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Dr. von Hippel: Why modern autonomy is making us miserable

How rising wealth and modern city living erode our happiness; the Hadza show why connection beats autonomy and why marriage still raises wellbeing.

Steven BartletthostDr Bill (William) von Hippelguest
Feb 17, 20251h 58mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:21

    Intro

    1. SB

      Do you believe the robots are gonna raise our kids? 'Cause it feels like a slippery slope.

    2. BH

      Well, it's not too far away from us, and we never evolved to want children. Look, the fertility rates are going way down and a lot of countries are gonna be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast. And the list is really long about how hard it is to raise the child in today's world. So, you wanna make having kids to be as much of a plus as it possibly can be. And with the perfect robot nanny, you would never worry at all.

    3. SB

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

    4. BH

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

    5. SB

      So, what do we do about that?

    6. BH

      Two things. One.

    7. SB

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

    8. BH

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

    9. SB

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

    10. NA

      (Cheers) (applause)

    11. SB

      Dr. William Von Hippel.

  2. 2:21 – 5:35

    What Does Dr. Von Hippel Do?

    1. SB

      What have you spent the last four decades of your life doing?

    2. BH

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

    3. SB

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

    4. BH

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

    5. SB

      What is evolution?

    6. BH

      So, evolution is this mindless process, and all it is is if, if it's the case that not everybody has the exact same number of kids, and if it's the case that not everybody's kids survive at the exact same rates, now we have room for evolution because there's variability. Something about me caused me to have lots of children that survived into the next generation, and something about this other guy caused him not to have any, maybe. And so, whatever there is about me that's heritable will, will be well-represented in the next generation, and about him, poor guy, even if he's wonderful, those traits are gone. And so, evolution just works with whatever's there, and the things that make you a success, either because they're just useful in that environment or they're a new mutation that turns out to have great value, they becoming, they become overrepresented in the gene pool. And so, evolution can, can create things that are species typical. All of our species have that. We all have two eyes. You know, that's just part and parcel of being human. And then it can make variability within humans. And there's tons of variability in our size, our stature, all sorts of things about us.

    7. SB

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

    8. BH

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

  3. 5:35 – 9:01

    What Are We Getting Wrong as a Species?

    1. BH

      important back then, and so it makes us happy when we eat those things.

    2. SB

      As a evolutionary psychologist and someone who understands where we've come from, and therefore, our sort of innate behaviors and needs and desires and so on, what are the things that we're getting wrong as a species at the moment, from your view?

    3. BH

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

    4. SB

      And by autonomy, you mean the sort of individualism where-

    5. BH

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      ... I don't need anybody anymore. It's about me. It's about my gratification, what I want now, versus others and a community or tribe?

    7. BH

      That's right. And it, it doesn't even need to feel like a big thing. It's just, let's say you and I are buddies and we're gonna go to a movie and you say, "Oh, I really wanna hit a rom-com." And I'm like, "Ah, I really wanna see an action movie." We go, "Okay, I'll see you if the movie's over." We just go our own ways. And so, it can be trivial little things, but it's across our lives. We're continually setting aside our connections to do what we want.

    8. SB

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

    9. BH

      So there's a number of them. Um, you can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone. We've got good data in the States, but the picture's the same in every industrialized country. In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone. Now it's... So, one in a hundred. Now it's one in seven. So, you know, here we are 170 years later, 175 years later, and it used to be crazy rare, and now it's one in seven. It's pretty darn common. If you look in, in the 1970s when I was a kid, um, about 30% of people saw their neighbors, got together with their neighbors, not s- visually seeing them, but got together with their neighbors, um, at least a few times a week, and only one in five pretty much never saw their neighbors at all. Now that's completely reversed. Now only one in five are seeing their neighbors regularly. It used to be one in three, and now one in three never s- get together with their neighbors at all. So we're, we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways. Even married couples are spending less time together. They're... It's weird. We don't understand what they're doing. But what I suspect is happening is that, let's say that you both wanna exercise and she kind of likes to jog and you kind of like to lift weights. We used to sort of do those together. Off for a jog and then a little weightlifting. But now with s- ten zillion options, you go to your gym and she goes to hers, and you just don't see each other as much as you used to. So, across our lives, we're spending far more time alone. And if you look at marriage and cohabitation, in some parts of the world, they haven't changed at all. But in the wealthy parts, United States, Western Europe, they're steadily going down. So it's not just, well, people aren't getting married because they're living together outside of marriage. If you cl- lump all those together, they're steadily going down over the last 50 years.

    10. SB

      And why does that matter?

    11. BH

      Well, the question is, first, on the one hand, s- it's not a problem at all. You vote with your feet, do what you want, of course, right? But on the other hand, what if it's making you unhappy? What if you think you're doing this because it's going to make you happy,

  4. 9:01 – 12:45

    Were Our Ancestors Happier Than Us?

    1. BH

      but in fact, you're wrong, and you keep making decisions over and over again that make you increasingly less happy? And that's what I think is happening here. I think every one of those decisions is an error.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      So, the best example, in my mind, is if you look at hunter-gatherers. And so, uh, there's a team that went to the Hadza, people who live outside, what live Kenya and Tanzania. They're as close as we know to what our ancestors would look like. And in my mind, they're perfect because they're also where it all happened. The Hadza still lived where humanity evolved. So, of course, it could have been different a quarter of a million years ago, but it could have been exactly like they live today. And so when you look at the Hadza, this particular team asked them, "Over the last week, have you been happy? Sometimes happy and sometimes sad? Sad?" Over 90% of the Hadza said happy. That was their answer. When you ask Westerners that same question, you get about 50% will say happy over the last week. And so the data suggests the Hadza are literally happier than we are. Now, they, they bury almost half their children. They, they live a life where they've got no s- savings whatsoever. They've got nothing in the bank. They don't know what tomorrow's gonna bring. They don't know if tomorrow's hunt's gonna be successful. They have so many cultural rules that they have to abide by that requires them to be constantly connected with each other because they rely on each other like an insurance policy. And yet they, they look a lot happier than we are. Now we can see those same stats in, in different modern contexts, but in my mind, that's the stat that blows me away.

