beard and balls bundle comes in. It comes with their Beard Hedger, lawnmower 5 .0 Ultra, and all the essentials that you need to keep looking sharp from head to toe. The Beard Hedger is your precision trimmer featuring 20 adjustable lengths so you can dial in the perfect style, whether it's light stubble or a full, but Reynolds stash, like I'm rocking here.

36:39And for downstairs, the lawnmower 5 .0 Ultra has a cutting edge ceramic blade, reduced grooming accidents, 75 minute battery, waterproof technology, and an LED light. So you could use it as a flashlight if you needed to scare off an intruder. perhaps. Right now you can get 20 % off and free shipping on the Beard and Balls bundle by going to the link in the description below or heading to manskaped .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom 20 a checkout that's manskaped .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 20 a checkout. Yeah, so it's is it another way to put this would be that people that are very competent.

37:15There is this subtext 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, 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 is whole life was hanging out and playing. I don't understand how he does it. He's just that good, right?

37:43Somehow also was an awesome professor. Yeah, exactly. Ten -Zillion grants change in the world. 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 it for a while. We have to sacrifice our connections. Again, the irony is, on becoming competent so that down the road, you're gonna want me on your team. You're gonna want to connect with me. And the other side of that that's interesting is, if you look at them together, 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.

38:16You know, if I'm the best hunter 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 going to benefit more from it. And so once actually Trump's competence so long as you're not incompetent. Wow. So even when going on a hunt, the warm of friendly, a better hang will be chosen over a better hunter. Yeah. Every time. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about bands and how bands tour recently. And I wondered, I asked 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 fucking virtuoso?

38:56Like man, he's just on the base, you know, it's like it's an extension of his body. But when they get back on the tour bus, he sucks. Or the equivalent, whichever other position it is. And 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 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 a 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 start, you don't turn your brain off as soon as you step off stage and you go, I've got to sit down with Rick again, and he's gonna do my head in for the next 23 hours until we get back on stage.

39:43And I finally get a bit of peace from him, and he gets to do the one thing that he's actually good at. So yeah, even in modern environments, I think we still have 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 prosocial, 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. One of the other things that we can do is to develop competences.

40:20These 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 our unit of effort. 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.

40:53And 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 make choice. you're going to be beaten for selecting, 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 a mate choice at all, you end up with everybody trying to jostle, and this is where that tension comes from. How close am I? You nailed it. That's exactly right.

41:23Let's go. I knew I was listening. Right. And so the upshot of all that is that we really want to connect. We really want people that we like. But remember that when their trinos have 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 think they think bills are really lovely guy. They can't wait to catch up with me again at a bar someday But that guy's not joining our band under any circumstance no matter how much they love him Yeah, amazing But that doesn't change the fact that you also made the point you know if Stu's impossible He probably won't be on the the thing either and so I remember when Simon and Garfonka was still a cut or still a group and Simon said when they split, he's like, look, I know people prefer our sound with Garfunkel.

42:03I can't work with them anymore. And so, you know, it just, potentially risking his whole career. It matters that much. Now, the bills never get to join the band. You have to have that minimal level of competence, but then you have to get along. Because that's what humans are designed to do. And so the thing is, what that means is that we actually really enjoy getting along. We don't think, gee, getting along is something super important to me. I will get along. We think, boy, I really like this guy. And evolution guides us for their emotions. And so it gets us to enjoy doing those things that are in our best interest.

42:37Did certain ancestral environments or times or periods of history set up prioritize one over the other, do you think? Can you imagine? I'm thinking high conflict. I'm thinking battle for leadership. I'm thinking war with the neighboring tribe. predation, starvation, cold snaps in the climate, stuff like that. I imagine that there would be periods where competence and autonomy would be more heavily valued and periods where the connection, prosocial stuff would be more valued. I think you're absolutely right. In the end, what's going to always matter the most when conflict is harsh, when times are harsh, is how well do we work together as a team?

43:22And 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. They feel lose their connections to larger groups. There's one exception to that rule, and that's when you're an intergroup conflict. And so when two groups come into conflict with each other, guys bond with each other in an enormous way. And the evolution of pressure on that's clear, because what we have to do now, if 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.

