The Sex Psychologist: We're Not Having Enough Sex! Fat Makes You Attractive! Dr Bill Von Hippel

Do you believe robots will raise our kids? It feels like a slippery slope. Well, it's not too far off, and we're not even evolving to want children. Look, fertility rates are plummeting. Many countries will be half their size by 2100 because they're shrinking so fast. The list of challenges in raising a child today is long. So, you want to make having kids as positive as possible. With the perfect robot nanny, you wouldn't worry at all.

Interestingly, Dr. William Von Hipple, a world-renowned evolutionary psychologist, has spent decades studying how instincts that helped our ancestors survive still drive us today, often in ways we don't realize. What are we getting wrong as a species? Young people are having less sex than 20 years ago, marriages are steadily declining, and our lives are better, yet we're not happier. Part of the problem is we constantly choose to do our own thing rather than connect.

Here's the data: In 1850, 1 in 100 Americans lived alone; now it's 1 in 7. In the 1970s, 1 in 3 spent time with their neighbors; now that's completely reversed. Let's dive deeper: 50% of humanity lives in cities. They're about 25% wealthier than those in the country, yet the data shows country dwellers are happier. Cities are all about "I want to do what I want." The problem is we can't introduce social connection willy-nilly; we won't keep it up. So, what do we do? Two things. One, and what does evolution tell us about attracting the opposite sex? You want honest signals of quality. Bizarrely, one of the clearest honest signals for men is...

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Awful. Dr. William Von Hipple, what have you spent the last four decades doing? Oh, mostly in the lab, trying to figure out why humans do what they do. What do you mean by "why we do what we do"? Well, I'm interested in the underlying causes. Why does having a nice dinner with friends make you happy? It seems obvious, but there's a reason. It's different if it's not with friends, or different foods—the list goes on. I look into our evolutionary history: How did we get here? What made our ancestors successful? Things that made them successful are likely to make us happy because happiness is a tool evolution uses to guide us. Evolution has no foresight, but it shapes us. Ancestors who enjoyed successful things had more kids.

What is evolution? It's a process. Not everyone has the same number of kids, and not all kids survive at the same rate. This allows for evolution because there's variability. Something about me caused me to have many children who survived, and something about this other guy caused him to have none. Whatever's heritable about me will be well-represented in the next generation; his, even if he's wonderful, is gone. Evolution works with what's there. Things that make you successful, either because they're useful or are beneficial mutations, become over-represented in the gene pool. Evolution creates species-typical things (we all have two eyes) and variability within humans (size, stature).

Why should we look at evolution for answers on human happiness and success? There are many small answers that don't link well. People say express gratitude—that'll make you happy. But why? If there's a good reason, it should have a lasting effect. Every "this will make you happy" claim needs a reason. It must have done something for our ancestors, or it's what my colleague Robert Trivers calls a phenotypic indulgence—mimicking something good for our ancestors. Video games, for example, are novel, but might mimic things super important to our ancestors, giving us the same endorphin rush, even if they aren't good for us anymore. Junk food is the same—loaded with fat, salt, and sugar. Our ancestors ate it all the time; we don't need it anymore, but it makes us happy.

As an evolutionary psychologist, what are we getting wrong? The balance between autonomy and connection. We prioritize "what I want to do now" rather than connecting. Autonomy is self-governance—"what do I feel like doing?" Everyone's going their own way, which isn't good for our happiness. This mistake is particularly problematic if you're Western, well-educated, wealthy, and live in a city. By autonomy, you mean individualism—"I don't need anyone"—my gratification versus others and community. That's right. It doesn't need to be big; it's the little things. You and I want to see different movies, so we go our separate ways. Across our lives, we continually set aside connections to do what we want.

What stats illuminate this? Americans living alone: In 1850, 1%; now, 1 in 7. In the 1970s, 30% saw neighbors regularly; now, only 20%. Married couples spend less time together. We don't understand why, but with many options, we may pursue activities separately. Across our lives, we spend more time alone. Marriage and cohabitation are steadily declining in wealthy parts of the world. It's not a problem, right? Do what you want. But what if it's making you unhappy? What if you think you're making yourself happy, but you're wrong? I think every one of those decisions is an error.

Are there stats proving we're getting this wrong in terms of happiness? Yes, the Hadza people. They're as close as we know to our ancestors and lived where humanity evolved. Asked if they were happy over the last week, over 90% said yes. Westerners say about 50%. They bury almost half their children, have no savings, and live with uncertainty, yet they seem happier than us. We see this in other modern contexts, but that stat blows me away. Why? I think it's the balance they strike between connection and autonomy. This is the focus of my second book.

I visited a rich friend, Steve. His life was over-the-top, yet he wasn't happier. I felt superior, thinking I'd be happy if I were rich. Years later, reading about the Hadza, I realized it wasn't just Steve; it's all of us. We fail to appreciate our modern world. Even 100–150 years ago, a quarter of children died before age five. Women died in childbirth at sky-high rates. Our lives are better, but not happier. Is it a lack of gratitude, or something fundamental? It's multicausal. These changes happen over generations. It returns us to the autonomy/connection problem.

