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

Summary

Podcast Summary: Title: Behavioural Psychologist: We're Not Having Enough Sex! Fat Makes You Attractive & The Poorer You Are The Friendlier You Are! Host: The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Guest: Dr. William von Hippel Release Date: February 17, 2025

In this compelling episode of The Diary Of A CEO, host Stephen Bartlett engages in an enlightening conversation with Dr. William von Hippel, a world-renowned evolutionary psychologist. Together, they delve into the intricate dynamics of modern society, exploring the decline in social connections, the paradoxes of wealth and happiness, the evolving landscape of human relationships, and the profound implications of technology on our future.

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1. The Decline of Social Connection in Modern Society

Stephen Bartlett opens the discussion by posing a thought-provoking question: "Do you believe the robots are going to raise our kids? Because it feels like a slippery slope." This sets the stage for an exploration of how technological advancements might further isolate humans.

Dr. von Hippel responds by highlighting the alarming trend of decreasing fertility rates and social isolation:

“Fertility rates are going way down, and a lot of countries are going to be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast.” (00:03)

He underscores the challenges of modern parenting and the potential relief that technology, such as robot nannies, could offer in alleviating these societal pressures.

2. Evolutionary Psychology Insights

Dr. von Hippel elaborates on his life's work, emphasizing the importance of understanding human behavior through an evolutionary lens:

“Happiness is one of the tools that evolution uses to guide us in the direction that it wants us to go.” (03:25)

He explains how our ancestors' instincts continue to influence our present-day actions, often in subtle ways that impact our happiness and social structures.

3. The Marriage and Happiness Connection

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the correlation between marriage and happiness. Dr. von Hippel presents data showing divergent outcomes for those who stay married versus those who divorce:

“Couples who get divorced, they actually, their happiest year was the year before their marriage... Couples who are going to stay together, their happiest year is the marriage year itself.” (54:52)

This suggests that the act of marrying itself can be a predictor of sustained happiness, while those who divorce often begin to decline in happiness even before tying the knot.

4. Wealth, Autonomy, and Happiness

The discussion navigates the complex relationship between wealth and happiness. While urban dwellers in the United States are about 25% wealthier than their rural counterparts, they report lower levels of happiness:

“People in the country are happier because cities are all about I want to do what I want.” (01:15)

Dr. von Hippel points out that the autonomy afforded by city living often comes at the expense of meaningful social connections, a balance that was more naturally maintained in ancestral societies.

5. Modern Dating and Evolutionary Influences

Stephen shares his personal experience with YouTube milestones and transitions into the topic of modern relationships. Dr. von Hippel discusses how evolutionary traits influence attraction and the challenges posed by dating apps:

“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.” (30:09)

He explains that traits like risk-taking and humor serve as honest signals of quality in potential partners, rooted deeply in our evolutionary history.

6. Technology and Future Parenting

A forward-looking segment addresses the potential for robots to become primary caregivers:

“If you could decide to learn or not learn. Now, why would you even learn your multiplication tables if you don't need to?” (60:16)

Dr. von Hippel envisions a future where robot nannies could alleviate the burdens of parenting, ensuring consistent and high-quality care. However, he also acknowledges the emotional and psychological complexities this shift could entail.

7. The Role of Religion and Social Structures

Religion emerges as a critical factor in fostering happiness through social connections:

“Anybody who wants to can get online and look at the general social survey... anybody who prays regularly is like twice as likely to be happy as those who don't.” (65:48)

Dr. von Hippel argues that religious participation provides both a sense of meaning and a robust social network, which are essential for human happiness.

8. Neurodivergence and Evolution

The conversation touches on the increasing prevalence of neurodivergent individuals and their role in society:

“Humans are super innovative species... neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they are less socially connected.” (57:33)

Dr. von Hippel suggests that while neurodivergence presents challenges, it has historically been a catalyst for innovation, underscoring the importance of diverse cognitive profiles in human progress.

9. Practical Advice for Enhancing Happiness

Towards the end of the episode, Dr. von Hippel offers actionable strategies for boosting personal happiness, grounded in his evolutionary insights:

1. Prioritize Family Connections: Engaging regularly with family, whether biologically related or chosen, strengthens social bonds.
2. Foster Social Connections: Actively seek opportunities to connect with others, sacrificing some autonomy to enhance relationships.
3. Adopt a Pet: Pets can provide companionship and reduce feelings of loneliness.
4. Engage in Group Activities: Participating in shared activities can build stronger, more meaningful connections.
5. Commit to Lifestyle Goals with Support: Pursuing personal goals alongside others increases the likelihood of success and satisfaction.

10. Conclusion: Balancing Autonomy and Connection

The episode culminates in a thoughtful reflection on the necessity of balancing personal autonomy with social connections:

“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.” (93:16)

Dr. von Hippel emphasizes that finding this balance is crucial for overcoming modern societal challenges and achieving lasting happiness.

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This episode of The Diary Of A CEO offers profound insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of human behavior and happiness. By bridging evolutionary psychology with contemporary societal trends, Dr. William von Hippel provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of the forces shaping our lives today and practical strategies to navigate them effectively.

Transcript

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

Interesting. Dr. William von Hippel is the world renowned evolutionary psychologist who has spent decades studying and finding the answers to how.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Instincts that once helped our ancestors survive.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Still drive us today, often in ways we don't even realize as a species. What are we getting wrong?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, young people are having less sex than they were 20 years ago. Marriage are 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 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 want to do what I want. And the problem is that we can't introduce social connection into our life willy nilly or we won't keep it up.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So what do we do about that?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Two things.

[Stephen Bartlett]

One, and then what does evolution tell us about how to attract the opposite.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

What is evolution?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 in the next generation. And something about this other guy caused him not to have any. Maybe. And so whatever there is about me that's heritable will be well represented in the next generation. And about him, poor guy, even if he's wonderful, those traits are gone. And so evolution just works with whatever's there. And the things that make you a success, either because they're just useful in that environment, or they're a new mutation that turns out to have great value. They become overrepresented in the gene pool. And so evolution can create things that are species typical. All of our species have that. We all have two eyes. 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

There's lots of tiny answers to that question, but they don't necessarily link together very well. So people say, you've probably heard, oh, express gratitude. That'll make you happy. If you express gratitude. Why? Why should that make you happy? If there's a good reason for it, then it makes sense that we should do it and it should have some kind of 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 my colleague Robert Chervis calls a phenotypic indulgence, which means it mimics something that was good for our ancestors. So, for example, you know, video games are pretty novel, right? They may mimic things that were super important for our ancestors and give us the same endorphin rush or whatever, even though they're not actually necessarily good for us anymore. Junk food is the same. It's loaded with fat, salt, sugar. Those are the kinds of things that our ancestors sought all the time. We don't need them anymore, but they were super important back then, and so it makes us happy when we eat those things.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

And by autonomy, you mean the sort of individualism where I Don't need anybody anymore. It's about me. It's about my gratification, what I want now versus others and a community, a tribe.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's right. And it doesn't even need to feel like a big thing. It's just, let's say you and I are buddies and we're gonna go to a movie. And you say, ah, 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. The movie's over. We just go our own ways. And so it could be trivial little things, but it's across our lives, we're continually setting aside our connections to do what we want.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