    4. SB

      And why do you think they are happier than us? You think it's because they're living in tribes and groups, or is it something else?

    5. BH

      Well, I think it's the balance that they've struck, and I think it's that balance between connection and autonomy. And so that's really the focus of this... of m- of my second book is... Uh, so I'll tell you how I got there. How's that? So I'm visiting a friend of mine, also named Steven, and, uh, he struck it rich, and he invites me over and I'm like, "This is gonna be cool. I'm gonna see how the super rich live." And it was over the top. You know, this monumentally huge apartment, beautiful view, cook's over there, maid's over there, et cetera. And so I turned to him and I'm like, "Steve, man, your life is over the top." And he's like, "Yeah, it seems that way, but it's just not." And I'm like, "Seriously?" And he goes, "Yeah, I'm no happier than I used to be." And he starts listing off all the problems that he's facing, and I'm like, "How could this person not appreciate these amazing benefits that he has? How, how is it even possible that a person could have so much and not just feel happy about it every day?" And I have to admit, I felt this sense of superiority. I thought to myself, "Oh, if I were crazy rich like you were, I'd be happy every day. I would appreciate this lifestyle that I had earned rather than just taking it for granted." So then, fast-forward a few years. This is a decade or so ago. Fast-forward a few years, and I'm reading Frank Marlow's wonderful book on the Hadza. And I'm reading about their lives and, and, and how content they are, and I'm like, "Holy cow, I'm just like my friend Steve."... compared to them, I'm a multimillionaire. I don't w- my, when my kids get sick, I'm, I'm off to the doctor immediately. I don't have this horrible life where I bury my own children. I have savings. I don't have to worry about tomorrow. I get up and get something out of the fridge. I'm comfortable when it's hot, I'm comfortable when it's cold. The list goes on. Compared to them, I'm a zillionaire, and yet they're probably happier than we are. And so I realized, it's not just Steve, it's all of us. You know, we're failing to appreciate this amazing modern world we live in. And you know, even if we look back 100 years, 100 years ago, a quarter of the children died by the... 150 years ago, a quarter of the children died by the time they turned five. You know, the, you, you got a, the flu or you got, you know, typhus, there was a zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young. Um, women died in childbirth at rates way

  5. 12:45 – 15:10

    Are We Forgetting to Be Grateful?

    1. BH

      skyr- compared to today. So, it's not just looking back at it together, but even looking back recently, our lives are so much better, but we're not any happier. If anything, I think we're maybe a little less happy.

    2. SB

      And is that just because we don't take a moment to be grateful? Or is there something fundamental about the way we're pursuing happiness?

    3. BH

      Look, I think it's multi-causal. Whenever you get a big effect like that, like if you take those data seriously that I've told you about the Hadza, they're basically twice as happy as we are. Now, ha- t- that's such a big effect, it has to be multi-causal. There has to be a lot going on there. And of course, these changes happen over generations. They don't happen overnight. If they happened overnight, I think it'd be super obvious to us what had gone wrong. But I think what, what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before, about autonomy and connection. And so let's take city living as for example.

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. BH

      Remember earlier I said that cities are about 5,000 years old, so human beings have been moving to cities for 5,000 years.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. BH

      By 1960, you had one people out of every three living in cities in, in the world, and by 2007 was the year we crossed over. 50% of humanity now lives in the city. So, people have been voting with their feet for a long time, but by a long time, I mean a, a hundred and so years, en masse moving to cities. Now there's lots of reasons for it. We can talk about it. But one of the costs is happiness. If you look at happiness and you divide people up by, by whether they live into ci- in cities, um, communities over a quarter million or in the country, communities less than 2,500 people, they're happier in the country than they are in the city, which is a remarkle- fact remar- remarkable fact, in part because they're also poorer in the country. People who live in cities in the United States, for example, are about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country. Now some of that gets burned on com- on expensive city living, but far from all of it, and so they're, you're literally poorer in the country, but happier.

    8. SB

      And that's this graph here that from your book, um, percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy in urban-

    9. BH

      Mm-hmm.

    10. SB

      ... and rural communities.

    11. BH

      That's right.

    12. SB

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

    13. BH

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      ... areas.

    15. BH

      Which is remarkable because there's so many opportunities in cities. People have been voting with their feet for over 100 years and arguably for 5,000 years moving to cities, and yet it's making them less happy. And so in my mind, this is another symptom of the same exact problem we've been talking about, which is

  6. 15:10 – 17:07

    What Is the Price We Pay for Living in Cities?

    1. BH

      cities are all about autonomy. City's about opportunity. If I go to a city, I can get any kind of education I want. I can have any kind of job that I want, and so people are drawn to cities. And of c- and in fact, I'll make more money. The data are very clear. But I'm gonna pay a price, and people don't even realize the price they're paying.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      Yeah, bizarrely we become more isolated, because in the city you've got 1,000 people right next to you, right? You're, you're cheek by jowl with your neighbor. You're in an apartment building and there's somebody on your left, somebody on your right, somebody above you, somebody below you, but what are your chances you even know that person? So, if you ask people, there's a couple ways you can ask the question. If you say, "Do you know someone well enough that you'd trust them with your house keys?" You're more likely to give that answer a yes in the country than you are in the city, even though in the country probably your nearest neighbor is a long way down the road, whereas in the city, your nearest neighbor's five feet away. That person five feet away, in principle, you ought to be good buddies with, or if they, you don't like that person, there's somebody else in your building you wanna be good buddies with, but we're just not. Whereas in the country, we connect with each other. Similarly, if you say, "How satisfied are you with your friendships?" people are more satisfied with their friendships in the country than they are in the city.

    4. SB

      There was a graph that I saw, I think it was in your book, the percentage of Americans who spend evenings with neighbors at different frequencies by income, and it basically shows that the more money you have, the less time you spend with your neighbors.

    5. BH

      Yeah, which is amazing, right? And so the thing is that the problem is that if you're rich, you don't need your neighbors. You know, if I, I'm, I'm out of coffee beans, I wanna borrow some, I can just drone 'em in or whatever. I, I can, I can call Instacart or whatever, whoever your p- your favorite delivery s- um, program is. But if you're poor, you can't afford to do that, and so poor people literally need each other. They live in these neighborhoods in these complex webs of interdependence where they borrow each other's tools, they look out for each other's kids, they look out for each other's pets, because they can't afford to outsource any of that, and that's actually how humans evolved. We evolved to need each other all the time. And so ironically, although rich people are happier than poor people, so it's not...