Let's take city living. Cities are 5,000 years old. By 1960, 1 in 3 lived in cities; by 2007, over 50%. People have been voting with their feet for centuries, but the cost is happiness. People in communities under 200 are happier than those in cities over 250,000, even though city dwellers are wealthier. This graph from my book shows that people are significantly happier in rural areas. People have been moving to cities for over 100 years, maybe 5,000, yet it makes them less happy. This is a symptom of the autonomy/connection problem. Cities offer opportunity, but at a cost—isolation. You're surrounded by people, but do you even know them?

If you ask, "Do you know someone well enough to trust with your house keys?", you're more likely to say yes in the country. Similarly, people are more satisfied with their friendships in the country. The more money you have, the less time you spend with neighbors. If you're rich, you don't need them; you can outsource everything. But poor people need each other. They live in webs of interdependence, borrowing tools, looking out for kids and pets. That's how humans evolved—we needed each other. Ironically, although rich people are happier than poor people, poor people are happier with their friendships. We see this with education, too. The more educated you are, the less you get together with your neighbors. Wealth and education tend to go hand-in-hand.

Money does make you happier in real time. The more important it is, the bigger the effect. It goes well past $100,000 a year. But there's the Easterlin Paradox: As society gets richer, people don't get happier. The US is three times richer than in 1940, but happiness is flat. So, what's the perfect combination? Wealth matters, but something else does, too—something we abandon with wealth. The underlying issue is the balance between autonomy and connection.

Part of the problem is that we can avoid the zero-sum game of life. My gain is your loss. In the animal world, cooperation creates positive-sum relationships. Vampire bats, for example, share blood. Humans give things, but we're cognitive animals—information has value, and I can give it to you without losing it. We create relationships where reciprocation isn't necessary. We have this advantage, but we're still animals. Status matters: Who's at the top? In our ancestral communities, it was easy. Today, it's hard. Money is an easy way to achieve status. Even though it doesn't make us happy overall, being richer than someone else does. It's a zero-sum status game. It's sexual selection—both sexes compete for the best partner.

What does evolution tell us about the dating game? Honest signals of quality. We've evolved to see through fake signals. One clear signal for men is risk-taking. Why? Two outcomes: Success shows skill, failure shows robustness. It's an honest signal. High-testosterone men pair up more; women find them attractive. Once partnered, testosterone goes down. Honest signals include physical size, wealth, ambition. Humor is an honest signal of quality. It takes an agile mind, a sign of good genes. Kindness is also important. Nice guys don't finish last. In hunter-gatherer communities, they're chosen over better hunters (minimum competence needed). They're suckers—give more than they get—but everyone wants to be with them.

What about for women? For women, it's different. Fertility is hard; they need to be well-fed, healthy, and young. Fat on their bodies (especially hips and thighs) shows they're well-fed. This matters more than anything else for men. Men want someone fertile and reproductive. Is attraction evolutionary or social? Both. There are basic underlying factors. Hip-to-waist ratio correlates with fertility. Analyses of Playboy bunnies show this ratio hasn't changed, even though their weight has. Does wealth matter for men? In principle, not much. You want to be well taken care of, but the qualities that make men successful are often internal. Skinny, fat, strong, weak—all fertile. But raising kids is hard; you want help. Women look for someone who will hunt and look after them and their kids. Women have more sexual plasticity than men. Men look for a particular appearance correlated with fertility. But given a choice, you'll pick the rich one. Male rock stars and businessmen date women across the social class spectrum, but it's less common the other way around. Women look for status and dominance in men; men care less about that in women.

What's the basis for homosexual relationships? Homosexuality is interesting. We see it across the animal kingdom, but exclusive homosexuality is more common in humans. No one is 100% sure why. The best evidence is polygenic—many genes contribute to behavior. The higher your polygenic score for homosexuality, the more likely you are to be attracted to the same sex. Brendan Zi's work shows men with more gay genes (but still straight) have more sexual partners than those with fewer. Being a little bit gay is attractive to women. Being too gay means you don't care about women. It's a balancing act.

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To guess, um, you know, if you think of extreme straight males versus gay males, gay males are much cleaner. They look after themselves, their bodies much better; their hygiene's much better. They take, you know, their sense of aesthetics is much better. 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.

One of the things that dovetails into this is some of the stats 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, one woman 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 mismatch in terms of women looking for men who are "up and to the right" economically, but there are fewer men there. Yeah, it's a real problem.

So, we talk about, for example, that women are underrepresented in some fields, like they're underrepresented in the sciences, and people worry about that a lot. But there's a much bigger problem we're facing; 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 are 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 never went back. So now the stat you were talking about is there's basically a 60/40 female-to-male ratio; that means there are three women on campus for every two men.