So there's a number of them. You can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone. We've got good data in the States, but the picture's the same in every industrialized country. In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone. Now it's a 1 in 100. Now it's 1 in 7. So, you know, here we are 170 years later, 175 years later, and it used to be crazy rare, and now it's one in seven is pretty darn common. If you look in the 1970s when I was a kid, about 30% of people saw their neighbors got together with their neighbors, not visually seeing them, but got together with their neighbors at least a few times a week. And only one in five pretty much never saw their neighbors at all. Now that's completely reversed. Now only 1 in 5 are seeing their neighbors regularly. Used to be 1 in 3, and now 1 in 3 never get together with their neighbors at all. So we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways. Even married couples are spending less time together. It's weird, we don't understand what they're doing. But what I suspect is happening is that let's say that you both want to exercise and she kind of likes to jog, and you kind of like to lift weights. We used to sort of do those together. Off for a jog and then a little weightlifting. But now it's 10 zillion options. You go to your gym and she goes to hers and you just don't see each other as much as you used to. So across our lives, we're spending far more time alone. And if you look at marriage and cohabitation in some parts of the world, they haven't changed at all. But in the wealthy parts, United States, Western Europe, they're steadily going down. So it's not just, well, people aren't getting married because they're living together outside of marriage. If you lump all those together, they're steadily going down over the last 50 years.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And why does that matter?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, the question is, first, on the one hand, it's not a problem at all. You vote with your feet, do what you want, of course. Right. But on the other hand, what if it's making you unhappy? What if you think you're doing this because it's going to make you happy, but in fact, you're wrong, and you keep making decisions over and over again that make you increasingly less happy? And that's what I think is happening here. I think every one of those decisions is an error.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

So the best example in my mind is if you look at hunter gatherers, and so there's a team that went to the Hadza, people who live outside would live Kenya and Tanzania. They're as close as we know to what our ancestors would look like. And in my mind, they're perfect because they're also where it all happened. The Hadza still lived where humanity evolved. So of course, it could have been different a quarter million years ago, but it could have been exactly like they live today. And so when you look at the Hadza, this particular team asks them, over the last week, have you been happy? Sometimes happy and sometimes sad. Sometimes 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 bury almost half their children. They live a life where they've got no savings whatsoever, they've got nothing in the bank. They don't know what tomorrow's 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 rel each other like an insurance policy, and yet they look a lot happier than we are. Now, we can see those same stats in different modern contexts, but in my mind, that's the stat that blows me away.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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, my second book is. So I'll tell you how I got there. How's that? So I'm visiting a friend of mine, also named Steven, and he struck it rich, and he invites me over. 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. Cooks over there, maids 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 is it even possible that a person could have so much and not just feel happy about it every day? And I have to admit, I felt this sense of superiority. I thought to myself, if I were crazy rich like you were, I'd be happy every day. I would appreciate this lifestyle that I had earned rather than just taking it for granted. So then fast forward a few years. This is a decade or so ago. Fast forward a few years, and I'm reading Frank Marlowe's wonderful book on the Hadza, and I'm reading about their lives and how content they are, and I'm like, holy cow. I'm just like my friend Steve compared to them. I'm a multimillionaire. When my kids get sick, I'm off to the doctor immediately. I don't have this horrible life where I bury my own children. I have savings I don't have to worry about. Tomorrow I get up and get something out of the fridge. I'm comfortable when it's hot. I'm comfortable when it's cold. The list goes on. 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 A hundred years, 100 years ago, a quarter of the children died by 150 years ago. A quarter of the children died by the time they turned five. You know, you got the flu or you got, you know, typhus. There was a zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young. Women died in childbirth at rates way skyrocket compared to today. So it's not just looking back at hunt togethers, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Look, I think it's multi causal. Whenever you get a big effect like that, like if you take those data seriously that I told you about the Hadza, they're basically twice as happy as we are now. That's such a big effect. It has to be multi causal. Has to be a lot going on there. And of course these changes happen over generations. They don't happen overnight. If they happen overnight, I think it'd be super obvious to us what had gone wrong. But I think what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before about autonomy and connection. And so let's take city living as for example. Remember earlier I said that cities are about 5,000 years old. So human beings have been moving to cities for 5,000 years. By 1960, you had one people out of every three living in cities in the world. And by 2007 was the year we crossed over 50% of humans. 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 100 or 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 where they live in cities, communities over a quarter million, or in the country, communities less than 2,500 people, they're happier in the country than they are in the city, which is a remarkable fact. Remarkable fact in part because they're also poorer in the country. People who live in cities in the United States, for example, are about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country. Now some of that gets burned on expensive city living, but far from all of it. And so you're literally poorer in the country, but happier.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's right.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Which is remarkable because there's so many opportunities in cities. People have been voting with their feet for over 100 years and arguably for 5,000 years moving to cities, and yet it's making them less happy. And so, in my mind, this is another symptom of the same exact problem we've been talking about, which is, cities are all about autonomy. Cities are about opportunity. If I go to city, I can get any kind of education I want, I can have any kind of job that I want. And so people are drawn to cities, and in fact, I'll make more money. The data are very clear. But I'm going to pay a price. And people don't even realize the price they're paying.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. Bizarrely, we become more isolated because in the city, you've got a thousand people right next to you. Right. You're cheek by jowl with your neighbor. You're in an apartment building, and there's somebody on your left, somebody on your right, somebody above you, somebody below you. But what are your chances 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 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 you don't like that person, there's somebody else in your building you ought to be good buddies with. But we're just not. Whereas in the country, we connect with each other similarly. If you say, how satisfied are you with your friendships? People are more satisfied with their friendships in the country than they are in the city.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. Which is amazing. Right. And so the thing is that the problem is that if you're rich, you don't need your neighbors. You know, if I'm out of coffee beans, I want to borrow some, I can just drone them in or whatever. I can call Instacart or whatever, whoever your favorite deliveries 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 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So money does make you happy.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