43:53You never going to be in the bun, 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 lives than they feel to their fellow soldiers in that moment when their life is being threatened by another group. And it's their teamwork that's going to either get them out of that or fail to. And so there's enormous evolution or pressure on us, particularly on men because they're the ones who typically engage in the center group conflict.

44:25And when you lost, everyone of the men are going to die. There's no taking prisoners. You either run away and you get lucky or you're dead. The women will typically survive, not necessarily in the happiest way, but they're going to make it. Or is the men or not? I can't remember whether it was Tracy Vienka or Joyce Benenson that did the study on female basketball players. Have you seen this? So keep going, it's not for me or so far. 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.

45:07And men on opposing teams showed more physical affection than female competitors on the same team. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, and just as you were talking there, I thought about that sort of co -elish and all warfare type. Like, 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, are cowboys or, you know, whatever it is.

45:43I always think about that sort of disposition that tend this tendency 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. No reason. 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 get there awesome example. I don't know that's steady. That's a lovely one and it does in some ways it doesn't surprise me. So when men are on 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.

46:26And so two years later, when we get traded and on 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, remember I mentioned earlier, they tend to smaller circles of closer friends. as a consequence, they're less forgiving of what you might call betrayal. So if I go against you, it takes a lot of repair work for us to be tied again. Whereas two guys, if I go against you, you say, well, I would have done the same thing at Foward Bill, she's like, I don't have a problem with that. And we can be mates again when the conditions are right, when it suits both of us.

46:59Yeah. 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 there are different species, right? And you go, no, same species. Different environments. Same species, different setup. Exactly. And 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 example I like to use, so I don't know if you've heard of this pure war hypothesis.

47:36It's this idea that you don't, if you don't have a word something for something, you can't think it. And it was this idea that was super popular in the 30s. It's a called a supere - It's a supere - A supere - So there are these two guys who had this hypothesis. And 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 does the word make any difference?

48:09But Lera Bourditzki at Stanford came along and said, but let's turn the problem on its head Let's look at people of 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 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?

48:41And so they remember this forever. And so when they're telling stories, they'll go, oh yeah, so there it was, north by northwest from me and south by southeast, I've got this emu and how am I going to resolve this problem? And, and you know, if you and I tell the story, go, there on my right was a lion and there on my left was a this. So they asked, well, if you ask them what was it on the side of you with the butt or the side of you with the face, right? Because they don't have a word for front or back. They had no problem answering that question. They go, that was the side with the face. And so it's clear evidence that superior and more for wrong.

49:09You 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 it, you start to color the world that way. So hunter 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 of 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.

49:44I should you know get involved or whatever so Our habits of thought can change our psychology to some degree It can become our dominant way of you in the world despite the fact that underline 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 quirk, been dropped in with the hadzer 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 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, It's like if you would, you would almost certainly just be exactly the same as them.

50:29That's right. Your psychology would be there. There's another thing you said with that said, there's of course variability in everything. And so some people don't 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 in the band likes, you know, he's like, his thing is playing the bass because he doesn't connect to other humans very well. and maybe just maybe if Stuart Ben -A -Hazah, their rules would have fit him better. And so there are around the edges, there's gonna be people who feel like they're tighter fit or a looser fit, but the looser's fitting haazah and the looser's fitting, you know, Brit or American or Aussie, whatever, are gonna be miles apart in what they do, but they could have switched and been each other.

51:11What are the forces that shape autonomy and connection then? So there's a lot of forces. One of them is some of them emerged 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 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 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 up.

51:46I'm highly empathic. And so when you heard I heard 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 it has really nice interpersonal consequences Other people are lower in empathy you poke them in the hand and then I go I wonder if that hurt Interesting a lot of blood about that did hurt And it doesn't phase them. You know, there, we see all sorts of differences between these people.

52:22If 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. 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 I'm a libertarian, it's so interesting. of course, being a libertarian is maximum autonomy, and if low empathy, severe low empathy, sorry, if very high empathy is associated with connectedness, and very low empathy is associated with high autonomy, this is almost mapping perfectly your hypothesis.