So, in principle, that first of all makes it harder to date on campus if you're female because there aren't as many men on campus as there are women, 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 as themselves or less. So we're creating a problem because women are getting really well-educated, and then there aren't as many educated men available for them to partner up with. 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 isn't necessarily a bad thing because women going to college and 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. So the way to be an economic success was 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. 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. 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. 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.

If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average—which is what I read in some of the studies, 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—the numbers don't match. It's a really unfortunate problem. 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, about 80% of women 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 women are interested in.

Interesting, on an individual level, I guess if you're a man you really do need to focus on your career if you want to have a chance of… well, 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 are lots of ways to skin a cat. 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 are also ways of being, you know, 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."

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

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. 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," yeah, because as a guy, I mean, what I had… must have had Tinder for about a month back in 2000, when I was 20… I'm going to say 23, 24. I couldn't get swipes. Yeah, 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.

Yeah, but she just didn't like any of them. 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 chromosomes. You only inherit Yl 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 some… lots of potential… that’s as we're getting no women at all. And so in our ancestral past, there are lots of men who nobody swiped right on; they couldn't find a partner. And there are lots of men who women were very interested in; they probably had multiple partners. And so we still live in that exact same world.

So what do they have to do? Lower their standards? 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? 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 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 going to be a perfect life partner." Very hard to see that on an app.

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 in an authentic way that can't be disproven. And if I'm a woman, therefore, I need to be showing my hip ratio. Well, I want to look attractive, and I want to look healthy, and I want to look young. Okay, but keeping in mind I could be none of the above and I'm still going to get swiped right. How does pornography confound all of this stuff?

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 pornography; we certainly evolved in a world where there's masturbation, um, but we evolved in a world that didn't have pornography. And so it's kind of hijacking our system a little bit. It feels like you're having sex when you know you're on OnlyFans or whatever those sites are that interest you. It mimics a lot of the features. And so, you know, I become interested in the social media world we live in and this possibility that social media makes so many things so easy that you stop going out, you stop… 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, etc.? And I think what's happened is that as we get lazy and we… we start putting our life online, you know, our social life, we even start to put more… our sexual life online. And so there's even evi… 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… if you'd asked me 20 years ago when Tinder and 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 what's going up is pornography watching. And so it 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 this graph that was in your book which shows how much sex we're having and how much porn we're watching. Yeah, and very simply it shows that we're having less sex and we're watching more porn, and it's quite a considerable drop between 2006 and 2012. It said a percentage of 18-to-25-year-olds who had had sex or watched porn within the last year. Yeah, and about 80% of 18-to-25-year-olds had had sex in the last year, and now it's getting down nearer to 60, 65, 70%, which is remarkable. These are young single people; you know, this is when we are most likely to have sex with, you know, partners of random hookups or whatever. So they're at the peak of their sexuality, and nonetheless, 20 years later they're less likely to have sex and more likely to be watching porn. And it looks like pornography consumption is almost like tripled, yeah, in that time period. It's… it's always… it's been accessible over that en… entire time period. But basically what… what I think those dat… I… I refer to this—I know it's an absurd acronym—I refer to this as SMILING—Social Media Induced Laziness In our Social Habits. I know it'll never catch on, but I think that what they're doing is smilling; they… they… they've got friends; we 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 going to have fun when you get there. And so you go, "Screw it, I'm not going to go." Now what you didn't know is that would have… that's the party where you would have met that person who you would have end up hooking up with, either as a short-term or long-term partner, but you didn't go, and instead what you did is you stayed at home. And so there's a decent chance you watch porn. And so we're… we're letting these fake substitutes take over in place of our actual real socializing, which I think is hugely problematic.

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

Well, I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction, right? Can just use… be on the pill, use a condom, use whatever you want, which our ancestors couldn't do and other animals can't do. And so the amount of sex that we have is completely uncorrelated with how many kids we decide to have. And so if you set pornography aside, fertility rates are going way down, and I think that's simply because we never evolved to want children; we evolved to want sex. And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex, and then you've also evolved to be nurturant 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. We evolved to want to have sex, and in a world without the pill, that automatically resulted in children. And then all you have to do is evolve to be nurturing to them because they're so dependent in humans when they're born, which is what happens when you had your baby recently—you have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child. And I wasn't keen to have more kids; my… I have some children who've grown to adulthood. I felt like I don't need any more kids, but then I have another kid, and I… I'm just in love with her, right? You can't help yourself. So we've intervened in nature's natural… we've intervened, and that intervention is what's potentially going to lead to there to be no more humans.

So if you look at the current population of the globe, it's meant to peak somewhere between, say, 2070 and 2090, probably around 8 billion and some change, and then it starts to go down, and then it may continue to go down forever. Now it may be that if… what… what causes you to want to have kids is very societal; it's very… well, my apartment's small, and I don't want to ship 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 aren't 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 is 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 are a lot of countries that are going to be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast—really half of East Asia, half of Western Europe; they're just shrinking crazy fast. They're demolishing houses; Japan is demolishing houses; there's nobody to buy them because the women are having less than that 2.1. Yeah, the average child rate in a lot of these countries is around 1.5 to 1.7—very, very low.

