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

21:20They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating. We have human ways of doing that too. But in humans, bizarrely, well, in all animals, actually, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is what is risk -taking. Now, that seems bizarre. Why would taking a risk attract females? Well, it attracts females because there's two outcomes when you take a risk. You either succeed showing just how skilled you are at whatever the domain is or you fail and either turn into a rash and therefore you remove yourself from the gene pool or you bounce right back up because you're such a robust organism.

21:56In either case, you're demonstrating that's an honest signal of quality. When we follow the date over time, we see that high testosterone men are more likely to pair up. They take these risks. Women find them attractive at some level, even if they don't personally feel like it's attractive at the moment. But something about that is attracted to them. And it may only be getting other men to back off. When I take these big risks, you may say, well, I'm not going to try to crowd in on Bill's scene. He's too tough. We don't know with certainty. But they take these risks. And then once they partner up, then their testosterone levels go back down.

22:27And they, because once you have a family, taking risks are foolish. You want to take risks to get in the mating game, but you don't want to keep taking risks once you've got people depending on you. So I've got honest signals of, did you say quality? Yeah. honest signals of quality is being attractive as a man. I've got risk taking. What else? Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality. Things like wealth. If you earned all that money, there's inherited wealth. We live in this kind of funny world, but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth. If you earned it yourself, there's ambition, things like that.

22:59People look for ambition because it's, if you are out there working hard all the time, it's an honest signal that you're going to probably continue to do that, provide for somebody, et cetera. I often think about like personality. And why is humor a attractive quality in men? That's a great example. Humor is an honest signal of quality. Now, it's funny because you could think, well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes. But if you think of your friends who are funny, they don't sit down and they go, hey, that's how they want to about patent Mike. That's not how people are funny. You know, let's her pay to do that up on stage.

23:28People are funny by making connections that you hadn't thought of by twisting the world 90 degrees and linking things together. And that takes an agile mind. And you know, there's more genetic expression in our brain than any. We're also in our body. So it's a sign of good genes. And also we're a cognitive species. Being smart is super important for men and women. That's how you succeed. But as humans, we also care in a enormous amount about kindness. And if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind, that person's going to do well in life. Because kindness ends up trumping everything just because there's a host of reasons for the bonus, which is that if you're a kind person, you're a great partner to me, even if you've got almost no other good qualities.

24:04You need some minimal levels of competence. But once you cross minimal competence, kindness means you're going to look out for me. And that matters a lot. Did nice guys finish lost in the evolutionary world? They don't actually. So the good thing about being in a nice guy is they tend to finish first. And so when we look at hunter -gatherer communities, and we look at people choosing their partners to go out on hunts in the morning, they actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters. Now again, you need a minimal level of competence. Now, they pay a big price to finish first because lots of people take advantage of them.

24:35And so I share with you, and you never share back with me. But if I'm a nice guy, I'm like, that's OK. You know, Stephen will come around. Someday he'll learn to share with me too. Or if he doesn't, that's OK. He's a good guy and I like to give him half my rabbit that I call it. So they, they're in economist terms. There's suckers a lot. They give a lot more than they get. But as far as winning in the world, everybody wants to be with them. What about for women in terms of attraction? If you were to design a perfectly attractive woman from an evolutionary basis, what would that woman be like? The different, the factors that matter for women are different for men because men are fertile throughout their whole lives.

25:13And it's so easy to be fertile. You, you make 100 million sperm a day or whatever that number is. They're tiny little cells. You can just do it even if you're old and desiccated. If your fertility is crazy hard for a woman, you need to be under the age of 40 basically. One star ancestral female sit 40. They almost never reproduced anymore. And we could talk about why that is. It's an interesting evolutionary solution to a problem. But then during that time, you have to be well fed and you have to be healthy because it's super hard to maintain a pregnancy. That's nine months where if you're not getting enough food, it's hard to feed that fetus.

25:45So for women, they need fat on their bodies, which was hard in our ancestral world. That meant they're well fed. They need to be healthy and they need to be young. And so when you have those qualities, that's more important than anything else for men. Because when it comes down to it, living forever is nice, but evolution doesn't care about it if you don't reproduce. Reproduction is the currency of evolution. And so what men are looking for in a partner is somebody who's reproductive, who's fertile. So is attraction an evolutionary thing in your universe is like a social thing? It's always both, right?

26:16Humans are wildly valuable. And you can move things around in crazy ways. Look at what people found attractive just 50 years ago compared to today. But there's a lot of basics that underlie it. And so for example, if you look at the actual shape of women and their hip to waist ratio, whether their bum is big or not big, and the current climate, the hip to waist ratio doesn't change. And that's because that hip to waist ratio is correlated with fertility. But the size of your bum, not so much. And in fact, when women deposit fats, pre -metapause, they deposit them on their thighs and their bum, which is where those fats are really good for the baby.

26:50They help neural development. You know, your brain is loaded with fat. When you're in utero, you need your mother to have lots of fat, ideally on her bum and thighs, because that's going to help feed your growing brain. So there's like a perfect hip to weight ratio. Yeah. Yeah. And it rarely changes. So there's analyses of like every playboy bunny from 1950 to whenever I don't know if playboy even exists anymore. And they always have the exact same ratio, even though the actual weight of the model would have changed dramatically. They went from pretty heavy in Maryland on Rose Day to really, really skinny for a while, and then back to heavier again.

27:22Demand typically careful women's rich from an evolutionary perspective. Does it matter? In principle, it doesn't matter much. I mean, remember that there's your phenote. Type you're you want to be well taken care of. But but as far as what you're actually attracted to, women so so we call it sexual plasticity that women have evolved to basically be able to find almost any guy attractive because the qualities that are going to make men successful are often on the inside. Because remember, I told you all men are fertile even when they get really old. So a skinny guy, a fat guy, a strong guy, a weak guy, they're all fertile.

27:56You don't have to worry about that. But what you do have to worry about is raising kids is really hard. You want help. So you want somebody who's going to be successful in hunting, you want somebody who's going to look out for you and your kids. These are the variables that really matter. And so women look for that. And that means they need to be able to fall in love with the middle of the Bill Gates of the world who aren't these big macho guys, but can really take care of you. And so women have a lot more of what we call sexual plasticity than men. Men have a particular shape they're looking for and a particular appearance on average because that correlates with fertility.

28:28Now, if you then have a choice, so here's one who's poor, here's one who's rich, you're going to go with the one who's rich, right? But if you look at male rock stars and male businessmen, people who are really rich and famous, the women that they date and marry go are entirely across the social class spectrum. Some are super rich, some are super poor. A waitress has a great chance with Mick Jagger. And so it does some high society elite person. But if you turn around the other way, a waiter doesn't have much chance with this rich female or a rock star sometimes, but way less likely. And that's because women are looking for features of state, it's in dominance of men and men don't care about that as much in women.

29:09What is the basis for homosexual relationships in evolution? So homosexuality is a really interesting question. We see it across the animal kingdom, so we know that we're not the only species who does it, but we don't often see exclusive homosexuality in the animal kingdom. That seems to be much more common in humans. Nobody's 100 % sure why it is, but the best evidence I've ever seen, the best evolutionary evidence comes out of this lab of an ex -collegamine, brand and ziich. And what he shows is that most human behaviors are driven by a number of genes, not just one. We call them polygenic. A whole bunch of genes contribute to a particular behavior.

29:41And especially a complex behavior like homosexuality. And so there's going to be a polygenic score for homosexuality. And the more of those higher your polygenic score is, the more likely you are to be attracted to same sex. And it works a tiny bit different in men and women, but basically the same. And what Brendan argued and now's now demonstrated is that as you gain more gay genes, genes that make you more attracted to the opposite sex, but you're not completely homosexual yet, you're more attractive to the opposite sex. You're more attractive. Yeah. So men who have more gay genes but are still straight, have more sexual partners than men who have fewer gay genes and are also straight.

30:19So being a little bit gay is super attractive to women. Being too gay, maybe they're attracted to you, but you don't care anymore because now you're only attracted to men. And so from an evolutionary perspective, it's this balancing act. You want to give men enough gay genes so that women are attracted to them, but not so many that they don't care about women. Okay. Which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction to the idea that testosterone and risk -taking and being born and being masculine. Well, but some gay men are feminine, but some gay men are very masculine. They're hyper -masculine.

30:49So there's both types. You can be gay and be wildly masculine or you can be gay and be quite feminine. So what is it about the being a little bit gay? Like what are the features? What are the features of being a little bit gay? We know the genes. This paper was published in Science Fire. I remember right a few years ago and laid out the genes and they don't make sense. Some of them relate to your sense of smell. We don't understand these polygenic scores very well yet. But if I had to guess, if you think of extreme straight males versus gay males, gay males are much cleaner. They look after their bodies much better.

31:27They're hygiene's much better. They're a sense of aesthetics is much better. And so maybe being a little bit gay means you're metrosexual. And now you've got these qualities where were you not so downright disgusting to women? One of the things that kind of does tell us into this is some of the stats that I was reading about education these days. One stat here says that 58 % of college graduates in the most recent cohorts were women with women on campus, with one women on campus for every two men. And with this scenario where there's more women becoming college -educated than men, at increasing numbers, you're gonna get a bit of a mismatch in terms of women looking for those men who are up into the right economically, but there's fewer men there.

32:15Yeah, it's a real problem. And so we talk about, for example, that women are underrepresented in some fields. Like they're underrepresented in the sciences. And people worry about that a lot, but there's a much, much bigger problem than we're facing. And in fact, I'm not even convinced the other one is a problem. And we can come back to that if you'd like, because I do think there's reasons for that that might have to do with preferences and not being held out. But setting that issue aside, if we look at the rates of going to university, my birth cohort, I was born in 1963, is the first year where women attended college, university at equal rates to men in the United States.

32:51And those lines crossed and they never gone back. And so now the stat you were talking about is, there's basically, it's 60, 40, basically, female to male. That means there's three women on campus for every two men. And so, in principle, that first of all makes it harder to date on campus if you're female, because there's not as many men on campus as there are women. And so the competition is fierce. But setting just dating on campus aside, on average, women are looking for men who are as educated as themselves or more, and men are looking for women who are as educated themselves or less. And so we're creating a problem because women are getting really well educated, and then there's not as many educated men available for them to partner up with.