53:04Yeah, it's this political ramifications of exactly what we're talking about, right? And so if you look at it when libertarians are willing to do I you know I'm not disrespecting libertarian values autonomy matters to all of us But but once it becomes ascending 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 Highest someone to clean their home. You know pretty much people of course Should a person be able to sell their kidney if they want extra money I'm a lot of people start to go no now.

53:34It's weird to say no to me I want to sell you my kidney. You're gonna die without it. I could use the 20 grand, but 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 answer is always yes. And so if I get a DUI, and I live in a total libertarian world, I would just put up on Fiverr, who will have their license suspended and go to jail for me 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 aesthetic, right?

54:09And so if you put a ton of it at the top of your list, you start to see the connection consequences, but from a philosophical perspective, it's a defensible viewpoint. In other news, whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24, 7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals, whether you want to put a little bit more effort in the gym or encourage yourself to get some extra hours of sleep, Woop helps you improve every day to make your health and wellness better.

54:41Every morning, Woop gives you a recovery score that actors a daily guide for how much you should exert yourself. And at the end of the day, you get a recommendation for your ideal bed time and weight time. You can track over 140 different habits and behaviors. They correlate that with your health and finally, they've even got a step counter. You can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. And if you're still on the fence, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Woop 4 .0 strap, plus you get your first month for free, and there's a 30 -day money back guarantee.

55:12So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it, after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Join by going to the link in the description below or heading to join .woop .com slash modern wisdom. That's join .woop .com slash modern wisdom. What about gender roles and their influence on autonomy, connections, stuff like that? Yeah, it's a great question. 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 hodz than if you're a bread or an American or whatever.

55:51But you're intrinsically the same, but that culture changes you a lot. And so of course our general's changed us a lot. I remember watching this video, it was put on by the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, where 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 wanna hear about his day, you're taking care of kids all day. In fact, I could even imagine to be slightly frustrating to be thinking about Marxist philosophy, but changing that piece all day, or doing whatever you're doing.

56:29And so that debate would never happen anymore, where two women argue about whether women should get an education. So our culture changes, 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 general's matter a lot. They also matter in ways that you less than you think and they don't matter in ways that you might think they would. So for example, if you look at sex differences on any domain and remember I was talking about men being more autonomy and women being more connection.

57:01So women are more likely to reward kindness in others. If you're kind to me and I'm female, I'm going to be more likely to go out of my way to repay it and if I'm male. If you're male, you're more likely to punish unkindness or unfriendliness in others. Because, you know, you've impinged on my autonomy when you're unfriendly to me, and I'm going to show you you can't do that. Then if you're female, both do it, but men do it more. Now, if you look at societies that are more gender -galitarian, where there's fewer rules about what men and women can do, those sex differences get larger. They don't get smaller.

57:32And 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 there being underlying the strong cultural impact, a very strong biological impact as well. Yeah, Steve Stuart Williams' new book is going to be all about sex differences, apparently, which I'm super excited for him to do, even though he will be... He won't be stepping into that much of a land mine, I guess, given what's happened over the last couple of months, but it definitely wouldn't have been particularly popular five Have you guys ever got another much?

58:12Yeah, it would be hard. Her book right there, and it's unfortunate to her book to write, because science and morality have nothing to do with each other. And if you look at what nature does, there's a bug out there where every time she always lays six eggs, they're inside her body, they're oval viiviperus, so they, they eggs hatch inside her, and there's one boy and five girls. He then has sex with all the 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 Ailey. What? And now what's this close? I can't it's a some kind of a dust might if I remember right and and I know and but of course now this is like a great tragedy.

58:50It's gonna 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 good and die like they're in the movie Alien after having incest with their sibling while they're inside their mother. And so like is there morality lesson here to be learned 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 could happen, it's happening somewhere in nature. Does that mean that we as humans should go, oh, it's natural and therefore important and good and we should guide ourselves by it?

59:22No, 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 general relations should want to read that book so they know what they're dealing with. But unfortunately, it worked the other way, right? A dak -delidium is a genus of mites known for its unusual life cycle. An impregnated female mite feeds upon a single egg of thrips, rapidly growing five to eight female offspring in one male, a single male mite, made to the whole of his sister's while they're still inside the mother.