  7. 17:07 – 18:03

    Does Money Make You Happy?

    1. BH

      Giving away all your material goods will not make you happy. Nonetheless, poor people are happier with their friendships. They're more likely to get together with their neighbors. And we see the exact same effect with education as well. The more educated you are, the less you get together with your neighbors. But of course, wealth and education tend to go hand in hand in our society.

    2. SB

      So money does make you happy?

    3. BH

      It's a funny thing. So money makes you a lot happier in real time. So if, if you start to make more money, you get happier, and the more important money is to you, the bigger that effect is, and it keeps going well past where we thought it did. We used to think it ceilinged at around $100,000 a year. It doesn't. Past 600,000 a year, money still makes you happier. It's, it's remarkable. It makes a difference. But there's this thing known as the Easterlin paradox, and that is that as society gets richer, people get no happier. So if you look at the United States going back to around 1940...... people earned about a third what they earn today in real

  8. 18:03 – 20:56

    What Is the Perfect Combination to Achieve Happiness?

    1. BH

      terms. So, we're three times richer than we used to be. And we've been measuring, um, happiness in the United States since the 1940s on representative samples, so we know that that holds true for the whole country. We know what the country looks like. It hasn't moved an inch. So real terms, money, gone way up. Happiness, exactly flat.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      W- well, the problem is this. There's a couple of things. First, we can come back to the big issue, which I think is this balance. That's the underlying issue why, why I think hunter-gatherers are happier than we are, is this balance that they maintain between autonomy and connection, which we can return to. But in direct answer to your question, part of the problem with humans is that w- we're this wonderful species in many ways, that we can avoid the zero-sum game that is life. And by zero-sum game, I mean that my gain is your loss. Like, there's only so many goods out there, and for me to have more means you have to have less. And in the animal world, lots of the world works that way. And they're able to cooperate with each other when they can create positive-sum relationships. So for example, vampire bats, they go out and they try to get blood from large animals, like land on their back, bite them a little bit, and leave. Drink a little bit of their blood. If they don't get any food at all at night, they're at risk of starvation within just a few nights. And so if I come home, if I've come back and I got nothing, and you were successful, I'll beg to you. And if we're friends, you'll regurgitate a little bit of the blood for me. Now, if, if you weren't successful, even if we're best mates, there's nothing you can do for me. Now if you think about the way humans give things to each other, it's sometimes goods, but we're this different animal. We're this cognitive animal. We're an animal where information has enormous value. And information, I can give it to you without losing any of it myself. And so we create these n- these relationships with each other where we don't even need to worry about reciprocation. We can do things for each other all the time. They're crazy easy to do, because they don't require me to give you anything. I still have the information I told you. So we already had this advantage over the animal kingdom. But we're still animals, and one of the ways that we're still animals is that, eh, we're still zero-sum in the sense of, well, what about our status? Who's gonna get picked for the mating relationships? Who's gonna get picked to be on the teams? And there, it always comes down to, well, who's at the top of the local heap and who's at the bottom of the local heap? And so in our ancestral communities, that would be a very small group of hunter-gatherers. All I had to do was be valuable or better than you guys in something. In our world today, it's awfully hard to be better than everybody, and money's one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to do it, because everyone can see it. And so even though money doesn't make us happy as the whole country's three times richer, we're no happier. If I'm richer than you, I am happier than you, because that's one way that I can be higher than in status. And so then maybe I can steal your girlfriend, or maybe the guys who are

  9. 20:56 – 23:08

    How to Be Attractive

    1. BH

      in your group who I really want to be in my group are gonna say, "Hey, Bill's cooler than Steven. I'm going with him." And so status matters. It's a process of sexual selection whereby both sexes are always trying to choo- get the best partner they can of the opposite sex, and so they're competing with each other. Men compete with men to try to have women choose them. Women compete with women to try to have men choose them, and that's a zero-sum status game.

    2. SB

      And what does evolution tell us about that, that competitive sort of dating game? What does it tell us, if I'm trying to be attractive as a man, what do I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human?

    3. BH

      Yeah, so what, what you want are what we call honest signals of quality, and the thing is that we've all evolved to look through fake signals. And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren't. Um, they puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating. We all, we have human ways of doing that too. But in humans, bizarrely, well, in, in all animals actually, one of the clearest 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, 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 road rash, and therefore you've removed yourself from the gene pool, or you bounce right back up because you're such a robust organism. In either case, you're demonstrating, that's an honest signal of quality. When we follow the data over time, we see that high testosterone men are more likely to pair up. They take these risks. Women find them attractive at some level, even if they don't f- personally feel like it's attractive at the moment, but something about that is attractive to them, and it may only be getting other men to back off. "When I take these big risks, you may say, 'Well, I, I'm not gonna 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 and they... Because once you have a family, taking risks are f- is foolish. You wanna take risks to get in the mating game, but you don't wanna keep taking risks once you've got people depending on you.

    4. SB

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

    5. BH

      Yeah.

    6. SB

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

  10. 23:08 – 24:11

    Why Is Humor an Attractive Trait?

    1. SB

      What else?

    2. BH

      Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality. Things like wealth. If you earned all that money, you know, there's inherited wealth. We live in this kind of funny world, but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth if you earned it yourself. There's, uh, ambition, things like that. People look for ambition because it's, i- 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.

    3. SB

      I often think about, like, personality, and why is humor a attractive quality in men?

    4. BH

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

  11. 24:11 – 24:55

    Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

    1. BH

      important for men and women. It... That's how you succeed. But as humans, we also care an enormous amount about kindness. And if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind, that person's gonna do well in life, 'cause kindness ends up trumping everything, just because there's a host of reasons for that. But one of which is that if you're a kind person, you're a great partner to me even if you've got almost no other good qualities. You need some minimal levels of competence. But once you cross minimal competence, kindness means you're gonna look out for me, and that matters a lot.

    2. SB

      Do nice guys finish last in the evolutionary world?