It's a funny thing. So money makes you a lot happier in real time. So if you start to make more money, you get happier. And the more important money is to you, the bigger that effect is. And it keeps going well past where we thought it did. We used to think it ceilinged at around $100,000 a year. It doesn't. Past 600,000 a year. Money still makes you happier. It's remarkable. It makes a difference. But there's this thing known as the Easterland paradox, and that is that as society gets richer, people get no happier. So if you look at the United States going back to around 1940, people earned about a third what they earn today in real terms. So we're three times richer than we used to be. And we've been measuring happiness in the United states since the 1940s on representative samples. So we know that that holds true for the whole. We know what the country looks like. It hasn't moved an inch. So real terms, money gone way up. Happiness. Exactly. Flat.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, the problem is this. There's a couple of things. First, we can come back to the big issue, which I think is this balance. That's the underlying issue. Why I think hunter gatherers are happier than we are is this balance that they maintain between autonomy and connection, which we can return to. But in direct answer to your question, part of the problem with humans Is that we're this wonderful species in many ways, that we can avoid the zero sum game that is life. And by zero sum gain, 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've come back and I got nothing and you were successful, I'll beg to you, and if we're friends, you'll regurgitate a little bit of the blood from me. Now, if you weren't successful, even if we're best mates, there's nothing you can do for me. Now, if you think about the way humans give things to each other, it's sometimes goods, but we're this different animal. We're this cognitive animal. We're an animal where information has enormous value. And information, I can give it to you without losing any of it. My. And so we create these relationships with each other where we don't even need to worry about reciprocation. We can do things for each other all the time. They're crazy easy to do because they don't require me to give you anything. I still have the information. I told you so. We already have this advantage over the animal kingdom, but we're still animals. And one of the ways that we're still animals is that we're still zero sum in the sense of, well, what about our status? Who's going to get picked for the mating relationships? Who's going to get picked to be on the teams? And there it always comes down to, well, who's at the top of the local heap and who's at the bottom of the local heap. And so in our ancestral communities, that would be a very small group of hunter gatherers. All I had to do was be valuable or better than you guys in something. In our world today, it's awfully hard to be better than everybody. And money is one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to do it because everyone can see it. And so even though money doesn't make us happy, as the whole country's three times richer, we're no Happier. If I'm richer than you, I am happier than you, because that's one way that I can be higher than in status. And so then maybe I can steal your girlfriend. Or maybe the guys who are in your group, who I really want to be in my group are going to say, hey, Bill's cooler than Steven. I'm going with him. And so status matters. It's a process of sexual selection whereby both sexes are always trying to get the best partner they can of the opposite sex. And so they're competing with each other. Men compete with men to try to have women choose them. Women compete with women to try to have men choose them. And that's a zero sum status game.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And what does evolution tell us about 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?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. So what you want are what we call honest signals of quality. And the thing is that we've all evolved to look through fake signals. And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren't. They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating. We all, we have human ways of doing that too. But in humans, bizarrely, well, in all animals, actually, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is 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 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 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, all right, I'm not gonna try to crowd in on Bill 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, a family, taking risks is foolish. You want to take risks to get in the mating game. But you don't want to keep taking risks once you've got people depending on you.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's a great example. Humor is an honest signal of quality. Now, it's funny because you could think, well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes. But if you think of your friends who are funny, you don't sit down and go, hey, did I tell you 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 important for men and women. That's how you succeed. But as humans, we also care an enormous amount about kindness. And if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind, that person's 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Do nice guys finish last in the evolutionary world?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 making 100 million sperm a day, or whatever that number is. They're tiny little cells. You can just do it even if you're old and desiccated. Fertility is crazy hard for a woman. You need to be under the age of 40. Basically. Once our ancestral females hit 40, they almost never 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, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, it's always both, right? You know, humans are wildly malleable, but. And you can move things around in crazy ways. You know, 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 the bum is big or not big, in the current climate, the hip to Waist ratio doesn't change. And that's because that hip to waist ratio is correlated with fertility. But the size of your bum, not so much. And in fact, when women deposit fats pre menopause, they deposit them on their thighs and their bum, which is where those fats are really good for the baby. They help neural development. You know, your brain is loaded with fat. When you're in utero, you need your mother to have lots of fat, ideally on her bum and thighs, because that's gonna help feed your growing brain.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So there's like a perfect hip to weight ratio.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 had the exact same ratio, even though the actual weight of the mod. They went from pretty heavy in Marilyn Monroe's day to really, really skinny for a while, and then back to heavier again.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Do men typically care if a woman's rich? From an evolutionary perspective, does it matter?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

In principle, it doesn't matter much. I mean, remember? But there's your phenotype. You want to be well taken care of. But as far as what you're actually attracted to women. 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 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 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 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 are entirely across the social class spectrum. Some are super rich, some are super poor. A waitress has a great chance with Mick Jagger, and so does some high society elite person. But if you turn it on the other way, a waiter doesn't have much chance with this rich female or 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

What is the basis for homosexual relationships in evolution?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

You're more attractive.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

One of the things that kind of dovetails into this is some of the stats that I was reading about education these days. This one stat here says that 58% of college graduates in the most recent cohorts were women with 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 going to get a bit of a mismatch in terms of women looking for those men who are up and to the right economically, but there's fewer men there.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah, it's a real problem. And so, you know, we, we talk about, for example, that women are underrepresented in some fields, like they're underrepresented in the sciences, and people worry about that a lot. But there's a much, much bigger problem than we're facing. And in fact, I'm not even convinced the other one is a problem. And we can come back to that if you'd like, because I do think there's reasons for that that might have to do with preferences and not being held out. But setting that issue aside, if we look at the rates of going to university, my birth cohort, I was born in 1963, is the first year where women attended college, university at equal rates to men in the United States. And those lines crossed and they'd never gone back. And so now the stat you were talking about is there's basically, 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. And so what you end up with is lots more people living single. Now, remember we talked about that before, Couples are less likely to get together. On the one hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing, because women going to college, making a lot of money means they can afford to live as a single person, which they literally could not do up until 1960. If you're a female in most countries, you couldn't have a job, really. And so the way to be an economic success is to marry. Those days are gone. But it does mean that it's harder for women to find partners when they're, on average, more likely to be educated than men. And we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women. But I suspect that school itself just doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls. And so it's harder for boys to hold still. Boys are less likely to want to please their teachers. Now, the list is long. It's hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways. And uneducated, unpartnered men are the biggest problem in every society. You know, if you've got men with poor prospects who can't find good jobs and who don't have a partner, they're the guys running around with high tea who are committing all the crimes. So as a society, you want to be very invested in men partnering up with women because that tames them. And you want to be very invested in men being viable partners for women, which means whatever we're doing wrong in schools that's pushing men out, we need to undo.

[Stephen Bartlett]

If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average, which is what I read in some of the studies that 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 become sort of more equalized, if there's still a desire for the man to have more and provide more, there's again, it doesn't. The numbers don't.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Focusing on your career is definitely an easy way to do it. But look, not everybody's a career person. And so you have to decide where your best prospects are. And that comes back to, like, why do we have autonomy? Well, we've evolved that because there's lots of ways to skin a cat. And so basically, autonomy means I'm going to pick my path in life where I think I have the best prospects. Usually that means career, but there's also ways of being just a really kind person, the person who's always going to look out for you, the person who's going to be great helping with the kids. Lots of men don't meet those criteria. And so that's a perfectly successful way. You just got to find you're not going to get swiped right on Tinder. That's not going to be your way of finding, if that's you, if you're the kind, reliable, but you don't have a great career, you don't have those other things, then the apps aren't the right place for you. But people who meet you are going to really like you and women are going to want to be with you because they're going to realize, oh, they may not want to be with you when they're younger, but as they get a little older and they've been through a few of the guys who everybody else is chasing, they're going to say, boy, I could really use somebody like you.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Speaking of the apps and Swipe and we talked about how men on those apps, if they're not in that sort of top echelon of demonstrating authentic quality on the surface, so, like rich, muscly, whatever, then their chances 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. They're only getting bad swipes.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Cause as a guy, I mean, I 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.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And if I got some, listen, it wasn't anything to write home about. 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, but she just didn't like any of them.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Exactly. That's the difference. And so the thing is that throughout our evolutionary history, men have often been left 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 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, 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. They couldn't find a partner. And there's lots of men who women were very interested in. They probably had multiple partners. And so we still live in that exact same world.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

Okay.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

But keeping in mind I could be none of the above and I'm still gonna get swiped right.

[Stephen Bartlett]

How does pornography confound all of this stuff?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah, pornography is a funny business. It allows us to vicariously engage in sex without actually doing it right. And so we evolved in a world where there was no porn. 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're on OnlyFans or whatever those sites are that interest you. It mimics a lot of the features. And so 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 on 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. But recently in the United States at least, if you look at young single people, their actual sexual behavior is going down. They're having less sex than they were 20 years ago. And if you'd asked me 20 years ago, when Tinder, whenever those things got invented, I would say, oh, sex is going to go way up. This is going to be, you know, this is going to be the best thing for hooking up ever. In actual fact, although it went up for a little bit, it Went back down. And instead of what's going up is pornography watching. And so maybe the pornography is getting better tailored to what people want. 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, because I'm thinking about.