33:33And so what you end up with is lots of more people living single, single. Now remember, we talked about that before, couples are less likely to get together. On the one hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing because women are going to college, making a lot of money means they can afford to live as a single person, which they literally could not do up until 1960. If you're a female in most countries, you couldn't have a job really. And so you'd be way to be in economic successes to marry those days are gone. But it does mean that it's harder for women to find partners when they're on average, more likely to be educated than men.

34:03And we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women, but I suspect that school itself is just doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls. And so it's harder for boys to hold still. It's boys are less likely to want to please their teachers. Now the list is long. It's hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways. And uneducated, unpartnered men are the biggest problem in every society. And if you've got men with poor prospects who can't find good jobs and who don't have a partner, they're the guys running around with high T who are committing all the crimes. So as a society, you want to be very invested in men partnering up with women because that tames them.

34:40And you want to be very invested in men being viable partners for women, which means whatever we're doing wrong in schools that's pushing men out, we need to undo. If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average, which is what I read in some of the studies now, I think it was roughly 70 % of women say they want a man that has equal or more money than they do. There's a mismatch there, isn't there? Because as both becomes sort of more equalized, if there's still a desire for the man to have more and provide more, there's again, it doesn't, the numbers don't add up. The numbers don't match.

35:13It's a really unfortunate problem. And so the easiest way to look at that problem is to basically look at Tinder or one of these dating apps. And there you can see that basically 20 % of the guys on Tinder get 80 % of the swipes. What that means is that 80 % of men basically largely get ignored on the app and 20 % are fond upon. In contrast, women, about 80 % of them are getting swiped by people on a regular basis. They're just not getting swiped by the guy that they're interested in. It's set up so that both sexes want the same thing. Men look for the same thing and women look for the same thing in men.

35:47And there's just a lot more competition among men to get women. And so it's a smaller subset of men who are women are interested in. Interesting. On an individual level, I guess if you're a man, you really do need to focus on your career if you want to have a chance of... Well, focus on your careers definitely an easy way to do it. But look, not everybody's a career person. And so you have to decide where your best prospects are. And that comes back to like, why do we have autonomy? Well, we've evolved that because there's lots of ways to skin a cat. And so basically autonomy means I'm gonna pick my path in life where I think I have the best prospects.

36:22Usually that means career. But there's also ways of being just a really kind person. The person who's always gonna look out for you. The person's gonna be great helping with the kids. Lots of men don't meet those criteria. And so that's a perfectly successful way. You just gotta find you're not gonna get swiped right on Tinder. That's not gonna be your way of finding. If that's you, if you're the kind reliable, but you don't have a great career, you don't have those other things, then the apps aren't the right place for you. But people who meet you are gonna really like you and women are gonna want to be with you because they're gonna realize oh, they may not want to be with you when they're younger, but as they get a little older and they've been through a few of the guys who everybody else is chasing, they're gonna say, boy, I could really use somebody like you.

37:00Speaking of the apps in Swapen, we talked about how men on those apps, if they're not in that sort of top echelon of demonstrating authentic quality on the surface, so like rich, mussely, whatever, then their chance of getting swiped on a very, very low. What about for women? Because a lot of my female friends say that they hate the dating apps. They have no luck. Then they're only getting bad swipes. Yeah, that's the difference. They're getting bad swipes. Meaning they don't like the guys who swiped them. The guys who have no luck are getting no swipes. This is true because actually, when I think about the particular friend I was thinking of, I asked to see her Tinder or whatever app it was many years ago.

37:39And I was like, oh my God. I, Jesus, I wish I had this many swipes. Yeah. Because as a guy, I mean, I had must have had Tinder for about a month back in 2000. When I was 20, I'm gonna say 23, 24, I couldn't get swipes. Yeah. And if I got some, listen, it wasn't interesting to write home about. Yeah, it was like, it was very, very rare. But when I looked at her Tinder, that she was complaining about, she had hundreds of men. Yeah. But she just didn't like any of them. Exactly. Yeah. That's the difference. And so the thing is that, throughout our evolutionary history, men have often been left out of the, out of the mating game entirely.

38:15And we know this if we look at the variability on our Y -linked chromosomes. You only inherit Y -linked genes from your father because women don't have a Y chromosome. For women, you can look at mitochondrial DNA, which you only inherit from your mother. And if you look at the mitochondrial DNA and the variability there, you can see that we have about twice as many moms as dads. Yeah. And that's weird, because it takes two to tango. But what it means is that some of the dads were getting lots of women, and lots of potential dads were getting no women at all. And so in our ancestral past, there's lots of men who nobody swiped right.

38:49They couldn't find a partner. And there's lots of men who women were very interested and they probably had multiple partners. And so we still live in that exact same world. So what do they have to do with our standards? Well, you could say lower their stance, but you could also say, you're not liking him for all the wrong reasons. Yeah. So what? He doesn't drive a Ferrari, and so what he doesn't look super cool or whatever. But he could be a great guy. The problem is, apps aren't well suited for that. And so when we were all just people who met in person, you would realize, how this guy is the salt to the earth, he'd be a perfect partner for me for my life.

39:21I know he's kind of ugly or he's kind of whatever, but who cares, right? He's going to be a perfect life partner. Very hard to see that on an app. Okay. So thinking about the attraction features of a woman that we talked about earlier, I know that if I'm a guy and I'm trying to have more success on the apps on social media, what I need to do is I need to pull up in my Lamborghini, I need to hit the gym, I need to signal my quality and authentic way that can't be disproven. And if I'm a woman, therefore, I need to be showing my hip ratio. Well, I want to look attractive and I want to look healthy and I want to look young.

39:54Okay. But keeping in mind, I could be none of the above, and I'm still going to get what I tried. How does pornography confound all of this stuff? And pornography is a funny business. It allows us to vicariously engage in sex without actually doing it, right? And so we evolved in a world where there was no pornography. We certainly evolved in a world where there's masturbation. But we evolved in a world that didn't have pornography, and so it's kind of hijacking our system a little bit. It feels like you're having sex when, you know, you're on only fans or whatever those sites are that interest you.

40:26It mimics a lot of the features. And so, you know, I become interested in the social media world we live in, and this possibility that social media makes so many things so easy that you stop going out. You stop, you know, because you can connect with your friends and social media. Why go through the snow and go across town and maybe not know anybody at the party, et cetera? And I think what's happened is that as we get lazy, and we start putting our life online, you know, our social life, we even start to put more, you know, our sexual life online. And so there's even evidence. The evidence is very tentative as to what it might mean.

41:00But recently in the United States, at least, if you look at young, single people, their actual sexual behavior is going down. They're having less sex than they were 20 years ago. And if you'd asked me 20 years ago when Tinder, whenever those things got invented, I would say, oh, sex is going to go way up. This is going to be, you know, this is going to be the best thing for hook and up ever. In actual fact, the went up for a little bit, it went back down. And instead of what's going up is pornography watching. And so it may be that pornography is getting better tailored to what people want. Maybe people are just getting lazy.

41:29And they instead of going to the party and maybe meeting somebody who they would have sex with, they just pick it up and watch it on TV. I don't know. Because I'm thinking about this graph that was in your book, which shows how much sex we're having and how much porn we're watching. Yeah. And very simply, it shows that we're having less sex and we're watching more porn. And it's quite a considerable drop between 2006 and 2012. It said a percentage of 18 to 25 year olds who had had sex or watched porn within the last year. Yeah. And about 80 % of 18 to 25 year olds had had sex in the last year.

42:04And now it's getting down nearer to 65%, 70%. Which is remarkable. These are young, single people. You know, this is when we are most likely to have sex with, you know, partners of random hookups or whatever. So they're at the peak of their sexuality. And nonetheless, 20 years later, they're less likely to have sex and more likely to be watching porn. And it looks like pornography consumption is almost tripled. Yeah. In that time period. It's always, it's been accessible over that in time, entire time period. But basically what I think those days, I refer to this, I know it's an absurd acronym.

42:39I refer to this as smilching. That social media induced laziness in our social habits. I know it'll never catch on. But I think that what they're doing is smilching. They've got friends around a party. It's across town. It's kind of a pain to get there. It'll cost you subway and everything else. And you're not sure if you're going to have fun when you get there. And so you go, screw it. I'm not going to go. Now what you didn't know is that one of, that's the party where you would have met that person who you would have ended up hooking up with, either as short -term or long -term partner. But you didn't go.

43:07And instead of what you did, you just stayed at home and so there's a decent chance you watched porn. And so we're letting these fake substitutes take over and place over actual real socializing, which I think is hugely problematic. And does this explain in part when we're thinking about a pornography rise? Why there is declining fertility rates? We're having less and less kids than ever in the Western world and some of you have concerned about population collapse. Well, I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction.

43:36You can just be on the pill, use the condom, use whatever you want, which our ancestors couldn't do and other animals can't do. And so the amount of sex that we have is completely uncorrelated with how many kids we decide to have. And so if you set pornography aside, fertility rates are going way down. And I think that's simply because we never evolved to want children. We evolved to want sex. And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex, and then you've also evolved to be nurtured to whatever child comes along from that, bingo, you're a mom or a dad. But if you evolved to want kids, you go back a little ways, you would have no idea how to achieve that.

44:10You wouldn't have known what to do. We evolved when I have sex. And in a world without the pill, that automatically resulted in children. Because kids. And then all you have to do is evolve to be nurtured to them because they're so dependent in humans when they're born. Which is what happens when you had your baby recently. And you have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child. And I wasn't keen to have more kids. I have some children who grow into adults that I felt like I don't need any more kids. But then I have another kid. And I'm just in love with it, right? You can't help yourself. So we've intervened in nature's natural growth?

44:42We've intervened in it. And that intervention is what's potentially going to lead to there to be no more humans. So if you look at the current population of the globe, it's meant to peak somewhere between say 20, 70 and 20, 90. Probably around 8 billion in some change. And then it's start to go down. And then it may continue to go down forever. Now it may be that if what causes you to want to have kids is very societal. It's very, well, my apartment's small. And I don't want to schlep them around. It's hard work. You could imagine a world where now robots are everywhere. And where you've got all the space in the world.