    3. BH

      They don't, actually. So, the, the good thing about being a nice guy is they, they tend to finish first. And so when we look in hunter-gatherer communities and we look at people choosing their partners to go out on hunts in the morning, they actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters.

  12. 24:55 – 26:10

    What Makes a Woman Attractive?

    1. BH

      Now again, you need a minimal level of competence. Now, they pay a big price to f- finish first, because lots of people take advantage of them. And so I share with you and you never share back with me, but if I'm a nice guy, I'm like, "That's okay. You know, Steven will come around. Someday he'll learn to share with me too. Or if he doesn't, that's okay. He's a good guy, and I like to give him half my rabbit," that I caught. So, they, they, they, they're... In economist terms, they're suckers a lot. They give a lot more than they get. But as far as winning in the world, everybody wants to be with them.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      Yeah, so-

    4. SB

      ... be like?

    5. BH

      S- the different... The, the factors that matter for women are different for men, because men are fertile throughout their whole lives and it's so easy to be fertile. You're, you, you're making 100 million sperm a day or whatever that number is. They're tiny little cells. You can just do it even if you're old and desiccated. Fertility's crazy hard for a woman. You need to be, um, under the age of 40 basically. Once our ancestral females hit 40, they almost never 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,

  13. 26:10 – 27:22

    Is Attraction an Evolutionary or Social Construct?

    1. BH

      you know, nine months where if you're not getting enough food, it's hard to feed that fetus. So, for women, they need fat on their bodies, which was hard in our ancestral world. That meant they're well-fed. 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.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      It's... Well, it's always both, right? You know, humans are, are wildly malleable, and you can move things around in crazy ways. You know, what... Look at what, what people found attractive just 50 years ago compared to today. But there's a lot of basics that underlie it. And so for example, if you look at the actual shape of women and their hip-to-waist ratio, whether their bum is big or not big, in the current climate, the hip-to-waist ratio doesn't change. And that's because that hip-to-waist ratio is correlated with fertility. But the size of your bum, not so much. And in fact, when women deposit fats pre-menopause, they deposit them on their thighs and their bum, which is where... Those fats are really good for the baby. They help neural development.

  14. 27:22 – 29:09

    Do Men Care If Women Are Rich?

    1. BH

      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 gonna help feed your growing brain.

    2. SB

      So, there's like a perfect hip-to-weight ratio?

    3. BH

      Yeah, yeah, and it rarely changes. So, there's analyses of like every Playboy bunny from 1950 to whene- I don't know if Playboy even exists anymore, but f- fr- and, and they always had the exact same ratio even though the actual weight of the model would've changed dramatically. We... They went from pretty heavy in Marilyn Monroe's day to really, really skinny for a while, and then back to heavier again.

    4. SB

      Do men typically care if a woman's rich from an evolutionary perspective? Does it matter?

    5. BH

      In, in principle, it doesn't matter much. I mean, th- remember, but there's ph- there's... Your phenotype, your, your... You want to be well taken care of. But, but as far as what you're actually attracted to, w- um, women... So, so we call it sexual plasticity that women have evolved to basically be able to find almost any guy attractive because the qualities that are gonna make men successful are often on the inside. Because remember, I told you all men are fertile even when they get really old, so a skinny guy, a fat guy, a strong guy, a weak guy, they're all fertile. You don't have to worry about that. But what you do have to worry about is raising kids is really hard. You want help, so you want somebody who's gonna be successful in hunting. You want somebody who's going to look out for you and your kids. These are the variables that really matter. And, and so women look for that, and that means they need to be able to fall in love with, you know, the Bill Gates of the world who aren't these big macho guys, but can really take care of you. And so women have a lot more of what we call sexual plasticity than men. Men have a particular shape they're looking for and a particular appearance on average because that correlates with fertility. Now, if you then have a choice, oh, here's one who's poor and here's one who's rich, you're gonna go with the one who's rich, right? But if you look at male rock

  15. 29:09 – 31:40

    Evolution and Homosexuality

    1. BH

      stars and, and, and male businessmen, people who are really rich and famous, the, the women that they, um, date and marry go, are entirely across the social class spectrum. Some are super rich. Some are super poor. A, a waitress has a great chance with Mick Jagger, um, and so does some s- high society elite person. But if you turn it 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 status and dominance in men, and men don't care about that as much in women.

    2. SB

      What is the basis for homosexual relationships in evolution?

    3. BH

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

    4. SB

      You're more attractive?

    5. BH

      Yeah. So men who have more gay genes but are still straight have more sexual partners than men who have fewer g- g- gay genes and are also straight. So being a little bit gay is super attractive to women. Being too gay, maybe they're attracted to you, but you don't care anymore because now you're only attracted to men. And so from an evolutionary perspective, it's this balancing act. You wanna give men enough gay genes so that women are attracted to them, but not so many that they don't care about women.

    6. SB

      Oh, okay. Which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction to the idea about testosterone and risk-taking and being brawn and being-

    7. BH

      Well, but n-

    8. SB

      ... masculine.

    9. BH

      ... some gay men are feminine, but some gay men are very masculine, they're hyper-masculine, so there's both types. You can be gay and be wildly masculine or you can be gay and be quite feminine.

    10. SB

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

    11. BH

      Yeah.

    12. SB

      ... what are the features of being a little bit gay?