[Stephen Bartlett]

This graph that was in your book which shows how much sex we're having and how much porn we're watching.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And very simply, it shows that we're having less sex and we're watching more porn. And it's quite a considerable drop. Between 2006 and 2012, it said a percentage of 18 to 25 year olds who had had sex or watched porn within the last year.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

And it looks like pornography consumption is almost like tripled.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

In that time period.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

It's been accessible over that entire time period. But basically what I think those data, I refer to this, I know it's an absurd acronym. I refer to this as smilching. It's 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. We're at a party, it's across town. It's kind of a pain to get there. It'll cost you subway and everything else. And you're not sure if you're gonna have fun when you get there. And so you go, screw it, I'm not gonna go. Now what you didn't know is that's the party where you would have met that person who you would've end 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 letting these fake substitutes take over in place of our actual real socializing, which I think is hugely problematic.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

They'Re born, which is what happens when you had your baby recently. You have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

We've intervened, and that intervention is what's potentially gonna lead there to be no more humans. So if you look at the. The current population of the globe, it's meant to peak somewhere between, say, 2070 and 2090, probably around 8 billion and some change. And then it 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 because there's not that many humans, or we've moved to the country and e commute or whatever. Maybe suddenly we'll want to have six or eight of them again because our robot's the one who gets up in the middle of the night with them and we don't have to. But right now, if you think about having kids, it's hard yards. And so lots and lots of people say, well, I just don't want to do that. And the consequence is that in every single country that's industrialized and rich, the reproductive rate of females is less than 2.1 per female, which is what you need in order to maintain population at the current level. And so every single country on earth is shrinking but for immigration. And so right now, you know, we have all these fights about immigration. It's going to be. I promise you, in 50 years, that argument's going to be the exact opposite. How can we convince people of 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Really?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

Women are having less than that. 2.1.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, the main thing is that because humans didn't evolve to want children, you can't just play on their. Don't you really want children? Because the answer 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. So if you look at kids, they're really interesting. There's some wonderful work by Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize. And he asks you in the moment, what are you doing and how much fun it is? Is it? And what he finds is no surprise if you're having sex. When you got the request and now, you probably waited. You were done before you answered your beeper, but you said, oh, I'm having a great time. And as it goes, TV was actually in second place. Watching TV is good fun in the moment. And then a little way down the list is like doing dishes, doing the laundry. If you're with your kids, you're on average about doing the dishes or doing the laundry. That's how much fun your kids are. But if you ask people what gives you great satisfaction in life, what makes you happy? Nobody says, I'm crazy happy because I've watched a ton of tv. That's just not an answer anyone's ever given or because I folded my laundry really well. What they do say, though, is, oh, my kids give me enormous joy. So how could it be both? How could it be that on average, your kids are as much fun as the laundry, but when you look back on your life, they're the key thing. And what we think the answer is is that they provide these peak moments that laundry simply doesn't. Right. No matter how well you fold your clothes, it's not exciting. But your kids have these amazing moments in their lives that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again and for good evolutionary reasons, where you get your whole body, mind and body and identity caught up in them. And so kids end up being a huge source of satisfaction. So what that means is, if you want to get people to start having kids again, try to get rid of the drudge side of it. You know, look at daycare is crazy hard. It's crazy expensive. Women want to be able to go back to work. The list is really long about how hard it is in so many different ways. You just remove those barriers, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

But aren't we gonna raise loads of messed up kids in such a wild place?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

A robot has infinite patience. If you design it nice and soft and fluffy, it's gonna be more cuddly than we are. The kids might like the robots more than they like us.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Last night, I was 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. 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. Cause I knew her. It was a joke. I knew her reaction would be pretty negative. 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 and that the man and the woman caused the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So you almost can't the robots.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, 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 gonna be kind to my children. I can't be positive they know every possible disease my kid could get and all the rest. I would rather hire this incredible robot who's super cuddly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what the pitch of that cry is. You can put whatever scent on them you want. You can make it mom or dad. You can make it even smell like you if you want. Why not have that person help you out? You know, our ancestors engaged 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 rely 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. 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?

[Stephen Bartlett]

Because the parent releases certain hormones in the child by their touch. The oxytocin. Robots don't release oxytocin.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Not 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 outsource them, and we all do. We have since time began, we've relied on others to help take care of our kids. Why not make it the perfect nanny rather than the that'll have to do nanny? Cause it's all I can afford.

[Stephen Bartlett]

It's a strange feature to think about because it feels also like a slippery slope where we might start having kids and then giving them completely robot parents.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

Do you believe that? Do you believe that's gonna be.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's gonna happen?

[Stephen Bartlett]

So if you've just had a baby. Right?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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. If 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 ten years later, on average, you're going to be exactly as you are now. Now, how does that average work out? Well, in lots of different directions, because I'm putting everybody together now. We've got these amazing data sets from Germany, for example, where we track people for so many years that we 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. Okay, couples who are going to stay together, their happiest year is the marriage year itself, not the year before it. So that's a good sign. If you're happier when you're walking down the aisle than you were last year, this marriage has a much better chance of lasting. Now, if you look at those marriages, the ones who last, they go in three directions. You've got the really bad ones where they stay together for economic or religious or whatever reasons. They're miserable, they don't like each other, and they're way less happy than before they met. Thankfully, they're relatively rare. If we look at the ones who are average, they're a little bit happier. These are among couples who stay together, they're a little bit happier for the first few years of their marriage than they were before they met. And then they slowly settle down to about where they were. So it's not plus or minus, it's basically where they were. If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years. So the year of Their marriage was happier than before they met, and the next year is happier still. And it just keeps working its way up. And so when you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy. It's a zero. So how could it be that marriage is a zero? And I think the answer to that question is that people who don't marry, it's not the fact that they didn't marry that's the problem. It's that they're overweighting autonomy. And overweighting it is probably what they're doing everywhere else in their life as well. So when they're making decisions about what to do with their friends, about whether they live with somebody else or live alone, all those decisions, they keep going with autonomy rather than going with connection. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be unhappy, but it makes. On average, it means that they're about half as likely to be very happy as somebody who would go and get married.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So it's the individualism that's causing their unhappiness that's causing them not to marry.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's what I believe.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yes. So the neurodivergence is a complicated one. It seems to be much more common now when we look at the epidemiological data, it seems to be associated with high toxin environments. So if you live in areas where there's lots of pollutants, people are more likely to be neurodivergent. But I think neurodivergence has always been with us. I think it's just become more common. Now. Why would it become more common with these various toxins? I don't know. My guess is that the brain is a social organism. The human brain is. We've evolved. Connection is our most important need. And it requires all sorts of different parts to work right. Which means that if you break the brain in any way, you're going to break your sociality because it's so implicated in so many different areas. And if these toxins that we're exposed to cause any damage to the brain, I think you're particularly likely to end up with social problems because the brain is a social organ. And so that's why I think autism rates are rising. But of course, I don't know. I'm only guessing based on the data I've seen. Now, in the case of neurodivergence, I think they've always played a really important role in humanity. And the reason for that is that humans are super innovative species. But if you ask yourself or your friends, how often have you ever invented anything? The answer is almost always never. And that's because we solve our problems socially. When something goes wrong, we go to our friends, we talk to them, we try to work together to figure out our problems. And we've always been that way. Hunter gatherers do that. And neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they are less socially connected. And so probably most of the great inventions of humanity were created by neurodivergent people. Now those of us who are not neurodivergent immediately go, wow, I'd like one of those. And so we're really good at spreading that by virtue of our social networks. But I think we've always relied on neurodivergent people to create the amazing innovations that the technical things 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 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're adhd, it's crazy hard to pay attention when you're bored, but it's perfectly easy to pay attention when you're interested. You just don't have the kind of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex 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 a modern problem that you have to sit still and listen, problem which our ancestors were never asked to do.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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'll 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 going to have other effects that you may not want. So the upshot is that why not have a little mind module that either attaches to your head or goes inside it, even, or. We already are treating people with this. There's some kinds of depression that just are untreatable. And for some of those people, they literally insert an electrode into their brain and stimulate this particular region. And the people who experience it 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 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