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

Well, we'd still be having sex; we just wouldn't be having kids, right? But we are having less as well, aren't we?

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

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

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. Um, what you want to do is you want to make having kids to be as much of a plus as it possibly can be and as little of a minus. So if you look at kids, they're really interesting—this is some wonderful work by Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize—and he… he asks you in the moment, "What are you doing and how much fun is it?" Is it… and what he finds is—no surprise—if you're having sex when you got the request, and now you probably waited till you were done before you answered your Bieber, but you… you said, "Oh, I'm having a great time." And as it goes with TV, was actually in second place; watching TV is good fun in the moment. And then a little way down the list is like doing the dishes, doing the laundry. If you… 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… 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… 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… that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again. And so… and for good evolutionary reasons where you get your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them. And so kids end up being a 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; it's crazy hard; it's crazy expensive. Women want to be able to go back to work; the list is really long about how hard it is in so many different ways. You just remove those barriers, especially once we're in this robot world, which I don't think is far away from us, where I don't have to get up in the middle of the night and do that unless I want to. I can if I want; my robot's not going to stop me from getting up and feeding them and changing their nappy.

But aren't we going to raise loads of messed-up kids in such a…

I don't… I… you know, a robot has infinite patience. If you design it nice and soft and fluffy, it's going to be more cuddly than we are. Um, the kids might like the robots more than they like us. Last night I was with… with my girlfriend, and I was joking because I read this article that Tesla's Optimus robots are now going into production, and they're hiring the team, which are these sort of humanoid robots that will be in your house and help with the chores and dishes and stuff. 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 raise the kids, and then the other one would like take the kid to school and stuff." Because 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… the kid would turn to the robot and call it Daddy and Mommy 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 cause the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender. Yeah, so you almost can't… the robot… all that's true, but here's the thing: currently we outsource them to nannies for a big chunk of the day if you're wealthy enough. People often hire a night nurse, somebody who comes in and helps out in the… at nighttime too if you've got the cash. And so when I hire those people, I can't be positive they're going to be kind to my children; I can't be positive they know every possible disease my kid could get and… and all the rest. I would rather hire this incredible robot who's super cuddly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what the… the pitch of that cry is. You could put whatever scent on them you want; you could make it Mom or Dad; you can make it even smell like you if you want to. Why not have that person help you out? You know, our ancestors engaged in what… in what's called alloparenting all the time, and what that meant was the men are out hunting, probably gone for most of the day; the females need to form these tight bonds with each other because it's hard work with a bunch of little kids and predators who want to eat them; you need eyes on them all the time, but you also need to be digging up tubers of whatever variety you're trying to eat. And so they relied on each other. Parenting is not a solo operation, which is Mom and Dad; it's this… I know it's cliché, 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 going to abuse your kid; you know, they're never going to do anything wrong; they're always going to be kind when your kid asks for the 10 millionth time… but why? They're going to keep giving them answers; they don't mind, right? Why not have the perfect parent when you're not there? Because… the parent releases certain hormones in the child by… by their touch—the oxytocin. Robots don't release oxytocin… 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 parenting; it's one of the… it's one of the nicest things that we humans ever do; it's some of my fondest memories, and I don't want to give those away, but I wasn't with my kid 24/7, and it would have driven me nuts if I were… it's… kids are wonderful and boring and horrible. And so why not… when you outsource—and we all do; we have since time began; we've… we've relied on others to help take care of our kids—why not make it the perfect Nanny rather than the… that'll have to do Nanny because it's all I can afford? I just… it's… it's a strange feature to think about because it feels also like a slippery slope where we might start having kids and then giving them completely robot parents… could do if you wanted to. I'd still rather that than you abuse your kids and be a terrible parent yourself, which we know is happening all the time.

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

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

Do you believe that? Do you believe that's going to… that's going to happen?

So if you've just had a baby, right?

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

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

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

And in marriage… this graph that I saw in your book shows that the percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy as a function of marital status quite clearly shows that if you want to be happy, you should be married, and if you want to be not too happy, you should be separated. So here's the data: if when people get married, on average they get no happier. So if you get married and then I look at 10 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… 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… 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 were 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… 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… it's not plus or minus; it's basically where they were. If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years. So their… the year of their marriage was happier than before they met, and the next year's happier still, and it just keeps working its way up. And so when you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy; it's a… 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. So the… it's the individualism.

Yes, that's causing their unhappiness; that's causing them not to marry. Yep, that's what I believe. And people that are less individualistic are getting married, and that's why. And… and so it's just a different kind of person who's doing that. In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce, we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced were also less happy before they even met their partner. So on average, 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… they… they find ways to make their marriage work, even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.

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And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence? Is there an evolutionary basis for why… why that occurs?