45:14Because there's not that many humans. Or we've moved to the country in e -commute or whatever. Maybe suddenly we'll want to have sex or aided them again. Because our robots are one who gets up in the middle of the night with them. And we don't have to. But right now, if you think about having kids, it's hard yards. And so lots and lots of people say, well, I just don't want to do that. And the consequences that in every single country that's industrialized and rich, the reproduction, the reproductive rate of females is less than 2 .1 per female, which is what you need in order to maintain population at the current level.

45:44And so every single country on earth is shrinking. But for immigration. And so right now, you know, we have all these fights about immigration. It's going to be, I promise you, in 50 years that arguments can be the exact opposite. How can we convince people of the country X to come into our country? Because we're going to shrink and disappear. There's a lot of countries that are going to be literally half their size by the year 2100. Because they're shrinking so fast. Really? Half of East Asia, half of Western Europe. They're just shrinking crazy fast. They're demolishing houses. Japan is demolishing houses.

46:13There's nobody to buy them. Because the women are having less than that 2 .1. Yeah, the average child rate in a lot of these countries is around 1 .5 to 1 .7. Very, very low. You don't think it's possible that we're going to make ourselves extinct because we're not having fucking sex, are we? Well, we'd still be having sex. We just wouldn't be having kids, right? But we are having less sex as well, aren't we? Well, that varies. Yeah, lots and lots of us are having less sex. There's reasons for that. There probably are more to do with ecotoxicology than with psychology. There's so many hormone mimics in our environment and plastics and in various pollutants that change our endocrine system that reduce sperm counts.

46:51We think that's what's going on. And reduce sperm count often as associated with reduced sex drive, et cetera. So if you were Prime Minister or President of the world, and it was your job to get us having children again, based on what you know about evolutionary psychology and human incentives, what would you do? Well, the main thing is that because humans didn't evolve to want children, you can't just play on there. Don't you really want children? Because the answer is often no. What you want to do is you want to make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be and as little of the minus.

47:24So if you look at kids that are really interesting, there's some wonderful work by Danny Conneman who won the Nobel Prize. And he asks you in the moment, what are you doing and how much fun it is? Is it? And what he finds is no surprise if you're having sex when you got the request and now you probably waited to you were done before you answered your beeper, but you said, oh, I'm having a great time. And as it goes with TV was actually in second place watching TV is good fun in the moment. And then a little way down the list is like doing dishes, doing laundry. If you're with your kids, you're on average about doing the dishes, or doing the laundry.

47:56That's how much fun your kids are. But if you ask people what gives you great satisfaction in life? What makes you happy? Nobody says, I'm crazy happy because I've watched a ton of TV. That's just not an answer I think was ever given. Or because I folded my laundry really well. What they do say though is, oh, my kids give me enormous joy. So how could it be both? How could it be that on average, your kids are as much fun as the laundry. But when you look back in your life, they're the key thing. And what we think the answer is is that they provide these peak moments that laundry simply doesn't, right?

48:25No matter how well you fold your clothes, it's not exciting. But your kids have these amazing moments in their lives that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again. And so, and for a good evolutionary reasons where you get your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them. And so, kids end up being a huge source of satisfaction. So what that means is if you want to get people to start having kids again, try to get rid of the dredge side of it. You know, look at, daycare's crazy hard, it's crazy expensive. Women want to be able to go back to work. The list is really long about how hard it is in so many different ways.

48:58You just remove those barriers, you know, especially once we're in this robot world, which I don't think is far away from us, where I don't have to get up in the middle of the night and do that unless I want to. I can if I want. My robot's not going to stop me from getting up and feeding them and changing their happy. But aren't we going to raise loads of messed up kids in such a wide range? I don't, I, you know, robot has infinite patience. If you design it nice and soft and fluffy, it's going to be more cuddly than we are. The kids might like the robots more than they like us. Last night I was with my girlfriend and I was joking because I read this article that Tesla's Optimus robots are now going into production and they're hiring the team, which are these sort of humanoid robots that will be in your house and help with the chores and dishes and stuff.

49:37And as a joke, I turned to my partner and I was like, we'll get two of those. And like one of them will like, like raise the kids and then the other one will like take the kid to school and stuff because I knew her, it was a joke. I knew her reaction would be pretty negative. And she was horrified. She goes, can you imagine a world where a robot would, the kid would turn to the robot and call it daddy and mummy. Because the kid wouldn't really know the difference. And I sat here with a child psychotherapist, psychologist, who said that in those first three years it's so critical for the primary caregiver to be around.

50:07And that the man and the woman caused the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender. So you almost can't get the robot back. That's true, but here's the thing. Currently we outsource them to nannies for a big chunk of the day. If you're wealthy enough, people often hire a night nurse. Somebody who comes in and helps out at nighttime too, if you've got the cash. And so when I hire those people, I can't be positive. They're going to be kind to my children. I can't be positive. They know every possible disease my kid could get in and all the rest. I would rather hire this incredible robot who super -cutly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what the pitch of that cry is.

50:49You could put whatever scent on them you want. You could make it mom or dad. You could make it even smell like you if you want to. Why not have that person help you out? You know, there are ancestors engaged in what's called aloe parenting all the time. And what that meant was the men are not hunting probably gone for most of the day. The females need to form these tight bonds with each other because it's hard work with a bunch of little kids and predators who want to eat them. You need eyes on them all the time, but you also need to be digging up two birds of whatever variety you're trying to eat.

51:16And so they rely on each other. Parenting is not a solo operation, which is mom and dad. I know it's cliche, but it takes a village kind of thing. So why not hire out this robot who is perfect in every way? You know they're not going to abuse your kid. You know they're never going to do anything wrong. They're always going to be kind when your kid asks for the 10 millionth time. But why? They're going to keep giving them answers. They don't mind, right? Why not have the perfect parent when you're not there? Because then the parent releases certain hormones in the child by their touch, the oxytocin, robots don't release oxytocin.

51:47Not yet? Why not have a robot that mimics all that and would cause the kid to do that too? Because you don't want to replace yourself. Parenting is one of the... It's one of the nicest things that we humans ever do. It's some of my fondest memories. And I don't want to give those away, but I wasn't with my kid 24 -7. And it would have driven me nuts if I were. Kids are wonderful and boring and horrible. And so why not when you ask her something? We all do. We have since time began. We've relied on others to help take care of our kids. Why not make it the perfect nanny rather than that'll have to do nanny?

52:19Because it's all I can afford. It's a strange feature to think about because it feels also like a slippery slope where we might start having kids and then giving them completely robot parents. Could do if you wanted to. I'd sell rather than you abuse your kids and be a terrible parent yourself, which we know is happening all the time. Do anything could better answer is just not to have the kids. That is the best answer. But you can't stop people from deciding to have kids. And we know when we look at abusive parents, for example, and the kids... If they're so bad that their kids literally get taken away, what do they do?

52:46They move to a new town and they have more. And so you know that you're subjecting these children to these horrible environments, but there's nothing you can do about it. I would way rather that those parents who think they want kids for whatever reason then have the robot there to look out for them and make sure that kids are well taken care of. Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Yes, that's going to happen. So if you just had a baby, right? Yeah, I've got a one and a half year old. One and a half years old. Would you allow a robot to... I love the nannies I have. But every single one of them, when you start is a risk.

53:16You don't know, right? They've been hired by the daycare. They're probably really good. But if you had the perfect robot, nanny, well then you would never worry at all. And in marriage, this graph that I saw in your book shows that the percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy as a function of marital status, quite clearly shows that if you want to be happy, you should be married. And if you want to be not too happy, you should be separated. So here's the data. If when people get married on average, they get no happier. So if you get married, and then I look at you 10 years later on average, you're going to be exactly as you are now.

53:55Now, how does that average work out? Well, in lots of different directions, because I'm putting everybody together now. We've got these amazing data sets from Germany, for example, where we track people for so many years that we know what they were like before they even met the partner, much less married them. And so we see how happy they are, and we see how it changes over time. And so for example, couples who get divorced, they actually, their happiest year was the year before their marriage. So they met the partner, they got happier, happier, and then they already started going downhill before they even got married.

54:23Okay. Couples who were going to stay together, they're happiest year is the marriage year itself, not the year before it. So that's a good sign. If you're happier when you're walking down the aisle, then you were last year, this marriage has a much better chance of lasting. Now, if you look at those marriages, the ones who last, they go in three directions. You've got the really bad ones where they stay together for economic or religious or whatever reasons, they're miserable. They don't like each other and they're way less happy than before they met. Thankfully, they're relatively rare. If we look at the ones who are average, they're a little bit happier, these are among couples who stay together.

54:57They're a little bit happier for the first few years of their marriage than they were before they met, and then they slowly settle down to about where they were. So it's not plus or minus, it's basically where they were. If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years. So the year their marriage was happier than before they met, and the next year's happier is still, and it just keeps working its way up. And so, when you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy. It's a zero. So how could it be that marriage is a zero? And I think the answer to that question is that people who don't marry, it's not the fact that they didn't marry that's the problem.

55:32It's that they're over -weighting autonomy. And over -weighting it is probably what they're doing every well in their life as well. So when they're making decisions about what to do with their friends, about whether they live with somebody else or live alone, all those decisions they keep going with autonomy rather than going with connection. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be unhappy, but it makes, on average, it means that they're about half as likely to be very happy as somebody who would go and get married. So if the individualism that's causing their unhappiness, that's causing them not to marry.

56:02Yep, that's what I believe. And people that are less individualistic are getting married, and that's why. And so it's just a different kind of person who's doing that. In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce, we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced were also less happy before they even met their partner. So on average, happier people tend to stay together in marriages. We don't know why that is, but my guess is that happier people just tend to be happier about everything. And so they're less like they find ways to make their marriage work, even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.

56:33At my company Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company Flight Group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that's a new show, a product, or a project. It's why I launched the conversation cards. I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon. And I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you. No matter where you are in the world, with Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely.

57:02No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level, and better connect with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we're giving you a trial, which is just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to Shopify .com slash Bartlett, that's Shopify .com slash Bartlett, or find the link in the description below. And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence? Is there an evolutionary basis for why that occurs? Yes. So the neurodivergence is a complicated one. It seems to be much more common now.