    13. BH

      We know the genes. Um, this ca- this paper was published in, um,

  16. 31:40 – 34:52

    The Economic Mismatch in Finding a Partner

    1. BH

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

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      Yeah. It's a real problem. And so, you know, we, we talk about, for example, that m- women are underrepresented in some fields, like they're underrepresented in the sciences. And people worry about that a lot, but there's a much, much bigger problem than we're facing and, in fact, I'm not even convinced the other one is a problem and we can come back to that if you'd like, because I, I do think there's reasons for that that might have to do with preferences and not being held out. But setting that issue aside, if we look at, uh, the rates of going to university, my birth cohort, I was born in 1963, is the first year where women attended college/university at equal rates to men in the United States and, and that- those lines crossed and they've never gone back. And so now the, the stat you were talking about is there's basically, uh, the... S- It's 60/40 basically, um, female to male. That means there's three women on campus for every two men. And so in principle that, m- 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 ed- as educated as themselves or more and men are looking for women who are as educated as themselves or less. And so we're creating a problem because women are getting really well-educated and then there's not as many educated men available for them to partner up with. And so what you end up with is lots more people living single, 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 att- going to college, making a lot of money means they can afford to live s- as a single person, which they literally could not do up until 1960. If you're a female in most countries, y- you couldn't have a job really and so you... the way to be an economic success is to marry. Those days are gone. But it does mean that it's harder for women to find partners when they're on average more likely to be educated than men. And we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women, but I suspect that school itself is just... doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls. And so it's harder for

  17. 34:52 – 37:06

    What Tinder Tells Us About Matchmaking

    1. BH

      boys to hold still. It's... Boys are less likely to want to please their teachers. You know, the list is long. It's hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways. And, and uneducated, unpartnered men are the biggest problem in every society. You know, if you've got men with poor prospects who can't find good jobs and who don't have a partner, they're the guys running around with high 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, and you want to be very invested in men being viable partners for women, which means whatever we're doing wrong in schools that's pushing men out, we need to undo.

    2. SB

      If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average, which is what I read in some of the studies that-

    3. BH

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      ... I think it was roughly 70% of women say they want a, a man that has equal or more money than they do.

    5. BH

      Yes.

    6. SB

      Um, there's a mismatch there, isn't there? Because as both become sort of more equalized, if there's still a desire for the, for the man to have more and provide more, there's again, it doesn't... the numbers don't-

    7. BH

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      ... add up.

    9. BH

      It's... The numbers don't match. It's a really unfortunate problem. And so the easiest way to look at that problem is to basically look at Tinder or one of these, um, dating apps and there you can see that basically 20% of the guys on Tinder get 80% of the swipes. What that means is that 80% of the men basically largely get ignored on the app and 20%...... are fawned upon. In contrast, women, about 80% of them are getting swiped by people on a regular basis. They're just not getting swiped by the guys (laughs) that they're interested in. It's set up so that both sexes want the same thing. You know, men look for the same thing in women and women look for the same thing in men, um, and there's just a lot more con- competition among the men to get women. And so, it's a smaller subset of men who our women are interested in.

    10. SB

      Interesting. On an individual level, I guess if you're a man, you really do need to focus on your career if you wanna have a chance of...

    11. BH

      Well, focus on your career is definitely an easy way to do it. But look, not everybody's a career person, and so you have to decide where your best prospects are. And that comes back to, like, why do we have autonomy? Well, we've evolved that because there's lots of ways to skin a cat. And so basically, autonomy means I'm gonna pick my path in life where I think I have the best prospects. Usually, that means career, but

  18. 37:06 – 39:59

    What Are Dating Apps Like for Women?

    1. BH

      there's also ways of being, you know, just a really kind person, the person who's always gonna look out for you, the person who's gonna be great helping with the kids. Lots of men don't meet those criteria, and so that's a, a perfectly successful way. You've 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, 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."

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      Yeah, that's, that's the difference. They're getting bad swipes, meaning they don't like the guys who swipe them. The guys who have no luck are getting no swipes.

    4. SB

      This is true, because actually when I think about a particular friend I was thinking of, I asked to see her Tinder or whatever app it was many years ago, and I was like, "Oh my God. I... Jesus Christ, I wish I had this many swipes."

    5. BH

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      'Cause, uh, as a guy, uh, I mean, when, w- 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.

    7. BH

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      And if I got some, listen, it wasn't-

    9. BH

      You weren't interested.

    10. SB

      ... anything to write home about.

    11. BH

      Yeah.

    12. SB

      It was like, and it was very, very rare. But when I looked at her Tinder that she was complaining about, she had hundreds of men.

    13. BH

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      But she just didn't like any of them.

    15. BH

      Exactly.

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. BH

      That's the difference. And so the thing is that throughout our evolutionary history, men have often been left out of the, out of the mating game entirely. And we know this if we look at the variability on our Y-linked chromosomes. You only inherit Y-linked genes from your father, because women don't have a Y chromosome. For, for women, you can look at mitochondrial DNA, which you only inherit from your mother, and if you look at the mitochondrial DNA and the variability there, you can see that we have about twice as many moms as dads. Yeah. And that's weird, 'cause it takes two to tango, but what it means is that some of the dads were getting lots of women and s- lots of, lots of potential dads were getting no women at all. And so in our ancestral past, there's lots of men who nobody swiped right. They couldn't find a partner. And 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.

    18. SB

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

    19. BH

      Well, they may... Uh, you could say lower their standards, but you could also say, you know, you're not liking him for all the wrong reasons. You know, yeah, so what he doesn't drive a Ferrari, and so what he doesn't look super cool or whatever, but he could be a great guy. The problem is apps aren't well-suited for that.

  19. 39:59 – 43:19

    What Is Pornography Doing to Us?

    1. BH

      And so, you know, when, when we were all just people who met in person, you would realize, "Oh, this guy's the salt of the earth. He'd be a perfect partner for me for my life. I know he's kind of ugly or he's kind of whatever, but who cares, right? He's gonna be a perfect life partner." Very hard to see that on an app.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      Well, I, I wanna look attractive and I wanna look healthy and I wanna look young.

    4. SB

      Okay.

    5. BH

      But keeping in mind, I could be none of the above and I'm still gonna get swiped (laughs) , right?

    6. SB

      How does pornography confound all of this stuff?

    7. BH

      Yeah, pornography's a funny business. It, it allows us to vicariously engage in sex without actually doing it, right? And so we evolved in a world where there was no pornography. We certainly evolved in a world where there's masturbation, um, but we evolved in a world that didn't have pornography, and so it's kind of hijacking our system a little bit. It feels like you're having sex when, you know, you're on OnlyFans or whatever those, uh, sites are that interest you. It, it mimics a lot of the features. And so, you know, I've 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 in social media. Why go through the snow and go across town and maybe not know anybody at the party, et cetera? And, and I think what's happened is that as we get lazy and we, we, we start putting our life online, you know, our social life, we even start to put more of, you know, our sexual life online. And so there's even evid- I... The evidence is very tentative as to what it might mean, but recently, in the United States at least, if you look at young single people, their actual sexual behavior is going down. They're having less sex than they were 20 years ago. And if you'd asked me 20 years ago when Tinder, whenever those things got invented, I would say, "Oh, sex is gonna go way up. This is gonna be, you know, this is gonna be the best thing for hooking up ever." In actual fact, although it went up for a little bit, it went back down. And instead what's going up is pornography watching. And so it... Maybe the pornography's getting better tailored to what people want. Maybe people are just getting lazy and they, instead of going to the party and maybe meeting somebody who they would have sex with, they just...... pick it up and watch it on TV? I don't know.