Yes, so the… neurodivergence is a complicated one. The… it seems to be much more common now when we look at the epidemiological data; it seems to be associated with high-toxin environments. So if you live in… in areas where there are 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… 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, you know, humans are a super-innovative species, but if you ask yourself or your friends how often have you ever invented anything, the answer is almost always never. And… and that's because we solve our problems socially. When something goes wrong, we go to our friends; we talk to them; we try to work together to figure out our problems, and we've always been that way. Hunter-gatherers do that, and neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they're less socially connected. And so 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, the technical things that… that make our lives so easy.

Now, ADHD is a different ball wax. We know it's highly heritable; we know a lot of the genes are… we also suspect that it didn't… it wasn't even a noticeable thing in a hunter-gatherer, right? You know, what ancestor ever tried to get you to pay attention to something that you were bored with? But if you're ADHD, it's crazy hard to pay attention when you're bored, but it's perfectly easy to pay attention when you're interested; you just don't have the kind of dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that allows you to force yourself to attend to things. And for our ancestors, you're loaded

Back to eating grass and being happy. Whereas, if I'm a human running away from a lion, be oh my God, that was really scary. I wonder when there's another lion coming. The biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future. Evolution doesn't give any gifts without costs; you pay a price for every one of them. 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 you're going to die someday. Other animals don't have that realization; they can't project themselves forward in time the way we can. So, does that mean that evolution tells us that the cure for anxiety is to stop thinking about the future? Effectively, if you didn't think about the future, you wouldn't 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.

I found something quite interesting in your book, I think it was in chapter nine, where you talk about religion and the fact that people associated with religious participation are typically happier than those who are not. The effect is remarkable. You can look at it in two different ways: one is just the effect of believing. Lots of people worry about a life without meaning; people of religion have solved that problem because religion gives your life meaning. There is a point. If you believe in any of the religions that exist, you're part of this never-ending chain, etc. 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. Then we'll look at people who pray versus people who don't pray. We can do this with national samples, where we say let's look at the General Social Survey. In fact, anybody wants to can get online and look at the General Social Survey and answer any question that's available in it. It's a remarkably remarkable publicly available data set, which I used repeatedly in this book. Praying actually makes you happier. If you're among people who don't go to church, they're 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. 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 twice as likely to be happy if you go to church regularly than if you never go to church at all. 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. So what I did is I separated people by whether they're poor or whether they're rich. 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. So they have, they get together; poor people get together with their neighbors much more often than rich people. 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; whether if you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on high; it's not because you necessarily want to socialize. 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 social, of socializing, whereas rich people have separated themselves from others. So those rich people who go to church several times a week are like twice as likely to be very happy as rich people who never go to church at all. So rich people need to go to church, yeah, or you know whatever they call church, they need to go somewhere where they're socializing regularly in person.

Why do we want religion? Because it's quite clear that there's something within us that wants to believe. 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. 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. I think lots of people have that hole, but not everybody. 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. So if you have a god-shaped hole but you don't believe, that's going to make you unhappy, whereas if you have that need for that and you do believe, that's going to make you happy. It's like anything else. What do you think the meaning of life is? I think it's devoid of meaning. So if life is truly devoid of meaning, then what do you do? The only answer to me is you make the best of this meaningless thing that you can. How do you do that? Well, you be aware of what we've evolved to do, and we've evolved to connect. So if connection is the most important thing I can do as a human, and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other because that's facilitating connection. You believe life is devoid of meaning. Yeah, people won't like that. I know I don't like it. I don't like the fact that I don't think life has meaning. When people search for meaning, they get happier, which suggests that they find it. I've never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning. Okay, so but maybe it's the pursuit of something then that's creating the happiness versus them finding meaning. Maybe we don't know. You so you just said that when people search for meaning they get happier. Yeah, 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. 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. So you know, 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 we 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 ones 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 cucaburra. They lay two eggs, and then they weigh a little bit, and then they lay a third. 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. Why doesn't it make it? Well, the two older siblings peck it to death. 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; cognitive things like division of labor. You know, cucaburras 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; everyone was eating us for dinner, and now it's the shoes on the other foot; we're the apex predator on this planet. But doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we band together in tough times? Yes, but we band together to attack others. Yeah, we do. It's not, look, there's never something that's done just for the niceness of it. Evolution doesn't care about 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 as even by Homo erectus once, so our ancestors one and two million years ago when they banded together, they were 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 other animals simply can't. They can't do that; they can't make a scenario in their mind and then enact it. 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 prehuman, other Homo erectus. And you're saying that with like America versus China and America versus Mexico and whatever it might be, the nationalism. Yeah, so remember I referred to us earlier as being tribal, and I talked about how chimpanzees are 600 times more aggressive within the group but equally aggressive between. So we've evolved in a world to be totally tribal, to just look out for ourselves because that other group might kill us. They may be nice; we may get along, but they might be vicious, and so we need to be prepared to be vicious in return. 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 our groups the benefit of the doubt, but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them.