57:42When we look at the epidemiological data, it seems to be associated with high toxin environments. So if you live in areas where there's lots of pollutants, people are more likely to be neurodivergent. But I think neurodivergence has always been with us. I think it's just become more common. Now, why would it become more common with these various toxins? I don't know. My guess is that the brain is a social organism. The human brain is. We've evolved. The connection is our most important need. And it requires all sorts of different parts to work, right? Which means that if you break the brain in any way, you're going to break your sociality.

58:13Because it's so implicated in so many different areas. And if these toxins that we're exposed to cause any damage to the brain, I think you're particularly likely to end up with social problems. Because the brain is a social organ. And so that's why I think autism rates are rising. But of course, I don't know. I'm only guessing based on the data I've seen. Now, in the case of neurodivergence, I think that they've always played a really important role in humanity. And the reason for that is that, you know, humans are super -innovated species. But if you ask yourself or your friends, how often have you ever invented anything, the answer's almost always never.

58:47And that's because we solve our problems socially. When something goes wrong, we go to our friends, we talk to them, we try to work together to figure out our problems. And we've always been that way. How do gatherers do that? And neurodivergence people are less likely to do that, because they're less socially connected. And so probably most of the great inventions of humanity were created by neurodivergence people. Now, those of us who are not neurodivergent, immediately go, wow, I'd like one of those. And so we're really good at spreading that by virtue of our social networks. But I think we've always relied on neurodivergence people to create the amazing innovations that, the technical things that make our lives so easy.

59:21Now ADHD is a different bottlenecks. We know it's highly heritable. We know a lot of the genes are. We also suspect that it wasn't even a noticeable thing in a hunter gather, right? What ancestor ever tried to get you to pay attention to something that you were bored with? But if you're ADHD, it's crazy hard to pay attention when you're bored, but it's perfectly easy to pay attention when you're interested. You just don't have the kind of dorsal ad or prefrontal cortex that allows you to force yourself to attend to things. And for ancestors, you're loaded with energy. You're probably a great hunter.

59:51And so it's a modern problem that you have to sit still and listen problem. Which our ancestors were never asked to do. I wonder if it will still be the case when we have all the robots in the AI doing everything for us. I'm betting not. I'm betting that you could decide to learn or not learn. Now, why would you even learn your multiplication tables if you don't need to? You can just ask your phone what the answer is. And so why are the times of the schooling that we go through is superfluous? In this world where AI can do everything that we can do. Do you think we're going to merge with technology more deeply?

1:00:20It's very possible. You could easily imagine like if there's a feature about yourself that you don't like. I suspect it will be hard to genetically engineer it. And the reason I think it will be hard to genetically engineer it is that most of our genes have more than one effect. And most of our traits are caused by more than one genes. You can't just tweak one gene and become the person you want it to be. It's going to have other effects that you may not want. So the upshot is that why not have a little mind module that you either attaches to your head or goes inside. Or we already are treating people with this.

1:00:52There's some kinds of depression that just are untreatable. And for some of those people, they literally inserted an electrode into their brain and stimulate this particular region. And the people experience and say it's like my world was in black and white and suddenly it became in color. But why not have that for knowledge that you can access? You know, I could spend my huge amounts of time studying Greek or I could shove one of those in. And now I can go to Greece and speak with the locals, right? Without my phone telling me what they're saying. You mentioned depression. What's the evolutionary basis for humans getting depressed and anxious?

1:01:23Because presumably that's not productive. No, it's not. So remember that with every generation of sexual reproduction, you're going to have people who have things that maybe evolution wouldn't like. Remember earlier, we talked about homosexuality that if you have more gay genes, women like you more, but then if you have too many, you don't like them in return, right? So that's a case where a little bit is a good thing evolutionarily. And a lot is a bad thing evolutionarily because you're not going to have offspring. Not a moral judgment, just a judgment based on what evolution cares about. Well, with anxiety, that makes perfect sense, right?

1:01:55So animals that can't envision the future have no anxiety. All they feel is fear in the moment. Oops, there's a lion. I'd better run as fast as I possibly can. And then as soon as they've run away, no lion. Life is everything's copacetic. I'll go back to eating grass and being happy. Whereas if I'm a human running away from a lion, oh my god, that was really scary. I wonder when there's another lion coming. Now, the biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future. Evolution doesn't give any gifts without costs. You pay a price for every one of them. And the capacity to simulate the future also comes with a realization.

1:02:26At first of all, it's not always going to be good. And second of all, it's always going to end badly. Once you understand life, you understand I'm going to die someday. And the other animals don't have that realization. They can't project themselves forward in time the way we can. So does that mean that evolution tells us that the cure for anxiety is to stop thinking about the future effectively? If you didn't think about the future, you would not be anxious. If you could get yourself to be mindful in the moment and set aside the future, you're anxiety will disappear because it's all future -based.

1:02:53I was at something that really, I found quite interesting as well in your book. I think it was in chapter 9 where you talk about religion. And the fact that people that are associated with religious participation are typically more happy than those who are not. The effect is remarkable. And so you can look at it in two different ways. One of the just the effect of believing, right? So lots of people worry about a life without meaning. People of religion have solved that problem because religion gives to your life meaning. There is a point. If you believe any of the religions that exist, you're part of this never -ending chain, etc.

1:03:26And it doesn't, they can be wildly different religions, but they all hold this notion that there's something before or something after. Now, you can look at the effect of that by saying, all right, let's select only people who never go to church. So we won't take the sociology part out of it. And then we'll look at people who pray versus people who don't pray. And we can do this with these national samples where we say, let's look at the General Social Survey. And in fact, anybody wants to, can get online and look at the General Social Survey and answer any question that's available in that. It's a remarkable publicly available data set, which I used repeatedly in this book.

1:03:59And praying actually makes you happier if among people who don't go to church than not praying. And in my mind, that's, that's, life has meaning versus it doesn't. People who have religion have meaning, people who don't often don't. Sometimes they do, but they often don't. But there's a social component to religion as well. And I think it's way more important. And so now you can, you can't do it quite as cleanly. Now you want people who go to church and you want to look at the effect of going to church. And then the data are remarkable. The effect of going to church is huge. It's like, you're like twice as likely to be happy if you go to church regularly, then if you never go to church at all.

1:04:34Now, I don't think going to church would have made our ancestors any happier at all. Why doesn't make us happier? Well, the way to answer that question is to then dive a little deeper into the data. And so what I did is I separated people by whether they're poor or whether they're rich. Now remember, earlier we talked about how the fact that poor people live in these tight, interdependent networks, because they count on each other all the time. They borrow things from each other, they rely on each other to keep the boat afloat. And so they have, they get together, poor people get together with their neighbors much more often than rich people, right?

1:05:03Rich people don't do that. So what that means is that if now, if you think that God wants you to go to church, if because remember we're talking about religion now, then you're going to go to church, even if you necessarily want to see the people there, even if you don't necessarily feel in need for them, but you're going to be forced into socializing. So sort of like this experiment that's being played on you, whether you believe in, or not, whether if you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on the high. It's not because you necessarily want to socialize. And we see that the effects of going to church are, they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor.

1:05:35Because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit already of that socializing, whereas rich people have separated themselves from others. And so those rich people who go to church several times a week are like twice as likely to be very happy, as rich people who never go to church at all. So rich people need to go to church. Yeah. Or you know, whatever they call church, they need to go somewhere where they're socializing regularly in person. Why do we want religion? Because it's quite clear that there's something within us that wants to believe. And you see this, I think we're seeing a little bit at the moment where we're seeing a return to religious belief in some degree.

1:06:10I know that it's, you know, it might not just be the religious belief that we think of. It might be spirituality or horoscopes or whatever, you know, it might be. There's a seems like there's a real surge of it, especially amongst young men. Yeah, that's a great question. People talk about in psychology, what they refer to, well, not just in psychology, but in psychological terms as a God shaped whole. There's a hole in your psyche that can only be filled by God. Whatever God is for you. And I think lots of people have that hole, but not everybody. And why do I think lots of people have it? Well, remember those prayer data we talked about.

1:06:45People who pray are happier on average than people who don't. And so if you have a God shaped hole, but you don't believe, that's going to make you unhappy. Whereas if you have that need for that and you do believe that's going to make you happy, it's like anything else. What do you think the meaning of life is? I think it's devoid of meaning. And so if life is truly devoid of meaning, then what do you do? And the only answer to me is you make the best of this meaningless thing that you can. And how do you do that? Well, you, you be aware of what we've evolved to do and we've evolved to connect.

1:07:15And so if connection is the most important thing I can do as a human and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other. Because that's facilitating connection. You believe life is devoid of meaning? Yeah. People won't like that. I know. I don't like it. I don't like the fact that I don't think life has meaning. When people search for meaning, they get happier, which suggests that they find it. I've never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning. Okay, so maybe it's the pursuit of something that's creating happiness versus them finding meaning. Maybe we don't know. So you just said that when people search for meaning, they get happier.

1:07:53Yeah. So that could imply one of two things that they end up finding it all. That is the search itself. Or a little of both. It's usually a little of both. But we don't know a certainty. There's not enough good data on this problem. Because lots of people search for meaning. And in the end, you can also decide that, well, there isn't meaning. And I'm a small cog and a big machine. And I'm a pointless small cog and a big machine. But it's all I've got. And so Richard Dawkins and Unweaving the Rainbow says, we're the lucky ones because we're going to get to die. Now what he really means by that is, first we get to live.

1:08:26And almost nobody gets to live. You think of the 100 million sperm that I make in every day. They don't go anywhere. They never get a chance. But I made three humans. I did my part. I only did the small part. But I was played a role in making three humans who then got lucky and got to live out of all the other sperm that came out that day. They're the one that made it into the egg and they get a chance at it. And we just happen to be really lucky. I believe as humans that the solution that evolution landed us on was a kind one. We have the kindest solution in my mind to solving life's problems.

1:08:59So you look at this, one of my favorite birds in Australia is the Cucumber. Cucumber is lay two eggs and they weigh a little bit and then they lay a third. And Australia is very drought prone. So some seasons are good and some are bad. If the season's good, that third egg has a decent chance of making it to adulthood because there's so much food being brought back to the nest. If it's not good, that third egg never makes it. And why doesn't it make it? Well, the two older siblings pack it to death. And they've got an adaptation on their beak, a little hook, that allows them to kill their little sibling more easily.