59:54The new female is now impregnated. Eat the 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 of her just merges as well, but does not look for food or mates and then dies after a few hours. Oh, I thought they ate him too. So I misremember that. So that's good. He gets to get out of there. He's getting a little bit of fresh air. You know what I mean? It's good to stretch your legs after you've had psychobolises. Yeah. Okay. Let's move into the modern world. How is all of this off balance when we get into contemporary society?

1:00:27Yeah, 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 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 egalitarian. 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 gonna end up being eaten by a lion and you guys are gonna end up being fine. And so I had to rely on my connections and my opportunities for autonomy were actually relatively rare.

1:00:59Every 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 we're very, we want them because they're good for us.

1:01:29Remember, evolution guides us, so to speak, 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 as 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 bit tomorrow. And so I want fat salt and sugar when I off 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.

1:01:59It's a form of what I would call miswanting. You can imagine an evolutionary mismatch lead in a miswanting. You can also imagine an evolutionary mismatch lead in what I call misfeeling, which is when you worry about things you shouldn't worry about. So, for example, I'm really scared of spiders. They wig me out. And I was in Sydney on a trip with a bunch of biologists and we went to the grocery store first and when we got to our campsite and we opened up our box, a fun web spider hopped out, which is a world's deadliest spider. Now they're biologists and I'm just a psychologist, right? So they immediately captured under a glass which I heard thought was crazy.

1:02:36And then when I suggest that now one of us should stomp on it 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 anti -bentied and people are good at avoiding them, etc. On the other hand, think about all the ways that we can dive.

1:03:05Automobiles and electricity are two really good examples. I've shocked myself once changing a lamp out and threw me across the floor. I'm not scared of lamps at all. I've never been bit by a spider. They think of me as the HBGBs. Cars whizzed by me all the time. Even the smallest one conflated me and drivers are really inattentive, but I don't walk down the road going afraid of cars. I walked down the sidewalk, given 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 misfeeling. And I think what we've got ourselves into is this exact kind of evolution I miss match with regard to autonomy and connection.

1:03:42And 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 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 together 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, in a autonomy connection or in fundamental tension, then every time we choose autonomy, we're sacrificing our connections and we've got man -of -ounce.

1:04:15What 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 start with urban living living in the cities, in the mid -1800s, about, well, cities started about 5 ,000 years ago. 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've very slowly migrated in cities over thousands of years, 5 ,000 years, of 10 % of us had migrated to cities.

1:04:55Between, we go from one in 10 in 1850 to 1960, we now have one in 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 to in the city. There's all sorts of opportunities. Everything is available to me in the city. And so I go to cities for the opportunities, the job, 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.

1:05:29And so even though when I live in a city, I'm cheap by jowl with a lot of other people, you know my apartment building might have 1 ,000 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 500 meters away, I probably know them well. So when you ask people in cities, do you know some of you trust with your house keys? They're less likely to say yes than when you ask someone in the country. Despite having people all around them all the time. And so what we've done when cities is living is an example.

1:05:59We sacrifice our connections in order to gain that autonomy city living. And then you say, all right, fine. People have been voting with their feet. All the humans on planet are doing it. It must make your 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.

1:06:29If you live in a poor neighborhood and you want to mo you lawn and your lawn mower broke, you probably can't afford to have it repaired or buy another one, but you could borrow one from your neighbor. And the same old is if you need your dog's hat while you're out of town or whatever the because maybe you can't hire a dog sitter, 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, there are a lot like our hunter -gatherer and sensors. They have these tight connections because they need to.

1:06:54Rich people don't need each other at all. If I run out of my favorite coffee beans, I'll just drone it in. My latte will be here in 45 minutes. 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.

1:07:31It's kind of the same as the 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, because of all of my pro -social context, you have to assume that they've spent a lot of time on themselves. And that's a kind of isolating autonomous individualistic existence. No, that's right. And so getting rich, the kind of person who gets rich is often an autonomy machine, because that's usually your route to get there. Not always. You can get that by glad handing and if your 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 your your your your very wealthy dad or mom married somebody who's highly connected And then you just inherited all that you're 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 grew up rich and they have them to get acquainted conversations and people grew up poor are engaged with each other and they're talking back and forth, they're connecting.