    8. SB

      'cause 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.

    9. BH

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      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.

    11. BH

      Yeah.

    12. SB

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

    13. BH

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

    14. SB

      And it looks like pornography consumption has almost, like, tripled-

    15. BH

      Yeah.

    16. SB

      ... in that t- time period.

  20. 43:19 – 46:24

    Are Populations Declining?

    1. SB

    2. BH

      It, it's, it's always, it's been accessible over that in time, entire time period, but basically, what, what I think those data, I, I, I refer to this, I know it's a v- absurd acronym, I refer to this as SMILSHing.

    3. SB

      SMILSHing.

    4. BH

      That's social media induced laziness in our social habits. I know it's a, it'll never catch on, but I think that what they're doing is SMILSHing. They, they, they've got friends who are at a party. It's across town and it's kind of a pain to get there. It'll cost you subway and everything else, and you're not sure if you're gonna have fun when you get there. And so you go, "Screw it. I'm not gonna go." Now, what you didn't know is that would've, that's the party where you would've met that person who you would've ended up hooking up with, either as short-term or long-term partner. But you didn't go, and instead what you did is you stay at home and so there's a decent chance you watched porn. And so we're, we're letting these fake substitutes take over in place of our actual real socializing, which I think is hugely problematic.

    5. SB

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

    6. BH

      Yeah, we are.

    7. SB

      ... and some people are concerned about population collapse.

    8. BH

      Well, I, I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now, we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction, right? You can just use, be on the pill, use a condom, use whatever you want, which our ancestors couldn't do and other animals can't do. And so the amount of sex that we have is completely uncorrelated with how many kids we decide to have. And so if you set pornography aside, fertility rates are going way down and I think that's simply because we never evolved to want children. We evolved to want sex. And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex and then you've also evolved to be nurturing to whatever child comes along from that, bingo, you're a mom or a dad. But if you evolve to want kids, you go back a little ways, you would have no idea how to achieve that. You wouldn't have known what to do.

    9. SB

      We evolved to h- wanna have sex, and in a world without the pill, that automatically resulted in children.

    10. BH

      Equals kids. And then all you have to do is evolve to be nurturing to them 'cause they're so dependent in humans when they're born.

    11. SB

      Which is what happens when you had your baby recently.

    12. BH

      Yeah. Yeah.

    13. SB

      You have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child.

    14. BH

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

    15. SB

      Ah, okay.

    16. BH

      You can't help yourself.

    17. SB

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

    18. BH

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

  21. 46:24 – 46:56

    Are We at Risk of Extinction Due to Lack of Sex?

    1. BH

      the consequence is that in every single country that's industrialized and rich, the reproduction, the reproductive rate of females is less than 2.1 per female, which is what you need in order to maintain population at the current level. And so every single country on Earth is shrinking, uh, but for immigration. And so right now, you know, we have all these fights about immigration. It's gonna be, I promise you, in 50 years, that argument's gonna be the exact opposite. How can we convince people of Country X to come into our country 'cause we're gonna shrink and disappear? There's a, a lot of countries that are gonna be literally half their

  22. 46:56 – 49:11

    How Bill Would Encourage People to Have Children Again

    1. BH

      size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast.

    2. SB

      Really?

    3. BH

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

    4. SB

      Because the women are having less than that 2.1?

    5. BH

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

    6. SB

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

    7. BH

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

    8. SB

      Ah.

    9. BH

      Right?

    10. SB

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

    11. BH

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

    12. SB

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

    13. BH

      Well, the, the main thing is that because humans didn't evolve to want children, you can't just play on their, "Do you really want children?" 'Cause the answer is often no. Um, what you wanna do is you wanna make having kids to be as much of a plus as it possibly can be and as little of a minus. So if you look at kids, they're really interesting. There's w- some wonderful work by Danny Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize, and he, he asks you in the moment, "What are you doing?" and how much fun it is.... is it? And what he finds is no surprise, if you're having sex when you got the request and now you probably waited till you were done before you answered your beeper, but you, you said, "Oh, I'm having a great time." And as it goes w- TV was actually in second place. Watching TV's good fun in the moment. And then a little way down the list is like doing the dishes, doing the laundry. If you a- if you're with your kids, you're on average about doing the dishes or doing the laundry, that's how much fun your kids are. But if you ask people what gives you great satisfaction in life, what makes you happy, nobody says, "I'm crazy happy because I watched a ton of TV." That's just not an answer anyone's ever given, or, "Because I folded my laundry really well." What they do say though is, "Oh, my kids give me enormous joy." So how could it be both? How could it be that

  23. 49:11 – 53:27

    Robots Raising Our Kids

    1. BH

      on average your kids are as much fun as the laundry, but when you look back on your life, they're, they're the key thing? And what we think the answer is, is that they provide these peak moments that laundry simply doesn't, right? No matter how well you fold your clothes, it's not exciting, but your kids have these amazing moments in their lives that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again. And so, and for good evolutionary reasons where you get your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them. And so kids end up being a human, huge source of satisfaction. So what that means is if you wanna get people to start having kids again, try to get rid of the drudge 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. You 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 gonna stop me from getting up and feeding them and changing their nappy.

    2. SB

      But aren't we gonna raise loads of messed up kids in such a world because-

    3. BH

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

    4. SB

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

    5. BH

      Negative. (laughs)

    6. SB

      ... negative. And she was horrified. She goes, "Can you imagine a world where a robot would, you, the kid would turn to the robot and call it daddy and mommy?" 'Cause the kid wouldn't really know the difference. And I sat here with a child psychotherapist, psychologist, who said that in those first three years it's so critical for the primary caregiver to be around, and that the man and the woman cause the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender.