1:09:29So they've literally evolved to kill their little sibling when times are tough. What if we evolved to do when times are tough to band even closer together and to work together and to cooperate? That's what got us to where we are. And it was all sorts of interesting things that got us. There was a cognitive things like division of labor. You know, Cucumber does don't do that because they're inherently mean. It's the only way they can solve the problem. Humans solve that problem very differently. Now, admittedly, we did our share of Infanticide 2. But mostly what we do is cooperate, work together, have division of labor.

1:09:58And we go from being this, like, you know, when we first left the trees must have been really rough. Everybody was eating us for dinner. And now the shoe is in the other foot where the apex predator on this planet. But doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we band together in tough times? Yes. But we band together to attack the others. Yeah, we do. It's not. Look, there's never something that's done just for the niceness of it. Evolution doesn't care about nicet at all. What's really nice though is that our solution, our way of becoming deadly. And every animal that survives becomes deadly or avoids being eaten in another way.

1:10:31Now, it turns out that once you band together, and as even by home erectus, once or our ancestors one and two million years ago, when they band together, they are already the deadliest force in this planet. We've got good evidence that they're reading huge animals like mammoths. So it's your ability to have division of labor to plan to say, you chase that mammoth and we'll put this trap here. Do things that other animals simply can't do that. They can't make a scenario in their mind and then enact it. And so it was that mental ability that turned us into these apex predators. But it doesn't take long as an apex predator who can work together with division of labor to realize, all right, there's only one predator left on this planet who has a chance of killing me and that's other humans.

1:11:13Or if it's pre -human, other home erectus. And you're seeing that with like America versus China and everything. America versus Mexico and whatever it might be. Everything. In nationalism. Yeah, so remember I referred to us earlier as being tribal. And I talked about how chimpanzees are 600 times more aggressive within the group, but equally aggressive between. So we've evolved in a world to be totally tribal, to just look out for ourselves because that other group might kill us. They may be nice, we may get along, but they might be vicious. And so we need to be prepared to be vicious in return.

1:11:42Thankfully, though, we didn't evolve where we know where they're vicious. We evolved where we just don't know. And maybe good and maybe bad. So we give out groups of benefit of the doubt, but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them. I was sat here yesterday with the wonderful gentleman, whom a big fan of Cordrobic Green, who wrote the book about power, 48 laws of power. What have you learned about power as it relates to our evolution, who passed and who ends up getting power in the world? So evolution doesn't care about morality, right? It's amoral. It's not amoral. It just doesn't care.

1:12:16And what that means is might is right. Humans are the only ones who understand possession. And I say, this is mine. And you're like, no, no, it's mine. And we can argue about the actual ownership of it. But for an animal, there's never an argument. If you made the kill, and I'm bigger than you, I take it from you. Now, in human groups, power is achieved by no human is strong enough on their own to have power by themselves. Every human goes to sleep. And when you go to sleep, the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily. And so to be powerful, you, you, part of it is to be tough and scary, but part of it also be kind and to look out for people who are on your side.

1:12:50So that you have a network of people who care about you. And what about body language in this as it relates to power? Is there anything that we can learn from humans and other animals about what powerful body languages or unpowerful or powerless body language looks like? It's super easy to look in other animals because they can't talk. They appease, they got ways of shrinking themselves. This is, no, don't beat me up. This, whatever you want is yours. And humans mimic some of that. We shrink ourselves when we want to not be intimidating. We elevate ourselves. We open ourselves when we want to be powerful and intimidating.

1:13:21But in humans, almost all humans, almost all the time, power doesn't emanate from our physical presence, but from what we're capable of. And some societies, America comes to mind. You demonstrate your power by showing your wealth, by showing what you can do, by being very in your face. I'm great at this. You know, I'm, we're number one kind of thing. Many cultures don't like that. Many, the more collectivist your culture is, the more frowned upon that is, and the less likely you are to do it, even if you are the powerful. And then you get to cultures where the only person who ever puts himself down is the really powerful because they can afford to say, no, no, I'm nobody.

1:13:56You don't want to bother with me. And the second they say that in those cultures, like, ooh, this person runs the show around here. And so in lot of cultures, the richest person is the one who dresses the most modestly, the most powerful person is because that's what the culture understands. But it's always you have to follow the cultural rules. And a weird number one society, that's not going to work for you. Everybody's just going to think you're nobody. And so the rules of power vary dramatically by where you are. But you could always see that somebody who is relaxed and looks comfortable is probably relatively high -power person in that circumstance.

1:14:29I've always wondered why billionaires who have more sort of objective power and not wearing designer clothes and being more understated and wearing just the same outfit every day and they don't wear the design of brands and have Louis Vuitton. Yeah. The thing is that we use those brands to compete for status. But they're already at the very top of the, they win their competition. And anybody who knows them knows that in their acts. They're also, especially as you start to get rich, all the fancy brands, and then as you get even richer and you've been that way longer, it becomes less important to you because you've got status in other ways.

1:15:01And maybe it's a counter signal at that point. Exactly. If he had a Louis Vuitton bag, he would actually be lowering himself to the status class. He's just a regular millionaire. He's not the multi -billionaire that he is. You've studied the Hads of Tribe. You mentioned them repeatedly. Only indirectly. I've never been there. What is the most interesting thing you've learned about them as it relates to happiness and purpose and living a good life that you might pass to all of us that are listening? Well, autonomy was really rare for ancestors. They evolved to want both. They need connection to survive and to be part of the collective that will go on the hunt and do all the things that is necessary for living every single day.

1:15:39But they also need autonomy to choose where they're going to, their real niche is going to be, what their best prospects are, how to stand out in the group. Everybody has to be a hunter gather, but you could still be the best arrow maker or storyteller or whatever. Make yourself valuable to the group. So you need autonomy so you can decide where your best prospects and decide what you want to do and put your efforts into the domains that matter to you that where you think you'll succeed. But for ancestors true autonomy was rare because if you guys, even though we all decide by consensus and you guys say you want to go south and I want to go north, I can't just go north when you go south or I'm going to be lion food.

1:16:13I've got to compromise or persuade you with my, you know, what I want to do, which means that opportunities for true autonomy were really rare for ancestors. The problem is now we don't need connection anymore. We can survive just fine without it. So we have opportunities for autonomy all the time. Cities are an example. They're full of opportunities for autonomy. And humans are moving their own droves. Every time that we get a choice between connection and autonomy, I fear that we're choosing autonomy. It's a formal miss wanting because for our ancestors, they rarely could get that choice where they could really pick either.

1:16:44And when they had it, they wanted to jump on autonomy. So now I think they were constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than to connect. And that's steadily making us unhappy. And our hunter gatherer friends who still exist on the surface don't do that. That's the one thing that you can learn from the HODSA. They're constantly thinking about each other and then thinking about, well, what do I want and finding a compromise that's much closer to balance? In that regard, men need women more than women need men as it relates to connection. Yes and no. So we all need to connect, but I believe women need it more than men.

1:17:18Largy for the reasons we were talking about earlier, where women need to get more help parenting so they need to form these tight bonds. So people will help them. But of course, men need connection too. And women provide men with a lot of the closest connection that they have. Because I read that marriage is more beneficial for men's longevity than it is for women. It is. It's not a huge difference. So if you look at people in their mid -60s where now long -gevity is in the offing, right? Men will live an extra two years if they're married, and women will live an extra year and a half if they're married.

1:17:46So women do more for men than men do for women, but both are getting something out of it, and that's not a huge difference. And they're giving us more emotional support typically than women. Well, also, I mean, think about how slavently and disgusting we are. They're probably helping us with our hygiene. They're probably helping in a variety of ways. But yes, I think emotional support really matters. And I think that you need to have something to live for. And kids provide us with that grandkids provide us with that connection, provides us with that. Nobody wants to die alone. That's a miserable thought.

1:18:13These, these had the tribes that we keep talking about. Did they stay together in marriages? It turns out, so they're best... Well, the person I regard as the premier ethnographer is Frank Marlow. He would live with the Hodson right about them. And he estimated from his life experience with them that about 20 % of them stay married for life. So one in five. Which is not high. Very low. Now, if you think about it, why is that such a high divorce rate? Well, hunter -gatherers don't institutionalize marriage the way that agriculturalists do. When agriculturalists get married, that's a financial arrangement.

1:18:48It didn't matter in the same way to our hunter -gatherers ancestors. When that's no longer nice, they moved out and chose somebody else. And so it's low. It's, it's... They're serial monogamous. They don't, you know, hudds tend not to have more than one wife at a time. It happens, but it's rare. Does our evolutionary past suggest that humans are serial monogamous?

1:19:14Now, why do I think we also cheat a little bit? Because if we're purely monogamous, men would not need testicles as large as they are. A gorilla is not monogamous. It has a harem of several females. But it doesn't know other male gorilla can approach those females because he will physically attack them. And so he knows that he's the only one having sex with them. And he has very small testicles. And in fact, they're inside his body. They're not at risk of damage. A chimpanzee who... The... The mating system is lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females. So who knows whose father has these enormous testicles?

1:19:48Because part of his job is to wash out and that doesn't sound nice. Wash out the guy who's there before him. So maybe his sperm will be the one that inseminates her. Wash out. Which means by wash out. Like literally pump so much sperm into her that the previous guy who just had sex with her. His sperm is literally washed out as if you were there with a hose. I know it doesn't. It's not... It's not that. Anyway, so if we were... Ancestrally purely monogamous, we'd have little gorilla testicles and we don't. We are as are way bigger than theirs. Which suggests that we did a little bit of washing out of our own.

1:20:18Which suggests we were serially monogamous, but we're also sneaking around at the same time. So cheating might be a natural part of a human being. Cheating... Well natural doesn't mean good. I'm not saying it's a good thing, right? I'm not saying it's what our ancestors did. So my guess is when they could get away with it. You know, they're on the cave. There's this couple who aren't a couple. But nobody else has run. Both of them have reasons to do it. Males want to cheat because it gives them a greater chance of having offspring than they otherwise wouldn't have. Females can't have an infinite number of kids like males can because they could have sex with 20 guys.