1:08:38And people who are rich are 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 it's just less engaged. They don't need each other. And unfortunately, even though they don't 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 and they'd rather do whatever, those are building up a cost.

1:09:09Why 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. When you look at that Harvard study, the longitudinal thing, a number of close connections to the best predictor of your out, et cetera, et cetera. How is it that our autonomy, seeking systems, our individualistic seeking systems have been so hijacked? How have they been run a rye and sped up to this sort of really overclocked way?

1:09:47Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know why it is, 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 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 gonna grab it And so we've evolved this psychology, I believe, that focuses on what we want in the moment and forgets about what we need in the longer term.

1:10:26And so let me give you, 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 as 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 you ignore services, but you just look at prayer, prayer makes poor people happier than rich people does. So people who 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.

1:11:00Rich people have the stuff that poor people are praying for. And so, but so it's not the belief side that matters about going to 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 voice to the pon you. You're not like I'm to gather. You don't have choice. And it makes an enormous difference in the happiness of people's lives. And it makes an even bigger difference for Riches and Poor because they're avoiding those connections. And so in each time we make that decision in the moment, do I want to go over to Chris's and borrow some coffee beans?

1:11:34He's going to bug me when I'm busy, screw it. I'm going to 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 love your term around sad success stories. 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 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.

1:12:15And 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 if 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 way? And how few people understand what they've gone through in order to be able to, yeah, sad success stories, I think they're a good mid. It's kind of heartbreaking because they've achieved the dream that all of us dream about, that we want. And I remember I came to which congressman it was, but he talked about, I've achieved everything I ever wanted.

1:12:49And all day long, 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's just the discrepancy between what I've achieved at work and what I've achieved in my personal life is so great that I can barely face it. 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.

1:13:20And so you say to me, Bill, I'd really like to see a Schwarzenegger flake and I'm like, I want to see it, Ram, comment, I say, I'll see you later, forget it. When I should just go to whatever movie you want to see, because it's less important than you and I get it together hanging out talking about it afterwards and that's what I think. How do you ensure, I mean, this is not an issue and it's interesting and I'm particularly fascinated with this sort of open loop about why we've tended toward autonomy as opposed to sort of connection. But there is a risk of sacrificing too much autonomy. There has to be some downsides to that too.

1:13:55Oh, 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. And that's understandable. You feel sorry for the old guy who got this sweatshirt and then knew he was going to have to give it away. He's like, forget it. I'm just keeping this one. I'm not giving this away this time. You know, the notion of not having anything you can call your own sounds hard to us, right? And so that balance needed to be corrected. But of course, the problem is now shit in the other direction where we're constantly making these decisions, we're making these choices that each choice makes the small sacrifice.

1:14:38You know that each choice is a good one. Every time I say, well, 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 spend less time with their friends than they ever did before. They spend 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.

1:15:10But it's that takes a lot of luck. And so 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 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. It's going to say how much can relationships and marriage assuage these problems of disconnection and over -reliance on autonomy that have to make some sort of an impact? They definitely matter. 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.

1:15:52And especially if neither of you has to sacrifice your autonomy because both of you like, you're both heart 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 Monet painting and both Marvel added to 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 wanna go to the art show or ski year, you know, whatever your preferences are. And I don't think that it has to be your romantic partner that you do those things with.

1:16:21But what I have come to realize is that, and it was actually COVID that showed me this, that there's lots of things that we do alone, that people matter to us also do alone, that we could just do them together. Now, in a 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. But of course, you actually live a long way from me. And so if we're made some way back, we have to do it e -connecting. But the great thing is, e -connecting is awfully easy now. We disparage it, and there's reasons too.

1:16:52But 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 crossword, and I always likes to do the crossword. And so when COVID started, we were both locked out a lot. We just started doing the crossword 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 daily, 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 crossword.

1:17:26And why not? You know, why not take connection in it easily? I remember there was a 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 we went way out of his way to find them all and got together with them. 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 you're lazy or busy.