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? 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. Every human goes to sleep, and when you go to sleep, the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily. And so to be powerful, you—part of it is to be tough and scary, but part of it also to 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. 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 language is or unpowerful or powerless body language looks like? It's super easy to look in other animals because because they can't talk; they appease; they've got ways of shrinking themselves and says, no, no, don't beat me up; this whatever you want is yours. And humans mimic some of that; we shrink ourselves when 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 can, I'm great at this, you know, I'm 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 himself down is the really powerful because they can afford to say, no, no, I'm I'm nobody; you don't want to be with me. And the second they say that in those cultures, like, oo, 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 "we're 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. 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. Yeah, the thing is that we use those brands to compete for status, but they're already at the very top of the heap; they won their competition, and anybody who knows them knows that, and their act—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. And maybe it's a counter-signal at that point. So maybe if he was, if he had a Louis Vuitton bag, he would actually be lowering himself to the status quo; he's just a regular millionaire; he's not the multi-billionaire that he is.

You've studied the Hadza tribe; you mentioned them repeatedly, only indirectly. I've never been there. Yeah, what is the most interesting thing you've learned about them as it relates to happiness and purpose and living a good life that you might pass to all of us that are listening? Well, autonomy was really rare for our ancestors. They evolved to want both; they need connection to survive and to be part of the collective that will, you know, go on the hunt and do all the things that are necessary for living every single day, but they also need autonomy to choose where they're going to be; their real niche is going to be what their best prospects are; how to stand out in the group. Everybody has to hunt and gather, but you could still be the best arrow maker or storyteller or whatever; make yourself valuable to the group. So you need autonomy so you can decide where you have best prospects and decide what you want to do and put your efforts into the domains that matter to you, 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 alone without food; I've got to compromise or persuade you with my, you know, what I want to do, which means that opportunities for true autonomy were really rare for 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 miscalculation 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 hunt-and-gather 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 kind of finding a compromise that's much closer to balance in that regard. Uh, men need women more than women need men as it relates to connection. Yes and no. So we all need to connect, but I believe women need it more than men, 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. I read that marriage is more beneficial for men's longevity than it is for women's. 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. And it's that they're giving us more emotional support typically than we're—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. These Hadza tribes that we keep talking about, do they stay together in marriages? It turns out, so they're, their best—well, the person I regard as a premier ethnographer is Frank Marlowe; 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; it's, 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. Does our evolutionary past suggest that humans are serial monogamists? I believe humans evolved to be serial monogamists 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 his father is—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. Wash out. What do you mean by wash out? Like, literally pumped so much sperm into her that the previous guy who just had sex with her, his sperm is literally washed out as if you're in 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 monogamous but we're also sneaking around at the same time. So cheating might be a natural part of—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. The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us. Is it the orangutan, which monkey is it that—well, chimps are the closest to us; the chimp, and then gorillas, and then orangutans, but they're all great apes, so they're all pretty close to us. Can chimps talk? No. So if they, if I'm a chimp and I, I leave the tree for a while and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife, I can't then find out that he did that. No, there's no one telling you. Now they do sign language, lots of things that they're interested in doing, immediate communication, but it's, if you think about sign 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 thing that's separated by space or by time; they just simply can't communicate. And so but they can't think about it either. And so Homo is the first animal on this planet who thinks about separate things separated by space and time. And so my guess is our complex communication began with them. It made me think of my dog. My dog does something; he does a poo in the house; I come home an hour later; I tell him—all—he doesn't know why you're upset. Yeah, that poo that happened an hour ago, he doesn't know what the problem is, but he can't think about the past and the future in terms and link it to—it's the—we know from psychology that if you want to punish an animal for pooing, which is effective if you do, you don't, you shouldn't rub the nose in things that aren't nice, but punishment is very effective if you punish them for pooing—you're a bad girl—you do it right away; they'll stop pooing in your house. You punish them an hour later; they go, I don't know what you're talking about. When I come home and say my dog's pooed in the house or something, or he's done something naughty, he's hiding. Yeah, because he now knows that when you find a poo in the house he gets in trouble; when you find 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, he can't think about, uh-oh, in the future, Steven's going to come home, and he's going to 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 for a while what's coming. Okay, so he doesn't actually know that it was that I didn't want him to tear up the couch or whatever, but he does know that when the couch is torn up and I come home that I'm going to be like, [ __ ] all the—yeah, and you're going to yell at him. And he also knows that if he does it in front of you, you'll yell at him, and if he poops in front of you, you'll yell at him. So he knows all those things, um, 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 I, if you feed a chimp or a monkey or any of these animals as much food as they want but only one meal a day, they don't like that because they like to eat several meals a day, just like we do, but they'll never go, I'm going to stash some of my food because I'm going to get hungry at 5:00 p.m. today because I'm only fed at 2:00. 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 going to be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs: I'll be hungry again; I'll be cold; I'll be whatever. But some animals store food, don't they? They do, but they do it, they do it automatically; they don't go, oh, it's going to be—for example, squirrels who bury nuts, well, do that if they'd never been through a winter. So they don't go, uh-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. Cuz my dog Pablo, he's never been around—I mean, he has been around other dogs, of course, but I don't—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. Yeah, and I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Like, and then I give him another bone, and he picks it up and buries it in 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—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, oh yeah, I think from the movies. Um, meerkats eat scorpions, and so they need to teach their—they're very good hunters; they need to teach their babies to kill something that could kill them. And so if, 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 it a live scorpion—like, you kill it and eat it—because it's got to learn how to do that. Like, it seems rough, but it's got to learn that. If you play the sounds of a little baby to us to the mother or the whoever's bringing the food, cuz it's not always mothers, it'll kill the scorpion and throw it in there even if the 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 going to kill the baby because all it knows is when I hear that sound I do x to the scorpion. Your dog is doing the same thing; when given a 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 know—do that; I don't know if I'll have it later, but it's evolved to solve that problem.