You mentioned depression there. What's the evolutionary basis for humans getting depressed and anxious? Because presumably that's not productive for us.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

No, it's not. So remember that with every generation with 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 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, 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, I'm like, oh, my God, that was really scary. I wonder when there's another lion coming now. The biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future. Evolution doesn't give any gifts without cost. You pay a price for every one of them. And the capacity to simulate the future also comes with the realization that, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

The effect is remarkable. And so you can look at it in two different ways. One 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 their 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 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'll take the sociality part out of it. And then we'll look at people who pray versus people who don't pray. And we can do this with these national samples where we say, let's look at the general social survey. And in fact, anybody who wants to can get online and look at the general social survey and answer any question that's available in that it's a remarkable publicly available data set, which I used repeatedly in this book. And praying actually makes you happier among people who don't go to church than not praying. And in my mind, 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't do it quite as cleanly. Now you want people who go to church and you want to look at the effect of going to church. And there the data are remarkable. The effect of going to church is huge. It's like you're like twice as likely to be happy if you go to church regularly than if you never go to church at all. Now, I don't think going to church would have made our ancestors any happier at all. Why does it make us happier? Well, the way to answer that question is to then dive a little deeper into the data. And so what I did is I separated people by whether they're poor or whether they're rich. Now remember earlier we talked about how the fact that poor people live in these tight interdependent networks because they count on each other all the time, they borrow things from each other, they rely on each other to keep the boat afloat. And so they have. They get together. Poor people get together with their neighbors much more often than rich people. Right? Rich people don't do that. So what that means is that if. Now if you think that God wants you to go to church because remember, we're Talking about religion now, then you're going to go to church even if you don't necessarily want to see the people there, even if you don't necessarily feel a need for them, but you're going to be forced into socializing. So it's sort of like this experiment that's being played on you. Whether you believe in or not. If you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on high. It's not because you necessarily want to socialize. And we see that the effects of going to church are they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit already of that socializing, whereas rich people have separated themselves from others. And so those rich people who go to church several times a week are likely twice as likely to be very happy as rich people who never go to church at all.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So rich people need to go to church.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

What do you think the meaning of life is?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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. And so if connection is the most important thing I can do as a human, and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other because that's facilitating connection.

[Stephen Bartlett]

You believe life is devoid of meaning.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

People won't like that.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Maybe we don't know.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

It's usually a little of both, but we don't know with certainty. There's not enough good data on this problem because lots of people search for meaning. And in the end you can also decide that, well, there isn't meaning. And I'm a small cog in a big machine. And I'm a pointless small cog in a big machine, but it's all I've got. And so Richard Dawkins in 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, and almost nobody gets to live. Right. You think of the 100 million sperm that I'm making every day. They don't go anywhere. They never get a chance. But I made three humans. I did my part. I only did the small part, but I 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. So you look at this. One of my favorite birds in Australia is the kookaburra. Kookaburras lay two eggs and then they wait a little bit and then they lay a third. And Australia is very drought prone. So some seasons are good and some are bad. If the season's good, that third egg has a decent Chance of making it to adulthood because there's so much food being brought back to the nest. If it's not good, that third egg never makes it. And why doesn't it make it? Well, the two older siblings peck it to death, and they've got an adaptation on their beak, a little hook that allows them to kill their little sibling more easily. So they've literally evolved to kill their little sibling when times are tough. What have we evolved to do when times are tough? To band even closer together and to work together and to cooperate. That's what got us to where we are. And it was all sorts of interesting things that got us there. It was cognitive things like division of labor. You know, kookaburras 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, too, but mostly what we do is cooperate, work together, have division of labor, and we go from being this, like, you know, when we first left the trees must have been really rough. Everybody was eating us for dinner. And now it's. The shoe is on the other foot. We're the apex predator on this planet.

[Stephen Bartlett]

But doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we band together in tough times? Yes, but we band together to attack the others.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah, we do. It's not. Look, there's never something that's done just for the niceness of it. Evolution doesn't care about nice at all. What's really nice, though, is that our solution, our way of becoming deadly. And every animal that survives becomes deadly or avoids being eaten in another way. Now, it turns out that once you band together, and even by Homo erectus, our ancestors 1 and 2 million years ago, when they band together, they are already the deadliest force on this planet. We've got good evidence that they're eating huge animals like mammoths. So it's your ability to have division of labor to plan, to say, all right, you chase that mammoth, and we'll put this trap here. You know, do things that other animals simply can't. They can't do that. They can't make a scenario in their mind and then enact it. And so it was that mental ability that turned us into these apex predators. But it doesn't take long as an apex predator who can work together with division of labor to realize, all right, there's only one predator left on this planet who has a chance of killing me, and that's other humans. Or if, you know, if it's pre human, other, homo erect.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And you're seeing that with, like, America versus China and everything, America versus Mexico and whatever it might be in nationalism.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. So remember I referred to us earlier as being tribal, and I talked about how chimpanzees are 600 times more aggressive within the group, but equally aggressive between. So we've evolved in a world to be totally tribal, to just look out for ourselves because that other group might kill us. They may be nice, we may get along, but they might be vicious. And so we need to be prepared to be vicious in return. Thankfully, though, we didn't evolve where we know where they're vicious. We evolved where we just don't know. It may be good and it may be bad. So we give out groups the benefit of the doubt, but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them.

[Stephen Bartlett]

I was sat here yesterday with the wonderful gentleman who I'm a big fan of, called Robert Greene, who wrote the book about power, 48 Laws of Power. What have you learned about power as it relates to our evolutionary past and who ends up getting power in the world?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

And what about body language in this as it relates to power? Is there anything that we can learn from humans and other animals about what powerful body languages or unpowerful or powerless body language looks like?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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, no, 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. But in humans, almost all humans, almost all the time, power doesn't emanate from our physical presence, but from what we're capable of. In some societies, you know, America comes to mind. You demonstrate your power by showing your wealth, by showing what you can do, by being very in your face. I'm great at this. We're number one kind of thing. Many cultures don't like that. 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 themself down is the really powerful because they can afford to say, no, no, I'm nobody, you don't want to bother with me. And the second they say that in those cultures, like, ooh, this person runs the show around here. And so in a lot of cultures, the richest person is the one who dresses the most modestly. The most powerful person is because that's what the culture understands. But it's always, you have to follow the cultural rules. In a 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 can always see that somebody who is relaxed and looks comfortable is probably a relatively high powered person in that circumstance.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

And maybe it's a counter signal at that point. So maybe if he had a Louis Vuitton bag, he would actually be lowering himself to the status class.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

You've studied the Hadza tribe. You mention them repeatedly, only indirectly.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

I've never been there. Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Well, what is the most interesting thing you've learned about them as it relates to happiness and purpose and Living a good life that you might pass to all of us that are listening.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, autonomy was really rare for our 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. But they also need autonomy to choose where 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 gatherer, 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 you have 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, I've got to compromise or persuade you with my what I want to do. Which means that opportunities for true autonomy were really rare for our ancestors. The problem is now we don't need connection anymore. We can survive just fine without it. So we have opportunities for autonomy all the time. Cities are an example. They're full of opportunities for autonomy, and humans are moving there in droves. Every time that we get a choice between connection and autonomy, I fear that we're choosing autonomy. It's a form of miswanting, because for our ancestors, they rarely could get that choice where they could really pick either. And when they had it, they wanted to jump on autonomy. So now I think that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than to connect, and that's steadily making us unhappy. And our hunter gatherer friends who still exist on this earth don't do that. That's the one thing that you can learn from the Hadza. They're constantly thinking about each other and then thinking about, well, what do I want? And finding a compromise that's much closer to balance.