1:17:53You 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 and do what you want to do, but connecting it at the same time. As this research given you a battle ends on why there's such a widespread sense of isolation and sort of dissatisfaction in the modern world's material comfort but psychological disease. Yeah, I used to marvel at it because when I was a little kid in the 60s and 70s, the world was a much rougher place and our attitudes were pretty rough. 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.

1:18:34It 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 super rare, you can still find people to connect with on the internet who you could never have found when I was a kid and all that and prior to that world. We're also way kinder to each other. Literally the solution to fighting on the playground was when the bell rang at the end in the background and somebody lost in somebody won. And the hierarchy was reshuffle, or kept the same, depending on the outcome. But teachers never stepped in to stop someone from beating somebody else up.

1:19:06It just didn't happen. If it was outside the school grounds, you could not allow the beat up in class, of course. And so 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 just have gotten a lot better. And of course, you and I know that it's the opposite, that the current generation is more anxious, just the current generation of adolescents 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 lack of balance that we have between autonomy and connection.

1:19:38Did it go on Orion? It's gotten worse in the last 50 years. Why anxiety do you think? What is it about that that's the emotion, de jour, of contemporary world? It's a great question. And I think I don't know. I don't know. But I would conjecture that the answer is Chris Rockman said, if you think words hurt you, then you've never been punched in the face. And I agree with him. I've been punched in the face, and it's not nice. And when I was a kid, the little phrase that we were taught is somebody's making fun of you. 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.

1:20:20I 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 pinch 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 rolled out of a car when I was a little kid because the door swung open and there's not even a seatbelt in the back And I'm four years old and I roll across the street You know that just doesn't happen anymore as we don't get hurt and random mayhemmy kinds of ways Then 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, painful thoughts happen in their mind.

1:21:00Well, 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 used to be. Hmm. What, I'm interested in whether you think it's possible for people to rebalance this in their own lives. 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 Hudson.

1:21:38So what do you think can be done? Yeah, that's super hard. And for me, 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 op -ed who finds all of his old friends and puts you jeffering into seeing them and then just doesn't have the time for that. And so quit's doing it. There's no accomplishment there. But you can do like what I did where now when I'm going to do the crossword anyway, I immediately call my sister first and we just do it together. Because what difference does it make to me?

1:22:11and it's nice, it's actually more fun to chat with her and I'm not good enough across Roots Doll to get them by myself. And so it's great when I've got her help, right? So 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 of brushing your teeth. You don't wake up in the morning, go, should I brush my teeth today? You know, you just, you follow your routine, you wait breakfast, you brush your teeth. It's what we call surrendering control of our behavior to the environment.

1:22:40after breakfast I brush my teeth. You want your new habits to work the same way, your socializing habits. And so you wanna think about, what are the activities that I do alone? And how could I connect while I do them? And then once you decide that, you think, well, what are my contingencies that are gonna cause me to do that? Not every morning while I decide to do it, because you just want decision is hard. But if you say, all right, well, on Tuesdays, I like to do X and so and so, and so. I'll always call, well, I'm cleaning up the toys after toddlers, I'll call my old high school friend because she's doing the same thing.

1:23:13Or whatever the case might be, right? You reintroduce connection in ways that become a bitual 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 do spend a lot of time alone. It's 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 I used to. Yeah, expectations are hard because you know, we, it's sort of like when I get upset because they put barbecue sauce on my meat lover's pizza, we, things work awfully smoothly in our world.

1:23:48And so we want that continued smooth friction -free existence. And it's easy enough, if somebody steps in to say, I 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 going to say, oh, you're right, that's absurd. But we're locked up in our moment to 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 humans on this planet are illiterate, over 90 % less than 10 % lived in abject poverty.

1:24:25That was 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 bits of bad news of what happened today. And the things that happened today that are bad are just more noticeable than the things that happen that are good. And so 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 glassed as half full kind of people. We just see opportunity and good.

1:24:55And some of us have the bad fortune that we're sort of genetically glassed half -empty type people. But there's strong evolution, not evolution, but genetic component to that. And so if you're the glass of 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, you know, digging into the sort of neurobiology of what happiness comes from, what sort of set point is, how much we can actually nudge it over time. It's both reassuring and fatalistic at the same time, I think.