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It's a really interesting, 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. 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 status; 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 my 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, 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 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 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 going to open up my Instagram tomorrow and find that somebody else has a better car or whatever it is that I just bought, and now mine looks kind of dumpy, whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself; it becomes this memory that's self, that that that you think back on and that you you're happy when you think about it, and especially if you do it with friends. And so the advice I would

To eventually do the same for you, of course, is to give up some autonomy to reestablish connection. The reason I say this is that married couples and friends are spending less time together. I think we need to return to a world where…

When I think about doing that, I'm going to be completely honest: no, you shouldn't be, because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. When I think, yeah, so I'm just trying to put myself in the head of someone hearing that. Many entrepreneurs and audience members are very busy building their startups or have demanding jobs. They're striving for a better life, requiring so much time and energy to separate themselves from the crowd. When they hear they need to spend more time with their partner, many think their business will fail. I agree. When giving generic advice, I'm not tailoring it to that person, and I completely agree with that life choice.

When we're young, we're autonomy machines, and that takes precedence, especially with big dreams. This is especially true for entrepreneurs trying to escape a difficult past, maybe lacking materially. LeBron James, striving to become who he wants to be, shows how well this works. What's the cost? Loneliness. But if you love what you're doing and see a real chance, I say pay that loneliness price when you're young—don't pay it every single day. Go out with friends on Friday night, talk with fellow entrepreneurs, do things that keep you connected so you're not suicidal by the time you get there. But I totally get that autonomy push; it's what makes us successful.

I do think I'm bullshitting myself a little bit. Could I spend another hour with my partner a day, or another two or three hours a week? My business would be fine, of course. But there's, as you said, an inherent striving that can be out of whack. If what you really want to do right now is work, when you're young, do it, because you can. Let your connections fray, try not to let them disappear, and then rebuild them when you've reached your goal. But the key is to get there. You have to set yourself an answer in advance.

Here's why I say that: I've found myself waiting for a bus longer than it would have taken to walk. After doing that a few times, I realized the bus schedule's erratic. I can walk. I'll wait X minutes and then walk. Our problem is that we keep setting new bars for ourselves. If we don't make a plan in advance—"I'll just give it another minute," "I'll just push this business for another year"—we can find ourselves doing it forever. You may not succeed; you may have a miserable life where all you did was work, and it never got there. So my recipe is: when you start something, give yourself an end date. Say what success would mean: how much money do I have to make? How much time can I give without making money and therefore losing? You should set those two things in advance because, once you're in it, I promise you'll move the bar.

If you're this hard-driving entrepreneur putting connection aside, I'm dead serious: get a dog, a cat, whatever your preferred animal is. The data show that having a pet makes people quite happy. I did it mindfully as a brand-new assistant professor. In the American system, I'd either get tenured and promoted after seven years or get fired. I knew I was a work machine for seven years; everything else would take second place, but my dog wouldn't care. Dogs are amazing. Maybe one day people will get robots as friends, which is quite grim.

When you ask yourself what made our ancestors happy, there's a lot of seemingly pointless sitting around, doing nothing together. The problem today, I believe (but don't have good data on this; it's Bill's intuition), is that we can always be doing something. There are a zillion good shows on TV. I suspect what we're giving up is random chitchat with friends. Twenty years ago, construction workers ate lunch together, shooting the breeze. Today, they're on their phones, not even talking to the guy next to them. Those guys aren't as tight, and their job isn't as good. Be present in idle conversation; it's super important.

Last, but not least, we all have lifestyle goals—getting fit, learning a language, painting. The data show you're way more likely to achieve those goals if you commit to them with someone else. They'll push you, and you'll push them. People join gyms and attend five times, never going back. Whenever you want to make a life change, use connection to make it more effective—it'll make you happier in the long term.

On that point about health, fitness, and lifestyle goals, I'm a contractor at Whoop, a company you're an investor in (and a podcast sponsor). I work on the performance science team. We look at Whoop's data and ask how we could do it better. What are people doing that helps them, and what isn't helping? Sleep, exercise, and eating aren't well understood. I have this cool job diving into data to answer fundamental questions.