1:20:47They're still only going to have one kid. The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us. Is it the orangutan? Which monkey is it? The chimps are the closest to us. The chimps. And then gorillas and then orangutans. But they're all great apes, so they're all pretty close to us. Can chimps talk? No. So if they... If I'm a chim, and I leave the tree for a while, and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife, I can't then find out that he did that. No. There's no one telling you. Now, they do sign language lots of things that they're interested in doing. Immediate communication. But if you think about sign language, it's really good for saying, you know, there's something behind you.

1:21:24It's really good for saying, I'm going to punch you in the face if you don't give me your food, whatever. But it's not good for saying, you know, yesterday I had sex with you live. How do they communicate that? They're terrible at communicating that kind of. Things that are separated by space or by time, they just simply can't communicate. But they can't think about it either. And so our homo -rectuses, the first animal on this planet, who could think about separate things separate by space and time. And so my guess is our complex communication began with them. It made me think of my dog. My dog does something.

1:21:55He does a poo in the house. I come home in an hour later. I tell him about it. He doesn't know why you're upset. That poo's that happened an hour ago. He doesn't know what the problem is. But he can't think about the past in the future in terms of, and link it to... We know from psychology that if you want to punish an animal for pooing, which is effective if you do, you shouldn't rub the nose in it. Things that aren't nice. But punishment is very effective. If you punish them for pooing, you're a bad girl. You do it right away. They'll stop pooing in your house. You punish them an hour later.

1:22:23They go, I don't know what you're talking about. When I come home and say my dog's pooed in the house or something, we've done something naughty. He's hiding. Yeah, because he now knows that when you find a poo in the house, he gets in trouble. When you find a torn -up furniture, he gets in trouble. He knows that. That's an association. Dogs are really, really good about learning associations. And so, all that... He doesn't... You know, when he tears it up, first of all, he's poor self -control because it's a dog. But second of all, he can't think about, uh -oh. In the future, Stephen's going to come home and he's going to be pissed.

1:22:50But now, when you do come home and he's like, looking over the torn couch, he's like, uh -oh, I'm in trouble. And so, he knows for what was coming. And then he goes to the next apartment. Okay, so he doesn't actually know that it was... That I didn't want him to tear up the couch or whatever. But he does know that when the couch is torn up and I come home, that I'm going to be like, fucking all the camera. Yeah, and you're going to yell at him. And he also knows that if he does in front of you, you yell at him. And if he boops in front of you, you yell at him. So, he knows all those things. But he can't think about the future.

1:23:19So, take an animal way smarter than a dog, a monkey. Or even a chimp, let's get way smarter. Chimps can't plan for tomorrow the way a human can. So, I... If you feed a chimp or a monkey or any of these animals, as much food as they want, but only one meal a day, they don't like that. Because they like to eat several meals a day, just like we do. But they'll never let go. I'm going to stash some of my food because I'm going to get hungry at 5 p .m. today. Because I'm only fed it, too. It never occurs them day after day after day to stash it. When they're full, they'll literally throw it at each other.

1:23:50Because they don't... They can't think... They can't think about a world that has unfelt needs. All they can think about is the world where their needs are the same as they are right now. And because we can project our mind into the future, we know there's going to be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs. I'll be hungry again. I'll be cold. I'll be whatever. But with some animals, still food, didn't they? They do, but they do it automatically. They don't go, oh, it's going to be, like for example, squirrels who bury nuts. We'll do that if they've never been through a winter. So, they don't go, oh, I was cold last winter.

1:24:18I better store some nuts because there weren't many around. They just have a vault of store nuts when the weather's supposed to get cold or whatever their signal is. Because my dog, Pablo, he's never been around... I mean, he has been around other dogs, of course, but I only have one dog, so he's never lived with me. And I wanted the first time I got a bone, like from the shop, and I gave it to him. He played with it a little bit, but then he picked it up and buried it in the couch. And I'm like, what the hell are you doing? And then I'd give him another bone, and he picks up and buries it in the couch.

1:24:46And then I ended up lifting up the couch, and there's all these bones buried in there. I'm like, how? That's an evolved behavior that he doesn't understand that purpose of somebody knows he wants to do. And so, let me give you an example from another animal system, where we've studied it really closely. So, mere cats, you know, mere cats, those cute little things, like... Oh, yeah. ...till I'm thinking of, yeah, from the movies. mere cats eat scorpions. And so, they need to teach their babies... they're very good hunters. They need to teach their babies to kill something that could kill them. And so, when they have tiny babies, they kill the scorpion and give it to it dead.

1:25:19And then the baby eats the scorpion. Once it's weaned from milk, because of course they're mammals. When the babies get a little bit bigger, they break the stinger off and throw the scorpion to it alive. So, the baby can practice killing the scorpion. And then when the baby's bigger still, it's almost ready to go out on its own. They throw it alive scorpion. You kill it and eat it, because it's got to learn how to do that. Like, it seems rough, but it's got to learn that. If you play the sounds of a little baby to the mother, or whoever's bringing the food, because it's not always mothers, it'll kill the scorpion and throw it in there, even if who would throw it into our juveniles could kill it themselves.

1:25:51And where's she at? If you have babies and you play juvenile sounds, it'll throw the life scorpion to the baby, who's going to kill the baby? Because all it knows is when I hear that sound, I do X to the scorpion. Your dog is doing the same thing. When given bone, chew on it for a little while, then bury it for later. Because I don't know if I'll have them later. Now, it doesn't do that. I don't know if I'll have it later, but it's evolved to solve that problem. As you guys know, whoop is one of my show sponsors. It's also a company that I have invested in, and it's one that you guys asked me about a lot.

1:26:19The biggest question I get asked is why I use whoop over other wearable technology options. And there is a bunch of reasons, but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial feature. It's non -invasive nature. When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to whoop, because it doesn't have a screen. And Will Armour, the CEO who came on this podcast, told me the reason that there's no screen. Because screens equal distraction. So when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym, my whoop doesn't demand my attention. It's there in the background constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them.

1:26:53If you've been thinking about joining whoop, you can head to join. whoop .com slash CEO and try whoop for 30 days, risk -free and zero commitment. That's join. whoop .com slash CEO. Let me know how you get on. I've invested more than a million pounds into this company Perfect Ted, and they're also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using matcha as my dominant energy source. And that's where Perfect Ted comes in. They have the matcha powders, they have the matcha drinks, they have the pods, and all of this keeps me focused throughout a very, very long recording day, no matter what's going on.

1:27:26And their team is obsessed with quality, which is why they source their ceremonial grade matcha from Japan. So when people say to me that they don't like the taste of matcha, I'm guessing that they haven't tried Perfect Ted. Unlike low quality matcha that has a bitter grassy taste, Perfect Ted is smooth and naturally sweet. And without knowing it, you're probably a Perfect Ted customer already. If you're getting your matcha at places like blank street or Joe in the juice. But now you can make it yourself at home. So give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like matcha. So here's what I'm going to do.

1:27:55I'm going to give you 40 % off our matcha if you try it today. Head to Perfect Ted .com and use codiary 40 at checkout. Or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland and Barrett or in the Netherlands that Albert Heine. And those of you in the US, you can get it on Amazon. It's really interesting and such an interesting subject matter because, you know, I spend so much time talking to people about our evolution and what it tells us about our future and who we are. And you're, I mean, you're the guy. You're the guy that knows more about our evolutionary past and I think anybody I've ever met.

1:28:29So I'm so curious to know if there's just anything else that someone like me should be aware of from all the work you've done in studying evolution, any study, any story that was particularly pivotal for you in your thinking that shaped you that we haven't yet talked about. We've talked a fair bit about how money doesn't make you as happy as you think it would, but it does help. It does help make you happy. And we've talked about how important money is a proxy for state. It's how important that was in our ancestral society. But you have to remember that our ancestral societies were very small.

1:29:04And so it was feasible that I could be the best at something in our group. I could be the richest. I could be the best aeromaker, the best storyteller. You name it. There's something I've got to shot at. Nobody can be the best at anything anymore. You can't even be the richest. I mean, tomorrow Elon Musk made some amount this year that's like so astronomical. It's hard to even imagine. And so the, there's always going to be people who have more than you do. And so the problem with money is that it's partially a state of this game. It's partially about buying an ice or car and a nice or house. And those things actually tend not to make us happy.

1:29:36But interestingly, spending our money on doing things tends to make us much happier, which is surprising. Because it feels like spending money on activities is kind of wasteful. I always felt like when I was young and broke that if I had money, it was hedonistic and wasteful to spend at skiing, whereas it was sensible to spend it on a new couch because I need a couch. And then I'll have that couch for a very long time, whereas the ski day is over in the day. But it turns out that if you have disposable income, it makes you a lot happier when you spend it on things to do rather than things to have.

1:30:09And we don't know exactly why that is yet. But I suspect that the reason is, is that things to have are a state of this game. And that state of this game is impossible to win, right? Because there's just too many humans on the planet. And I'm going to open up my Instagram tomorrow and find that somebody else has a better car or whatever it is that I just bought. And now I, mine looks kind of dumpy. Whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself. It becomes this memory that's self that that you think back on and that you are happy when you think about it. And especially if you do it with friends.

1:30:37And so the advice I would give is, you know, if you're trying to, especially if you're successful and you're trying to find a way to not feel like all that success was a lot of effort and not really worth it, is to use your money in ways to enhance your experiences in life rather than to enhance your things. So what are the, if I had to force you, I don't like doing this, but if I had to force you to give me a summary of the top 10, I got five things that are most correlated to my happiness in your opinion. I'm most likely to increase my probability of living a happy, filled life. And you have to give me five.

1:31:10Okay. What are those five things? Families first. Okay. We evolved in families. I'm not just small families, but extended families. And it, you may not get along with your family and then you want to find a proxy family or you want to create one of your own. So I'm not telling you you need to go along with that jerk of an uncle of yours or your hopeless parents or whatever. But I'm saying spend time with your family and if it's not the family, you want to trade them in for a new one. But we evolved to have the close confines, regular contact, constant contact with family. And so if you can't do it in person because they're far away or, you know, the financial means whatever, you just do it every day on the phone anyway.