[Stephen Bartlett]

In that regard, men need women more than women need men. As it relates to connection.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yes and no. So we all need to connect, but I believe women need it more than men, largely for the reasons we were talking about earlier, where women need to get more help parenting, so they need to form these tight bonds so people will help them. But of course, men need connection, too, and women provide men with a lot of the closest connection that they have.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, also, I mean, think about how slovenly 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

It turns out. So their best. Well, the person I regard as their premier ethnographer is Frank Marlow. He would live with the Hadza and write about them. And he estimated from his life experience with them that about 20% of them stay married for life. So one in five, 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. It didn't matter in the same way to our hunter gatherer ancestors. When that's no longer nice, they moved out and chose somebody else. And so it's low. They're serial monogamists. They don't, you know, Hadza tend not to have more than one wife at a time. It happens, but it's rare.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Does our evolutionary path suggest that humans are serial monogamous?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yes, I believe humans evolved to be serial monogamous who cheat a little bit. Now, why do I think we also cheat a little bit? Because if we're purely monogamous, men would not need testicles as large as they are. A gorilla is not monogamous. It has a harem of several females, but it doesn't. No other male gorilla can approach those females because he will physically attack them. And so he knows that he's the only one having sex with them. And he has very small testicles. And in fact, they're inside his body. They're not at risk of damage, a chimpanzee who. Their mating system is. Lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females. So who knows who's father has these enormous testicles because part of his job is to wash out. I know it doesn't sound nice. Wash out the guy who was there before him, so maybe his sperm will be the one that inseminates her.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Wash out? What do you mean by wash out?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

So cheating might be a natural part of your behavior.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Cheating? Well, natural doesn't mean good. I'm not saying it's a good thing. Right. But I'm saying it's what our ancestors did. So my guess is when they could get away with it. You know, there they are in the cave, there's this couple who aren't a couple, but nobody else is around. Both of them have reasons to do it. Males want to cheat because it gives them a greater chance of having offspring they otherwise wouldn't have. Females can't have an infinite number of kids like males can because they could have sex with 20 guys. They're still only going to have one kid.

[Stephen Bartlett]

The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us. Is it the orangutan? Which monkey is it?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Can chimps talk?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

No.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So if they. If I'm a chimp and I leave the tree for a while and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife, I can't then find out that he did that.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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, language, it's really good for saying, you know, there's something behind you, it'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 your wife. How do they communicate that? They're terrible at communicating. That kind of things that are separated by space or by time, they just simply can't communicate. And so. But they can't think about it either. And so our Homo erectus is the first animal on this planet who could think about separate. Separate things separate by space and time. And so my guess is our complex communication began with them.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

He doesn't know why you're upset. That happened an hour ago. He doesn't know what the problem is.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

We know from psychology that if you want to punish an animal for pooing, which is effective, if you do, you shouldn't rub their 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 punch them. An hour later, they go, I don't know what you're talking about.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. Because he now knows that when you find a poo in the house, he gets in trouble. When you find a torn up furniture, he gets in trouble. He knows that that's an association. Dogs are really, really good about learning associations. And so all that, he doesn't, you know, when he tears it up, first of all, he has poor self control because it's a dog. But second of all, he can't think about, oh, in the future, Steven's gonna come home and he's gonna be pissed. But now when you do come home and he's like looking over the torn couch, he's like, uh, oh, I'm in trouble. And so he knows Falwell was coming.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Okay. So he doesn't actually know that it was that I didn't want him to tear up the couch or whatever. But he does know that when the couch is torn up and I come home, that I'm gonna be like, fuck, I know the couch.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. And you're gonna yell at him. And he also knows that if he does in front of you, you'll yell at. And if he Poops in front of you, you'll yell at him. So he knows all those things, but he can't think about the future. So take an animal way smarter than a dog, a monkey, or even a chimp. Let's get way smarter. Chimps can't plan for tomorrow the way a human can. So if you feed a chimp or a monkey or any of these animals as much food as they want, but only one meal a day, they don't like that because they like to eat several meals a day, just like we do. But they'll never go, I'm going to stash some of my food because I'm going to get hungry at 5pm today because I'm only fed at 2. It never occurs to them day after day after day to stash it. When they're full, they'll literally throw it at each other. Because they don't. They can't think. They can't think about a world that has unfelt needs. All they can think about is the world where their needs are the same as they are right now. And because we can project our mind into the future, we know there's gonna be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs. I'll be hungry again, I'll be cold, I'll be whatever.

[Stephen Bartlett]

But some animals store food, don't they?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

Cause 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 only ever lived with me. And I wondered, the first time I got a bone, like from the shop and I gave it to him, he, like, played with it a little bit, but then he picked it up and buried it in the couch.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Like, and then I'd give him another bone and he picks it up and buries it on the couch. And then I end up like, lifting up the couch and there's all these bones buried in there. I'm like, how?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

That's an evolved behavior that he doesn't understand the purpose of, but he knows he wants to do. And so let me give you an example from another animal system where we've studied it really closely. So meerkats. Do you know meerkats? Those cute little things like.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Oh yeah, Timon.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

I think in the, from the movies, meerkats 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. And then the baby eats the scorpion once it's weaned from milk. Because of course they're mammals. When the babies get a little bit bigger, they break the stinger off and throw the scorpion to it alive so the baby can practice killing the scorpion. And then when the baby's bigger still, it's almost ready to go out on its own. They throw at a live scorpion. I. You kill it and eat it. Cause it's gotta learn how to do that. Like, it seems rough, but it's gotta learn that if you play the sounds of a little baby to the mother or whoever's bringing the food, cause it's not always mothers, it'll kill the scorpion and throw it in there. Even if who it's throwing into are juveniles who could kill it themselves. And worse yet, if you have babies and you play juvenile sounds, it'll throw the live scorpion to the baby who's gonna kill the baby. Because all it knows is when I hear that sound, I do X to the scorpion. Your dog is doing the same thing. 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

As you guys know, WHOOP is one of my show sponsors. It's also a company that I have invested in and it's one that you guys ask me about a lot. The biggest question I get asked is why I use WHOOP over other wearable technology options. And there is a bunch of reasons, but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial features. Its non invasive nature. When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to WHOOP because it doesn't have a screen. And Will Ahmed, the CEO who came on this podcast, told me the reason that there's no screen. Because screens equal distraction. So when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym, my WHOOP doesn't demand my attention. It's there in the background, constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them. If you've been thinking about joining Whoops. You can head to join.whoop.com CEO and try Whoop for 30 days risk free and zero commitment. That's join.whoop.com CEO. Let me know how you get on. I've invested more than a million pounds into this company, Perfect Ted, and they're also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using Matcha as my dominant energy source and that's where Perfect TED comes in. They have the Matcha powders, they have the Matcha drinks, they have the pods. And all of this keeps me focused throughout a very, very long recording day, no matter what's going on. And their team is obsessed with quality, which is why they source their ceremonial grade Matcha from Japan. So when people say to me that they don't like the taste of Matcha, I'm guessing that they haven't tried Perfect Ted. 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 match at places like Blank street or Joe and the Juice. But now you can make it yourself at home. So give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like Matcha. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you 40% off our matcha if you try it today. Head to Perfectted.com and use code DIARY40 at checkout or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland and Barra or in the Netherlands at Albert Hein. 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 than I think anybody I've ever met. So I'm so curious to know if there's just anything else that someone like me should be aware of from all the work you've done in studying evolution, any study, any story that was particularly pivotal for you and your thinking that shaped you that we haven't yet talked about.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