    7. BH

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      So you, you almost can't g- and the w- the robot's not gonna-

    9. BH

      All that's true, but here's the thing, currently we outsource them to nannies for a big chunk of the day. If you're wealthy enough, people often hire a night nurse, somebody who comes in and helps out in the, eh, at nighttime too, if you've got the cash. And so when I hire those people, I can't be positive they're gonna be kind to my children. I can't be positive they know every possible disease my kid could get and, and all the rest. I would rather hire this incredible robot who's super cuddly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what f- the, the, the pitch of that cry is. You could put whatever scent on them you want, you could make it mom or dad, you 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, in what's called alloparenting all the time. And what that meant was the men are out hunting, probably gone for most of the day, the females need to form these tight bonds with each other because it's hard work with a bunch of little kids and predators who want to eat them. You need eyes on them all the time, but you also need to be digging up tubers of whatever variety you're trying to eat, and so they relied on each other. Parenting is not a solo operation with just mom and dad, it's this, I know it's cliche but it takes a village kind of thing. So why not hire out this robot who is like perfect in every way? You know they're not gonna abuse your kid. They're, you know they're never gonna do anything wrong, they're always gonna be kind. When your kid asks for the 10 millionth time, "But why?" They're gonna keep giving them answers. They don't mind, right? Why not have the perfect parent when you're not there?

    10. SB

      Because, um, the parent releases certain hormones in the child by, by their touch, the oxytocin.

    11. BH

      Yeah.

    12. SB

      Robots don't release oxytocin.

    13. BH

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

    14. SB

      I just, uh, it's a, it's a strange future to think about because it feels also like a slippery slope where we might

  24. 53:27 – 56:33

    Marriage and Happiness

    1. SB

      start having kids and then giving them completely robot parents.

    2. BH

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

    3. SB

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

    4. BH

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

    5. SB

      Do you believe that?

    6. BH

      Yes.

    7. SB

      Do you believe that's gonna be-

    8. BH

      That's gonna happen.

    9. SB

      So if I ... You've just had a baby, right?

    10. BH

      Yeah.

    11. SB

      How o-

    12. BH

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

    13. SB

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

    14. BH

      I, I love the nannies I have, but every single one of them when you start is a risk. You don't know, right? These are just, they've been hired by the daycare, they're probably really good, but if you had the perfect robot nanny, well then you would never worry at all.

    15. SB

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

    16. BH

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

    17. SB

      Okay.

    18. BH

      Couples who are gonna stay together, their happiest year is the marriage year itself, not the year before it. So, that's a good sign. If you're happier when you're walking down the aisle than you were last year, this marriage has a much better chance of lasting. Now, if you look at those marriages, the ones who last, they go in three directions. You've got the really bad ones where they stay together for economic or religious or whatever reasons. They're miserable. They don't like each other and they're way less happy than before they met. Thankfully, they're relatively rare. If we look at the ones who are average, they're a little bit happier. These are among couples who stay together. They're a little bit happier for their first few years of their marriage than they were before they met, and then they slowly settle down to about where they were. So, it's- it's not plus or minus. It's basically where they were. If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years. So, their... the year of their marriage was happier than before they met and the next year's happier still and it just keeps working its way up. And so, when you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy. It's a z- it's a zero. So, how could it be that marriage is a zero? And I think the answer

  25. 56:33 – 57:28

    Ads

    1. BH

      to that question is that people who don't marry, it's not the fact that they didn't marry that's the problem. It's that they're overweighting autonomy, and overweighting it is probably what they're doing everywhere else in their life as well. So, when they're making decisions about what to do with their friends, about whether they live with somebody else or live alone, all those decisions, they keep going with autonomy rather than going with connection. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna 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.

    2. SB

      So, the... it's the individualism-

    3. BH

      Yes.

    4. SB

      ... that's causing their unhappiness-

    5. BH

      That's going on.

    6. SB

      ... that's causing them not to marry?

    7. BH

      Yep. That's what I believe.

    8. SB

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

    9. BH

      Yes. And- and so it's just a different kind of person who's doing that. In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce, we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced were also less happy before they even met their partner. So-

    10. SB

      Oh, really?

    11. BH

      ... on average, happier people tend to stay together in marriages.

  26. 57:28 – 59:57

    Is There an Evolutionary Basis for ADHD and Neurodivergence?

    1. BH

      We don't know why that is, but my guess is that happier people just tend to be happier about everything and so they're less like... they- they find ways to make their marriage work even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.

    2. SB

      At my company, Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company, Flight Group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that's a new show, a product, or a project. It's why I launched the conversation cards. I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon. And I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world. With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely. No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we're giving you a trial, which is just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to shopify.com/bartlett. That's shopify.com/bartlett, or find the link in the description below. And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence? Is there an evolutionary basis for why- why that occurs?

    3. BH

      Yes. So, the... um, neurodivergence is a complicated one. The, um... it seems to be much more common now. When we look at the epidemiological data, it seems to be associated with high-toxin environments. So, if you live in- in areas where there's lots of pollutants, people are more likely to be neurodivergent. But I think neurodivergence has always been with us. I think it's just become more common. Now, why would it become more common with these various toxins? I don't know. My guess is that the brain is a social organism, the human brain is. We've evolved... connection is our most important need and requires all sorts of different parts to work right, which means that- that if you break the brain in any way, you're gonna break your sociality 'cause it's so implicated in so many different areas. And if these, um, toxins that we're exposed to cause any damage to the brain, I think you're particularly likely to end up with social problems because the brain is a social organ. And so that's why I think autism rates are ri- 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 it... they've always played a really important role in humanity. And the reason for that is that, you know, humans are a super innovative species, but if you ask yourself or your friends, "How often have you ever invented anything?" the answer's almost always never. And-

  27. 59:57 – 1:00:17

    Will There Be Less Neurodivergence With AI Development?

    1. BH

      and that's because we solve our problems socially. When something goes wrong, we go to our friends, we talk to them, we try to work together to figure out our problems, and we've always been that way. Hunter-gatherers do that. And neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they're less socially connected. And so w-... probably most of the great inventions of humanity were created by neurodivergent people. Now, those of us who are

  28. 1:00:17 – 1:01:19

    Will We Merge With Technology?