1:31:49Find a reason to chat regularly with family, ideally eat with family. Eating was a key moment for ancestors. They got together around the fire. They, if it was a stressful hunt, they're cooking up their meal together and they're eating it together. This bad habit of a lot of families to just watch TV together. And there's nothing wrong with TV. But you should also talk together because we evolved to be storytellers. We evolved to share stories with each other. They're super important for us. So trust me when I say those momentary desires to do your own thing will pale in comparison to the long term benefits of continuing to be.

1:32:24And when you're getting together, these rituals of eating together and having conversation together is hugely important. Okay. Number two. Number two is it's also going to be connection. And it sounds silly, but it's like when you're trying to plan your day and you've got this list of things you want to do and you've got list of things your friends are doing, you can't always do what your friends are doing. But if you can get yourself to sacrifice what you really prefer and do what they're doing and they're going to eventually do the same for you of course too. Give up some of that autonomy in order to reestablish some of that connection.

1:33:01And the reason I say this is when we look at married couples even, they're spending less time together. When we look at friends, they're spending less time together. I think we need to go back to this world. What's going to happen? When I think about doing that, I'm just going to be completely honest. No, you should be because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. No, no, when I think, yeah, so I'm just going to put myself in the head of the person that's hearing that. And a lot of entrepreneurs, modients that are like very busy building their start and they've got jobs that are demanding of them, they're striving and they're striving away from a life that they didn't like towards a life that they hope they will.

1:33:33So that's requiring them to give so much time and energy to like separate themselves from the crowd. So when they hear that they need to spend more time with their partner, many of them will be thinking, but then my business will fail. And I agree with them. When I'm giving this generic advice, I'm not tailored to that person. And I completely agree with that person's life choice. When we're young, we're autonomy machines. And that takes precedence. Especially if you have a big dream that you think you could get to, you're the sound entrepreneur. And especially if you're trying to get away from something that wasn't much.

1:34:03Like materially, you just didn't have enough to really get by whatever the case might be. LeBron James, storm basket after basket after basket trying to become the person he wants to be. Look how well it works for him. What's the cost? The cost is paid at the time. You're going to be lonely when you do that. But if you're loving what you're doing and if you think it has a real chance, will I say pay that loan in this price when you're young? Don't pay it every single day. Please go out with your friends on Friday night and talk with your fellow entrepreneurs and do things that still allow you to be connected.

1:34:32So you're not suicidal by the time you get there. But I totally get that autonomy push. It's what makes us a success. I do think I'm bullshitting myself a little bit. Because could I spend another hour with my partner a day or another two, three hours a week in my business to be fine? Of course I could. But like you said, there's an inherent striving which can be out of whack. And the problem is that if what you really want to do right now is work. I say when you're young, do it. Because you can let your connections frayed, trying to let them disappear. And then you can rebuild them when you now have got there.

1:35:07But the key is you've got to get there. You have to set yourself in an answer in advance. And here's the reason I say that. I have found myself waiting for a bus longer than it would have taken me to walk. And so once I do that a few times, I realize, oh, the bus schedules are radic. I can do the walking. I'm going to wait X minutes and then I'm going to walk. Our problem is that we keep setting new bar for ourselves if we don't make that plan in advance. I'll just give it another minute. I'll just give it another minute or I'll just push this business for another year. I'll just push it for another year.

1:35:36And you can find yourself doing it forever. You may not succeed. You may have a miserable life where all you did was work and you kept pushing it for another year and it never got there. And so my recipe is when you start something, you give yourself an end date. You say, what would it mean for me to be a success? And so you can have an end date that's both good and bad. How much money do I have to make? And now I won. How much time do I get without making any money and therefore I lost? And you should set those two things in advance. Because once you're in it, I promise you you're going to move the bar.

1:36:06Number three, yes. If you're this hard driving entrepreneur who's putting that aside, I'm dead serious when I say get a dog or cat, whatever your preferred animal is. And the data show that having a pet actually makes people quite happy. And I very mindfully did it when I was a brand new assistant professor. You know, in this American system, I'm going to either get tenured and promoted after seven years or I'm going to get fired. So I knew that I was a work machine for seven years. Everything else was going to take second place. But my dog wouldn't care. Dogs are amazing. And maybe one day as you were talking I was thinking maybe people are going to get robot someday.

1:36:40And that's a sad thing to talk about. But just like a robot generally to be that friend, which is quite grim. Number four. So when you ask yourself, well, what made our ancestors happy? There's a lot of seemingly pointless sitting around and doing nothing together. And the problem with our world today, I believe, but don't know. I don't have good data on this. This is Bill's intuition is that we can always be doing something. There's a 10 ,000 ,000 ,000 actually very good shows on TV. And I suspect that what we are giving up when doing that is random chitchat with friends. Now, when I used to walk by construction sites 20 years ago, you see all these guys eating their lunch together and just shooting the shit right?

1:37:24Just having a good time. When I walk by construction sites today during lunch, I see most of the guys in their phone not even talking to the guy right next to them. They're still sitting in a line at the construction site, but they're not engaged with each other. And those guys are not as tight and their job is not going to be as good. And so I would say be present. Be present in idle conversation times. It doesn't seem as interesting as it is. It's super important. Number five. Last but not least. I would say, and this is going to sound a little bit redundant. But we all have lifestyle goals that we pursue.

1:37:57And they could be getting more fit. They could be learning a foreign language. They could be learning to paint. They could be anything like that. The data show very clearly. You're way more likely to achieve those lifestyle goals if you commit to doing them with somebody else. Because they'll push you and you'll push them. People join gyms every year that they attend five times and never go back. And so whenever you want to make a change in your life, try to use connection to make that change more effective. Because not only will it make the change more effective, but it'll overall in the long term make you a happier person.

1:38:25And on that point about health fitness and lifestyle goals, I found out that you are a senior scientist at a company that I'm an investor in. Cooled whoop. They also respond to the podcast I should probably say. But you're a senior scientist there. That's where I'm a contract. I don't work directly for them, but they've contracted me to work with them. That's right. And what is it you're doing at whoop? I have the coolest job in the world. So I work as part of the performance science team. And what we're tasked to do is just look at all the data that whoop collects and ask the question, how can we do it better?

1:38:59What are things that are people are doing that really help them? Let them know how much it's helping them. What are things that people are doing that maybe aren't helping them? Let them know that it's not helping. And more so, let's, you know, sleep is not well understood. Exercise is not well understood. This relationship to eating is not well understood. You'll have learned that from lots of guests prior to previous on the show. And so I get this really cool job where we just dive into our data all the time to try to answer these fundamental questions. And what are some of the cool questions you've asked that have garnered interesting answers thus far?

1:39:29So these aren't published data yet. And so what that means, the caveat on them is that we could be wrong, right? I could be telling you stuff that I'm going to send it to a journal and they're going to laugh in my face and say, and you're forgetting the fausity effect. That total, that's total nonsense, right? That could happen. So going with, you have to understand the caveat here that these are raw data that we've just discovered that we haven't vetted yet in the scientific community. But let me give you an example. One of the quite remarkable things that we're finding at Wub is that exercise amplifies other behaviors.

1:39:59And so if I do something that's good for me, even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, and I exercise that day, it's better for me. If I do something that's bad for me, and even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, it's worse for me on a day that I exercise. Let me make an example. Yeah, so if I drink, we know that I'll call every drink, every alcoholic drink that I have, raises my resting heart rate by, I think it's about a beat beat and a half fire member right, and lowers my HIV by like three points of fire member right. I could be getting those numbers a little bit off. That's that kind of magnitude.

1:40:30And every drink just, it's this linear effect up to at least 10 drinks. We see that in our data, with thousands and thousands of people. If you have those drinks on days that you're basically sedentary, you did almost nothing, they're effective smaller than if you have those drinks on days where you exercised. So I could exercise in the morning, then I drink, and the impact of the drink is worse, because I exercise. Because you exercised. And the same holds for good things. I know it's ridiculous. I don't understand the physiology at all, but this is what we're seeing. So drink and don't exercise.

1:41:01Exactly. On days that you're going to misbehave, and it's probably not just alcohol, that's just one of the ones I've analyzed. On days that you're going to misbehave, be relatively sedentary. Now, the thing is, it also works the other way. So if you like, if you sometimes wear blue light blocking glasses late in the evening, or you dim the lights late in the evening, you're conscientious about getting ready for bed, that has a bigger positive effect on your recovery on days that you exercise. Even though blue light and exercise have nothing to do with each other. So it doesn't seem to matter what the behavior is.

1:41:30If it's positive, it has a bigger positive effect on days you exercise more. If it's negative, it has a bigger negative effect on days you exercise more. Which is super cool. I have no idea why. We're obviously going to write it up and tell the world about it. And when we do, maybe I made a mistake, and we'll discover what I did wrong and what I just told you isn't true. But for now, I believe that's true. So if I'm having a bit of like a naughty day, you know, I find like breaking all my rules. Don't exercise. Interesting. And then if I'm having a great day, like I'm meeting really, really healthy, and everything's going on sleeping well.

1:42:04Here's the thing. Eating might be the exception. The data also show that if you like imagine you stuff your face full of fatty foods and all that kind of stuff, exercise is exactly what you should be doing now. After you ate, use the fuel you process. Don't just store it. And so food is something we need. Too much food is obviously a bad thing. But I don't count food in the naughty behavior list. And so I haven't actually, everybody eats every day and I don't have good data on how much they've eaten. But what our data do suggest is that going for a walk, even just a walk, like zone two is fabulous.

1:42:38Even zone one is good. Going for a walk, doing stuff after you eat helps you just feel better. And I'm guessing here that what you saw in the data is you could look at someone who is drinking alcohol every day, for example. And then you could see on the days that they exercised as well. Yeah. The impact of the alcohol on their biomarkers was more significant. Yes. And what we have is, fortunately, we've got thousands and thousands of people. So big data sets who log out call relatively often, they don't drink every day. And I can even show you what the pattern looks like. People don't drink much Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

1:43:10They have a drink or two, Friday, more Saturday and Sunday, more, and then go back. But they also exercise at different points across the week. And so some people, those two things happen to hit at the same time. And sometimes they don't. And what I try to do in these analyses, what we all try to do in these analyses, is look within person. Because if you're the kind of person who exercises when you drink and I'm not, well, who knows what else differs between us? So what I really want to know is what does Steven look like when he drinks two drinks on days and he also exercises the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual.