We've talked a fair bit about how money doesn't make you as happy as you think it would. But it does help. It does help make you happy. And we've talked about how important, you know, money is a proxy for state. It's how important that was in our ancestral society. But you have to remember that our ancestral societies were very small. And so it was feasible that I could be the best at something in our group. I could be the richest. I could be the best arrow maker, the best storyteller. You name it, there's something I've got a shot at. Nobody can be the best at anything anymore. You can't even be the richest. I mean, tomorrow. Elon Musk made some amount this year that's, like, so astronomical it's hard to even imagine. And so 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 status game. It's partially about buying a nicer car and a nicer house. And those things actually tend not to make us happy. But interestingly, spending our money on doing things tends to make us much happier, which is surprising because it feels like spending money on activities is kind of wasteful. I always felt like when I was young and broke that if I had money, it was hedonistic and wasteful to spend it skiing, whereas it was sensible to spend it on a new couch, because I need a couch, and then I'll have that couch for a very long time, whereas the ski day is over in a day. But it turns out that. That if you have disposable income, it makes you a lot happier when you spend it on things to do rather than things to have. And we don't know exactly why that is yet, but I suspect that the reason is the things to have are a status game. And that status game is impossible to win, right? Because there's just too many humans on the planet. And I'm gonna open up my Instagram tomorrow and find that somebody else has a better car or whatever it is that I just bought, and now mine looks kind of dumpy. Whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself. It becomes this memory that you think back on and that you're happy when you think about it, and especially if you do it with friends. And so the advice I would give is 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So what Are the. If I had to force you, I don't like doing this, but. But if I had to force you to give me a summary of the top five things that are most correlated to my happiness, in your opinion, are most likely to increase my probability of living a happy filled life, you have to give me five. Okay, what are those five things?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Families first. Okay, we evolved in families. Not just small families, but extended families. And you may not get along with your family and then you want to find a proxy family or you want to create one of your own. So I'm not telling you you need to get along with that jerk of an uncle of yours or your hopeless parents or whatever. But I'm saying spend time with your family and if it's not the family you want, trade them in for a new one. But we evolved to have the close confines, regular contact, constant contact with family. And so if you can't do it in person because they're far away or the financial means, whatever, you just do it every day on the phone anyway. Find a reason to chat regularly with family. Ideally, eat with family. Eating was a key moment for ancestors. They got together around the fire. If there was a successful hunt, they're cooking up their meal together and they're eating it together. This bad habit of a lot of families to just watch TV together. And there's nothing wrong with tv, but you should also talk together because we evolved to be storytellers, we evolved to share stories with each other. They're super important for us. So trust me when I say those momentary desires to do your own thing will pale in, in comparison to the long term benefits of continually getting together and these rituals of eating together and having conversation together. It's hugely important.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Okay, number two.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 a list of things that your friends are doing, you can't always do what your friends are doing. But if you can get yourself to sacrifice what you really preferred 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 re establish some of that connection. And the reason I say this is when we look at married couples, even they're spending less time together. When we look at friends, they're spending less time together. I think we need to go back.

[Stephen Bartlett]

To this world when I think about doing that. I'm just gonna be completely honest.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

No, no. When I think. Yeah. So I'm just trying to put myself in the head of the person that's hearing that. And a lot of entrepreneurs in my audience that are very busy building their startup, 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. So that's requiring them to give so much time and energy to, like, separate themselves from the crowd. So when they hear that they need to spend more time with their partner, many of them will be thinking, but then my business will fail.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

What's the cost?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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, I say pay that loneliness price when you're young. Don't pay it every single day. Please go out with your friends on Friday night and talk with your fellow entrepreneurs and do things that still allow you to be connected so you're not suicidal by the time you get there. But I totally get that autonomy push. It's what makes us a success.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 fray, try not to let them disappear, and then you can rebuild them. When you now have Got there. But the key is you got to get there. You have to set yourself an answer in advance. And here's the reason I say that. I have found myself waiting for a bus longer than it would have taken me to walk. And so once I do that a few times, I realize, oh, the bus schedule's erratic, I can do the walking, I'm going to wait X minutes and then I'm going to walk. Our problem is that we keep setting new bar for ourselves if we don't make that plan in advance. Oh, I'll just give it another minute. Oh, I'll just give it another minute. Or I'll just push this business for another year. I'll just push it for another year. And you can find yourself doing it forever. You may not succeed. You may have a miserable life where all you did was work and you kept pushing it for another year 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 give it without making any money? And therefore I lost. And you should set those two things in advance because once you're in it, I promise you, you're going to move the bar.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Number three.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yes. If you're this hard driving entrepreneur who's putting that aside, I'm dead serious when I say get a dog, a cat, whatever your preferred animal is. And the data show that having a pet actually makes people quite happy. And I very mindfully did it when I was a brand new assistant professor. You know, in this American system, I'm gonna either get tenured and promoted after seven years or I'm gonna get fired. So I knew that I was a work machine for seven years. Everything else was gonna take second place, but my dog wouldn't care.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Dogs are amazing. And maybe one day as you were talking, I was thinking, maybe people are gonna get robots someday. And that's a sad thing to do. But just like a robot generally to be their friend, which is quite grim. Number four.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 is Bill's intuition, is that we can always be doing something. There's a 10 zillion actually very good shows on TV. And I suspect that what we are giving up when doing that is, is random chitchat with friends. Now, when I used to walk by construction sites 20 years ago, you'd see all these guys eating their lunch together and just shooting the shit, right? Just having a good time. When I walk by construction sites today during lunch, I see most of the guys on their phone, not even talking to the guy right next to them. 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

And number five, last but not least.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

I would say, and this is gonna sound a little bit redundant, but we all have lifestyle goals that we pursue, and they could be getting more fit. They could be learning a foreign language, they could be learning to paint. They could be anything like that. The data show very clearly. You're way more likely to achieve those lifestyle goals if you commit to doing them with somebody else, because they'll push you and you'll push them. People join GY every year that they attend five times and never go back. And so you want to, 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

And what is it you're doing at woop?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

I have the coolest job in the world, so I work as part of the performance science team. And what we're tasked to do is just look at all the data that WHOOP collects and ask the question, how can we do it better? What are things that people are doing that really help them? Let them know how much it's helping them. What are people things that people are doing that maybe aren't helping them? Let them know that it's not helping. And more so, 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 previously on the show. And so I get this really cool job where we just dive into our data all the time to try to answer these fundamental questions.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

So these aren't published data yet. And so what that means the caveat on them is that we could be wrong. Right. I could be telling you stuff that I'm going to send it to a journal and they're going to laugh in my face and saying, you're forgetting the Fosdick effect. That'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 WOOB is that exercise amplifies other behaviors. And so if I do something that's good for me, even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, and I exercise that day, it's better for me if I do something that's bad for me, and even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, it's worse for me on a day that I exercise.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Give me an example.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. So if I drink, we know that alcohol, every drink, every alcoholic drink that I have raises my resting heart rate by, I think it's about a beat, beat and a half, if I remember right. And lowers my HRV by like, three points if I remember right. I could be getting those numbers a little bit off, but it's that kind of magnitude. And every drink just. It's this linear effect up to at least 10 drinks. We see that in our data with thousands and thousands of people. If you have those drinks on days that you're basically sedentary, you did almost nothing. Their effect is smaller than if you have those drinks on days where you exercised.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So I could exercise in the morning, then I drink. And the impact of the drink is worse because I exercise.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Because you exercise. 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