1:25:28And like you're working within, this kind of an interesting one, lots of people believe that they have agency when it comes to things like their career, their earnings, whether 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 I think that level of, you have a bracket that you're working with in, that bracket is very heavily predisposed.

1:26:08But within that bracket, it's all on you. And I think that thinking about, thinking about things in that kind of a way is, it should humble people that, people who have got worldly success, but in a disquiet, should feel, huh, maybe my worldly success kind of was a little bit less in my agency than I might have thought. Maybe I was kind of dragged along by my nature because I have this sense internally that something is my nature and my agency isn't able to get it's 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 and my sweat and my spit and my sawdust.

1:26:49Yeah, because those are easy to see. Now, I think your example is right 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 suggests that 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. So, there's environmental changes that we can remake 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.

1:27:28But, there's lots of thin people who have obese polygenic scores, and there are very few thin people who are obese, who have thin polygenic scores or 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. It's harder for some than others. If you have the 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 donuts. You can't have these, you can still achieve your goals.

1:27:59And so it just depends on 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 I have 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 am I weaknesses? Okay, I can't stop eating ground. It's fine. Never ever going to buy them. Not going to go to that corner of the mall where that Mrs. Fields 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.

1:28:31And 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 have to step back and say, all right, I have, 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 and follow people, I don't know.

1:28:59don't put that on your list because it's just not going to happen, right? You want to choose the path it seems to at least the most likely 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 the path of most easy connection and autonomy is to choose a partner who's interests aligned with yours so that your autonomy is your connection and 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 it's, for instance, you mentioned earlier on about the highly empathic person.

1:29:38Look, man, like if you know, you really feel the pain of others very deeply that you have the opportunity to connect, you seem to sort of make connections more quickly and sort of drop in more easily than other people do, you probably shouldn't be a Navy SEAL sniper. like that's probably that's probably not the real for you. But working with soldiers that have got PTSD or you know working with a job that requires 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. So yeah I had a I've been talking about this a turn.

1:30:19I did a DNA A test about three or four months ago with this company called Intellect's DNA, no affiliation, but they're cool. And I'd already taken the Robert Plowman behavioral genetics red pill a long, long time ago. 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 alleles. And there's very specific pairs of it. Now, you've got the polymorphic thing, which is sort of these big bundles of them that come together, which tends toward traits of X and Y. But very individual alleles do very specific things, especially when you're talking sort of neurobiologically, when you're talking, and getting to see your building blocks of your behavioral genetics in front of you, written out.

1:31:03It's like, oh, you've got the one copy of the CY4KK gene, which means that you clear adrenaline and norrapanephrine less more slowly or something like that. This is one of the reasons why after an emotional event, it takes you longer to come back into land, but it's also associated with 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 bricks that make up the house that is you. It was so fascinating. I can't stop thinking about it. It was great. It is super cool. And I've only done the 23 and me one, which doesn't dive into that level of detail.

1:31:40Maybe it does now. I did it because I was interested in my long -term health score, like Alzheimer's risk and things like that. And I was amused to see that I have this Neandr at all allele 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. And then you're like, oh, maybe I'm just a product of my inner workings and I'm not running the show at all. I'm just a new. Yeah. It is entertaining. And it's super interesting and you also raise a good point where these genes have multiple effects, right?

1:32:17And so we often believe we're gonna come to this world where we can genetically just adjust ourselves to what we want to be But every gene has more the almost every gene is more than one consequence And so you have to ask yourself will do I want to be able to focus for a long period 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. It's so cool for someone to go deep into the hunter gatherer stuff and sort of use that to help us understand ourselves.

1:32:50Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing? Check out the book. So, I'm now on Instagram. I just said it. I just said it. My account I was told by my publicist. I need to do this. So, I'm William Bonheppel or however it works. That William Bonheppel or something like that. I've got a full 40 followers. So I've got legions of people who are already keen to hear what I have to say, 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 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.

1:33:28I can't wait to see what you're right next on Yeah, I people should go and check it out the books fantastic, super readable. I really loved how many stories were in there. It's really great. I think it's given 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.