1:43:39We want to make it all against what you usually do. And there we see these effects very clearly. Are there any other cool answers you've discovered in your time at Weep? You know, if you look at how much sleep people need, the argument is everybody needs the same, basically, on average, right? But some people need a little less and some people need a little more. I think men need less sleep than women. I don't know that yet, but there's lots of reasons to think that. First of all, hunter gathers, when you look at the data they've gathered with actograph, where they put a motion capture on hunter gathers, the men sleep about 20 minutes less than the women do.

1:44:15Now, that's not significant in their samples, because they have small samples of hunter gathers. When we put these things on zillions of people, we see men sleep about 20 minutes less than women do. When you put the Weep on. Yeah. And so we see the exact same thing they see, but it's wildly statistically significant. Our data is so huge, 20 minutes is a lot. Now, here's the thing. If men don't need as much sleep as women, why is that the case? So recently, now, this hot off the press, I can't promise you I'm doing it right, but I believe I am. Our data suggests men sleep more impactfully, more effectively than women.

1:44:45That for every hour of sleep, then a man gets, he gets a little more bang for the buck on his recovery than women get. I have no idea why that might be. It could be they have bigger slow ways when they're in slow way sleep. It could be a thousand different things. I don't know, but what my data suggests is that men get more bang for the buck out of every hour of sleep. And as a consequence, they sleep about 20 minutes less. That's right off the press. I can't even promise you that holds up if I... It holds up. I've looked at it in two samples, but I could be making a mistake. I want to play with it more.

1:45:16I just did some research as you're explaining that also, really interesting finding or hypothesis on the previous one, which is about why... If I drank alcohol on a day when I exercised, it would cause my biomarkers to have a reflect a worse sort of state. It says, on days when you both drink alcohol and exercise, the combined psychological stresses can lead to alterations in your biomarkers reflecting increased oxidative stress, liver strain, dehydration and inflammation. In contrast, on days when you consume alcohol without exercising, these effects might be less pronounced resulting in different biomarker profiles.

1:45:53I think that's... It's just AI. It's super possible. Yeah. Yeah. It's very possible. That could be the mechanism. It could be all about hydration. And so all you've got to do is be doubly conscientious about hydrating and then problem solved. But here's the thing. Every negative thing I've looked at has gotten worse when it's... when you exercise. And every positive thing I've looked at has gotten better. So it may be as simple as... as something very specific with alcohol and exercise, but it may be there's a broader principle to play. And so somebody out there who's super smart, like trivers came along and lined up, however, animal mating system worked.

1:46:27He says, look, here's how it works. Females make the larger sex cell. They typically then put more effort into it. So males compete for females. And then low and bold, you see that across the animal kingdom and there are rare exceptions where males put more effort. Now the females compete for the males. So somebody's got to come along with super smart, and they'll hear what I just said and they go, I know the answer is to that, but I don't know. And the beauty is that when I hear a scientific explanation that nails that I immediately go, oh, that's it. And I wish I thought of it, but at least I can see that they've got the answer when I didn't.

1:46:58Is there anything else? One last thing from your work as a senior scientist at WUP, that is intriguing to you or any hypotheses you have that you're discovering from the data? Well, so we're seeing lots of nice evidence have a couple different things. First of all, there's a lot of little things that help a lot. And I'm a big believer in lots of little things helping a lot, but they have to suit you because we also find huge individual variability on how well they work. So reading in bed on average actually not only helps you sleep, fall asleep more regularly, but even helps you sleep longer. I suspect but don't know that you're clearing your mind of the day's worries.

1:47:32That probably works for some people, but some people probably works the opposite. Like now they get caught up in the novel, they're reading and they can't sleep. So you have to be super thoughtful about what works for you. CBD works really well, but it actually works for some people really well and for others it even has a negative effect. You know, our samples are big enough that we can see across the board. We find things like a weighted blanket, blue light blockers in the evening, dimming your lights in the evening. Those are big. They have big effects across the course of the night. By big I mean like 15, 20 minutes of more sleep, more time in REM and slow wave.

1:48:02You add all these things together, it ends up being a lot. Wow. The final thing that we find is a lot of people have sleep worries. You know, they worry they won't sleep well. And the downside of that is that if you have sleep worries, what ends up happening is they get produced by your poor sleep. Like I think, Jim, I'm going to have trouble falling asleep because lo and behold I did. But then when we analyze the data, we've run these surveys where we ask, what was your worry going into the night? And when you woke up in the morning, how did it go? And what rolled into your worries play, et cetera?

1:48:29And when we disentangle it, we see that the worries start to cause their own problems. They, the worries themselves make it harder to sleep. And so if you could find ways to short circuit those worries, again, things like reading and bed, whatever it is to get your mind elsewhere, it's going to be beneficial. Is there much data on coffee in the impact that that has? Coffee actually overall is not bad. You don't want to do too late in the day. And some people can, I have friends who can drink a coffee at dinner and go right to sleep. So it's not everybody. But some people, after 2pm, it can be pretty disrupted for some people.

1:48:59And what we'd also advise is when you're eating, try to restrict that to daylight hours, that seems to make a big difference. Your body, you're trying to get parasympathetic dominance when you go to sleep. And if you've got food in there, your body's working hard to digest it. And that makes it difficult. What's the most important thing in your book, the social paradox, when finding what you want means losing what you need, that we haven't talked about? That is important for someone who's listening that wants to improve their life and increase their probability of happiness. So the last thing I would say is that we haven't covered is that, all right.

1:49:31So I'm arguing you need to increase your sociality. And I'm arguing that your socialness, you need to be more social, more connected. And I'm arguing that we're too autonomous. But that's a big ask. And I remember reading the article in the New York Times about this guy. He wrote an op -ed piece about it. He decided to reconnect with all of his old friends. And so he's calling them up and finding them and they're getting together. And then he answered by saying, am I going to keep this up every week? No, I just don't have time. And that's really, really an important lesson. That we lead these busy lives that are not the same as hunter -gatherers.

1:50:03We have so many things that we can do and are meant to be doing. That we can't just introduce social connection into our life willy -nilly or we won't keep it up. We have to be socratic and know yourself and know your weaknesses and know what you're going to sustain and what you're not. And from my perspective, that means two things. One, trying to say, well, whenever I do something alone, that I'm doing something I enjoy, like maybe the crossword puzzle or running or whatever your thing is. Is there a way to do that with others? Don't match my connection need with my autonomy need. I want to do that.

1:50:35That's my autonomy speaking. But are there others who want to do it or I can do it with? So in my case, I'd love to do the New York Times puzzle. My sister lives in London. So we reconnect in a way that we just weren't doing before because we're both busy. But we're both doing the puzzle anyway, so why not do that? If you have to decide to do something every single time you do it, you just won't do it. You want to surrender control of that decision -making process to either your past or to the environment itself, by which I mean in the same way that we say, I'll brush my teeth after breakfast.

1:51:03We don't say, I wonder if I should brush my teeth today. We just know what I eat breakfast then I brush. You want to do the same thing. Oh, after breakfast, I'll call my sister and we'll do the puzzle together. You want to set rule so you don't have to decide to do it. And then these things become habit. And so what I want to argue is that people should reintroduce connection by trying not to do things alone, but they should do in the easiest way possible in the way that's most likely become habitual and that doesn't actually add more time to their busy day. And it's surprisingly doable. William, thank you.

1:51:32We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Uh -oh. Not knowing who they're leaving it for. And so this question's going to come out on left field. Probably, yeah. You'll give in the chance plus the power to do one thing to save humanity plus make everyone happy. What would that be? If I had one chance to do one thing to save humanity. To save humanity. I would, and I'm magic, right? I can make it whatever I want. I would make sure that there's perfect justice. Because if there's perfect justice then everybody who misbehaves does wrong by somebody else knows that they're going to get the consequences for that behavior.

1:52:14Because I think that the one thing that humanity's not going to get its way out of is people being horrible to other people. But if there's perfect justice, everybody who's horrible to somebody else is going to get there. And it doesn't, I don't mean justice when you die. I mean justice in real time. They're going to stop doing that and people will just be better to each other. What would be the cost of that? Because that's always a cost, right? The cost of that is that, well, look, you can't get away with anything anymore. I get away with a lot of little things like I speed all the time. And I do it because I know I can get away with it.

1:52:45And I like doing that. But I think the perfect justice would have the advantage that it's harmed to others. See, in the past, we cared about property crimes a lot and not so much harm to others. I would want in this world that the perfect justice comes with harm to others. Okay, but with justice, there's a subject development, right? To what is just? Because if you look back through history, what we thought was just the right. That's true. And so the cost might be missing in the mark. We might, we might as a human population today come up with a consensual decision about what justice is. There are a thousand years from now they look back and they're utterly appalled that that was what we were doing.

1:53:18Which is what we look back at. 200 years ago, justice, what the fuck? Yeah, what the hell was that? Thank you so much, William. Thank you for writing an incredible book. Your first book here called The Social Leap was a smash hit and is an extraordinary book. But this book is exceptional. And it's exceptionally timed. I think it has to be said because where the world is at the moment, it feels like we're all we're drifting to some degree. It feels like we're drifting from the the island where our tribe are. And we're getting further and further away from knowing exactly what it is to be human.

1:53:51I think we're feeling the consequences of that. If you look at a lot of the data, we're feeling we have the mental health crisis around the world, the increase in suicidal ideation and suicide, the increase in purposelessness, the increase in opioid addictions and things like that. And I don't think anybody could make the case in a way that's founded on what we're seeing, that we're any closer to being human, or whatever that means, than we've ever been. And this book, I think, helps us to call us correct. It helps us to understand it, it turns the lights on. And as it says on the front, it helps us to understand that there's this important balance between autonomy and connection.

1:54:28And we need both of them, but we need to get the balance correct. And many of us, including myself, no deep inside that maybe we're not getting that balance correct. And this is why this book is so wonderful, because it's confronting in the nicest possible way, and in an important way. So I highly recommend everybody to give it a read. It's called The Social Paradox, when finding what you want means, losing what you need by William Bonn -Hippel. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. I really enjoyed chatting with you about it. I can't wait. I can't wait for people to read it and to send me lots of messages.

1:54:57Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you. Totally my pleasure. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53 % of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you, as if you do that, that I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do.

1:55:28Thank you so much.

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