So drink and don't exercise.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Exactly. On days that you're gonna misbehave. And it's probably not just alcohol. That's just one of the ones I've analyzed. On days that you're gonna misbehave, be relatively sedentary. Now, the thing is, it also works the other way. So if you sometimes wear blue light blocking glasses late in the evening, or you dim the lights late in the evening, you're conscientious about getting ready for bed. That has a bigger positive effect on your recovery on days that you exercise, even though blue light and exercise have nothing to do with each other, so it doesn't seem to matter what the behavior is, if it's positive, it has a bigger positive effect on days you exercise more. If it's negative, it has a bigger negative effect on days you exercise more, which is super cool. I have no idea why. We'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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

I'm like, breaking all my rules, don't exercise.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 at weight. 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. Even zone one is good. Going for a walk, doing stuff after you eat helps you just feel better.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yes. And what we have is, fortunately, we've got thousands and thousands of people, so big data sets who log alcohol relatively often. They don't drink every day. And I can even show you what the pattern looks like. People don't drink much. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they have a drink or two, you know, Friday more, Saturday and Sunday more, and then go back. But they also exercise at different points across the 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 difference between us? So what I really want to know is what does Stephen look like when he drinks two drinks on days that he also exercises the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual. We want to make it all against what you usually do. And there we see these effects very clearly.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Are there any other cool answers you've discovered in your time at weep?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

You put the whoop on.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. And so we see the exact same thing they see, but it's wildly statistically significant. Our data set, because it's so huge, 20 minutes is long. Now, here's the thing. If men don't need as much sleep as women, why is that the case so recently? Now, this is hot off the press. I can't promise you I'm doing it right, but I believe I am. Our data suggests men sleep more impactfully, more effectively than women. That for every hour of sleep that a man gets, he gets a little more bang for the buck on his recovery than women get. I have no idea why that might be. It could be they have bigger slow waves when they're in slow wave 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's 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah, it's very possible. That could be the mechanism. It could be all about hydration. And so all you gotta 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 you exercise, and every positive thing I've looked at has gotten better. So it may be as simple as something very specific with alcohol and exercise, but it may be there's a broader principle at play. And so somebody out there who's super smart like Trivers, came along and lined up how every animal mating system worked. He says, look, here's how it works. Females make the larger sex cell. They typically then put more effort into it. So males compete for females. And then lo and behold, you see that across the animal kingdom and the rare exceptions where males put more effort, now the females compete for the males. So, you know, somebody's going to come along super smart and they'll hear what I just said and they go, I know what the answer is to that, but I don't know. And the beauty is that when a, when I hear a scientific explanation that nails it, I immediately go, oh, that's it. And I wish I thought of it, but at least I can see that they've got the answer when I didn't.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Well, so we're seeing lots of nice evidence of 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. That 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 and more sleep, more time in REM and slow wave. You add all those things together, it ends up being a lot.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Wow.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Now, the final thing that we find is a lot of people have sleep worries. They worry they won't sleep well. And the downside of that is that if you have sleep worries, what ends up happening is they get produced by your poor sleep. Like, I think, gee, I'm have trouble falling asleep because lo and behold, I did. But then when we analyze the data, we've run these surveys where we ask, what was your worry going into the night and when you woke up in the morning, how did it go and what role did your worries play, et cetera. And when we disentangle it, we see that the worries start to cause their own problems. The worries themselves make it harder to sleep. And so if you could find ways to short circuit those worries again, things like reading in bed, whatever it is to get your mind elsewhere, it's gonna be beneficial.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Coffee, actually, overall is not bad. You don't wanna do it too late in the day. And some people can. I have friends who can drink a coffee at dinner and go right to sleep. So it's not everybody, but some people after 2pm it can be pretty disruptive for some people. And what we'd also advise is when you're eating, try to restrict that to daylight hours. That seems to make a big difference. 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 harder to digest it, and that makes it difficult.

[Stephen Bartlett]

What's the most important thing in your book? The social paradox. When finding what you want means losing what you need. That we haven't talked about that is important for someone who's listening, that wants to improve their life and increase their probability of happiness.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

So the last thing I would say is that we haven't covered is that. All right, so I'm arguing you need to increase your sociality, and I'm arguing that your socialness, you need to be more social, more connected. And I'm arguing that we're too autonomous. But that's a big ask. And I remember reading this article in the New York Times about this guy. He wrote an op ed piece about him. 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 ends it 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. We have so many things that we can do and are meant to be doing that we can't just introduce social and 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 for months, from my perspective, that means two things. One, trying to say, well, whenever I do something alone that I'm doing something I enjoy, like maybe the crossword puzzle or running or whatever your thing is, is there a way to do that with others? Don't, you know, match my connection need with my autonomy Need I want to do that? That's my autonomy speaking. But are there others who want to do it, who I can do it with? So in my case, I love to do the New York Times puzzle. My sister lives in London. So we reconnect in a way that we just weren't doing before because we're both busy, but we're both doing the puzzle anyway, so why not do that? If you have to decide to do something every single time you do it, you just won't do it. You want to surrender control of that decision making process to either your past or to the environment itself. By which I mean in the same way that we say, I'll brush my teeth after breakfast, we don't say, I wonder if I should brush my teeth today. We just know I eat breakfast, then I brush. You 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 it in the easiest way possible, in the way that's most likely to become habitual, and that doesn't actually add more time to their busy day. And it's surprisingly doable.

[Stephen Bartlett]

William, thank you. We 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 gonna come out.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Of left field probably.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Yeah. You're given the chance plus the power to do one thing to save humanity, plus make everyone happy. What would that be?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

If I had one chance to do.

[Stephen Bartlett]

One thing to save humanity?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

However you want.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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 gonna get that there'll be consequences for that behavior. Because I think that the one thing that humanity is 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 their. 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.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

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

[Stephen Bartlett]

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

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Justice, so the cost might be missing the mark. We might as a human population today come up with a consensual decision about what justice is. That a thousand years from now, they look back and they're utterly appalled that that was what we were doing, which.

[Stephen Bartlett]

Is what we look back at exactly 200 years and go. Justice. What the fuck?

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Yeah. What the hell was that?

[Stephen Bartlett]

Thank you so much, William. Thank you for writing an incredible book. Your first book here called the Social Leap, was a smash hit and is an extraordinary book. But this book is exceptional and it's exceptionally timed. I think that has to be said, because where the world is at the moment, it feels like we're drifting to some degree. It feels like we're drifting from the island where our tribe are, and we're getting further and further away from knowing exactly what it is to be human. I think we're feeling the consequences of that. If you look at a lot of the data we're feeling we have the mental health crisis around the world, that 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 course correct it, helps us to understand. It turns the lights on. And as it says on the front, it helps us to understand that there's this important balance between autonomy and connection. And we need both of them. But we need to get the balance correct. And many of us, including myself, know deep inside that maybe we're not getting that balance correct. And this is why this book is so wonderful, because it's confronting in the nicest possible way and in an important way. So I highly recommend everybody give it a read. It's called the Social Paradox. When finding what you want means losing what you need by William Von Hippel. Thank you.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Thanks, Stephen. I really enjoyed chatting with you about it.

[Stephen Bartlett]

I can't wait. I can't wait for people to read it and to send me lots of messages. Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

[Dr. William von Hippel]

Thank you. Totally my pleasure.

[Stephen Bartlett]

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 is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career I've learned just how crucial having the right systems in place is. One which has helped me across many of My Investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system. Through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting, financial management, inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio, as over the last year we've moved out of startup mode and into scale up mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite.com bartlett and free download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's netsuite.com bartlett.