    1. BH

      not neurodivergent immediately go, "Wow, I'd like one of those." And so we're really good at spreading that by virtue of our social networks, but I think we've always relied on neurodivergent people to create the amazing innovations that, the technical things that, that make our lives so easy. Now ADHD is a, a different ball of wax. We know it's highly heritable. We know a lot of the genes are. We also suspect that it didn't, it wasn't even a noticeable thing in a hunter-gatherer, right? You know, what ancestor ever tried to get you to pay attention to something that you were bored with? But if you have ADHD, it's crazy hard to pay attention when you're bored, but it's perfectly easy to pay attention when you're interested. You just don't have the kind of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that allows you to force yourself to attend to things. And for our ancestors, you're loaded with energy, you're probably a great hunter. And so it's, it's a modern problem, the you-have-to-sit-still-and-listen problem, which our ancestors were never asked to do.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      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

  29. 1:01:19 – 1:02:53

    What Is the Evolutionary Basis for Depression and Anxiety?

    1. BH

      ask your phone what the answer is. And so why... Tons of the schooling that we go through is superfluous in this world where AI can do everything that we can do.

    2. SB

      Do you think we're gonna merge with, um, technology more deeply?

    3. BH

      It's very possible. You could easily imagine, like, if there's a feature about yourself that you don't like, I suspect it'll be hard to genetically engineer it. And the reason I think it would be hard to genetically engineer it is that most of our genes have more than one effect, and most of our traits are caused by more than one gene. So, you can't just tweak one gene and become the person you wanted to be. It's gonna have other effects that you may not want. So the, the upshot is that why not, you know, have a little mind module that you, either attaches to your head or goes inside it even, or... You know, we already are treating people with these... There's some kinds of depression that just are untreatable. And for some of those people, they literally insert an electrode into their brain and stimulate this particular region, and, and the people who experience this say it's like, "My world was in black and white, and suddenly it became in color." Well, why not have that for knowledge that you can access? You know, I could spend my huge amounts of time studying Greek, or I could shove (laughs) 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.

    4. SB

      You mentioned depression, that... What, what's the evolutionary basis for humans getting depressed and anxious? 'Cause presumably, that's, that's not productive for our survival.

    5. BH

      No, it's not. So remember that, that with every generation, with sexual reproduction, you're gonna 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

  30. 1:02:53 – 1:05:56

    Religion and Its Effect on Happiness

    1. BH

      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 'cause you're not gonna have offspring. Not a moral judgment, just a judgment based on what evolution cares about. Well, with anxiety, that makes perfect sense, right? So animals that can't envision the future have no anxiety. All they feel is fear in the moment, "Oops, there's a lion. I'd better run as fast as I possibly can." And then as soon as they've run away, "Oh, no lion. Life is c- everything's copacetic. I'll go back to eating grass and being happy." Whereas if I'm a human running away from a lion, I'd be, "Oh my God, that was really scary. I wonder when there's another lion coming." Now, the biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future. Evolution doesn't give any gifts without costs. You pay a price for every one of them. And the capacity to simulate the future also comes with the realization that is, first of all, it's not always gonna be good, and second of all, it's always gonna end badly. Once you understand life, you understand, "I'm gonna die someday." And the other animals don't have that realization. They can't project themselves forward in time the way we can.

    2. SB

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

    3. BH

      If you didn't think about the future, you would not be anxious. If you could get yourself to be mindful in the moment and set aside the future, your anxiety will disappear, 'cause it's all future-based.

    4. SB

      Oh, is there, something that really, um, I found quite interesting as well in your book, I think it was in chapter nine, where you talk about religion.

    5. BH

      Mm-hmm.

    6. SB

      And the fact that people that are associated with religious par- participation are typically more happy than those who are not.

    7. BH

      Yeah. The effect is remarkable. And so you can look at it in two different ways. One of is just the effect of believing, right? So lots of people worry about a life without meaning. You know, people of religion have solved that problem because religion gives your life meaning. There is a point. If you believe any of the religions that exist, you're part of this never-ending chain, et cetera. And it doesn't... They can be wildly different religions, but they all hold this notion that there's, there's something before and something after. Now, you can look at the effect of that by saying, all right, let's select only people who never go to church. So we won't, we'll take the sociality part out of it, and then we'll look at people who pray versus people who don't pray. And we can do this with these national samples, um, where we say, let's look at the General Social Survey. And in fact, anybody who wants to can get online and look at the General Social Survey and answer any question that's available in that. It's a remarkably, a remarkable publicly-available dataset, which I used repeatedly in this book. And praying actually makes you happier if you, 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 wanna 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 than if you never go to church at all. Now, I don't think going to church would've made our ancestors any happier at all. Why does it make us happier? Well, the way to answer

  31. 1:05:56 – 1:06:58

    Why Do We Want to Believe in Something?

    1. BH

      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 'cause they count on each other all the time. They borrow things from each other. They rely on each other to keep the boat afloat. And so they have, they get together, poor people get together with their neighbors much more often than rich people, right?Rich people don't do that. So what that means is that if now, if you think that God wants you to go to church, if, because remember, we're talking about religion now, then you're gonna go to church even if you don't necessarily want to see the people there, even if you don't necessarily feel a need for them, but you're gonna be forced into socializing. So it's sort of like this experiment that's being played on you, whether you re- believe in or not. Whether, if you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on high. It's not because you necessarily want to socialize, and we see that the effects of going to church are, m- they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor, because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit already of that socializa- of socializing, whereas rich

  32. 1:06:58 – 1:10:07

    What Is the Meaning of Life?

    1. BH

      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.

    2. SB

      So rich people need to go to church?

    3. BH

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

    4. SB

      Why do we want religion? Because it's quite clear that there's something within us that wants to believe.

    5. BH

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      And you see this, I think we're, I think we're seeing a little bit at the moment where we're seeing a return to religious belief in some degree. I know that it's, you know, and it might not just be the religious belief that we think of. It might be spirituality or horoscopes or whatever it, you know, it might be.

Episode duration: 1:58:11

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