What are some cool questions you've asked that garnered interesting answers? These aren't published yet, so we could be wrong. One remarkable thing we're finding is that exercise amplifies other behaviors. If I do something good for me (even unrelated to exercise) and I exercise that day, it's better. If I do something bad, it's worse on a day I exercise.

Give me an example. If I drink, each alcoholic drink raises my resting heart rate by about a beat and a half and lowers my HRV by about three points. This is a linear effect up to at least ten drinks. If you have those drinks on sedentary days, their effect is smaller than on days where you exercised. So if I exercise in the morning, then drink, the impact of the drink is worse because I exercised. The same holds for good things. I don't understand the physiology, but this is what we're seeing. Drink and don't exercise on days you're going to misbehave. This probably isn't just alcohol; it's just one I've analyzed.

It also works the other way. If you wear blue light blocking glasses late or dim the lights, that has a bigger positive effect on your recovery on days you exercise, even though blue light and exercise are unrelated. 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. Interesting. We'll write it up, and maybe I made a mistake. But for now, I believe that's true. If I'm having a naughty day, don't exercise. If I'm having a great day, exercise.

Eating might be the exception. The data also show that if you stuff your face with fatty foods, exercise is exactly what you should be doing—use the fuel, don't store it. Too much food is bad, but I don't count food in the "naughty behavior" list. Everyone eats every day, and I don't have good data on how much they eat, but our data suggest that going for a walk (even Zone two or one) after you eat helps you feel better.

You could look at someone who drinks alcohol every day and see the impact of the alcohol on their biomarkers is more significant on days they exercised. We have thousands of people in our datasets who log alcohol relatively often. They don't drink every day. People don't drink much Monday–Thursday; they have a drink or two Friday, more Saturday and Sunday, then go back. They also exercise at different points across the weekend. Sometimes those two things hit at the same time, sometimes not. We look within the person because if you're the kind of person who exercises when you drink, who knows what else differs. We want to know what Steven looks like when he drinks two drinks on days he also exercises—the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual. We want to compare it to what you usually do, and we see these effects very clearly.

Are there any other cool answers you've discovered? If you look at how much sleep people need, the argument is that everyone needs the same on average, but some need a little less, some a little more. I think men need less sleep than women; I don't know that yet, but there are reasons to think that. Hunter-gatherer data show men sleep about 20 minutes less than women. It wasn't significant in their small samples. With zillions of people, we see men sleep about 20 minutes less than women, wildly statistically significant. Twenty minutes is a lot. If men don't need as much sleep as women, why? Our data suggest men sleep more impactfully, more effectively than women; for every hour of sleep a man gets, he gets a little more bang for his buck on recovery than women. I don't know why. It could be a thousand things. My data suggests men get more bang for their buck out of every hour of sleep, and consequently sleep about 20 minutes less. This is off the press; I can't promise it holds up. I've looked at it in two samples, but I could be making a mistake.

On the previous point about alcohol and exercise, the combined psychological stresses can lead to alterations in your biomarkers, reflecting increased oxidative stress, liver strain, dehydration, and inflammation. On days when you consume alcohol without exercising, these effects might be less pronounced, resulting in different biomarker profiles. It's very possible; it could be all about hydration. Be doubly conscientious about hydrating. But every negative thing I've looked at has gotten worse when exercising, and every positive thing has gotten better. It may be a broader principle at play. Someone will come along and explain it, but I don't know yet.

What else? We're seeing evidence of a couple of things. Lots of little things help a lot, but they have to suit you because we find huge individual variability. Reading in bed helps you fall asleep more regularly and even sleep longer. I suspect you're clearing your mind of worries, but for some, it's the opposite. CBD works really well for some, negatively for others. Our samples are big enough to see that across the board. Weighted blankets, blue light blockers, dimming lights—these have big effects (15–20 minutes more sleep, more REM and slow wave). Add those things together, and it's a lot.

Many people have sleep worries. If you have sleep worries, they get produced by your poor sleep. We see that the worries themselves make it harder to sleep. Find ways to short-circuit those worries—reading in bed, whatever—to get your mind elsewhere. It will be beneficial.

Is there much data on coffee? Overall, it's not bad. Don't do it too late in the day. Some people can drink coffee at dinner and go right to sleep. After 2 p.m., it can be pretty disruptive for some people. When eating, try to restrict that to daylight hours. Your body's trying to get parasympathetic dominance when you go to sleep. If you have food in there, your body's working hard to digest it, making it difficult.

What's the most important thing in your book, *The Social Paradox*, that we haven't talked about? I'm arguing you need to increase your sociality, be more connected, but that's a big ask. We lead busy lives; we can't just introduce social connection willy-nilly. We have to be Socratic and know what we can sustain. That means: whenever I do something alone that I enjoy, is there a way to do that with others? Match my connection need with my autonomy need. I want to do that (autonomy), but are there others who want to do what I can do with? I love the New York Times puzzle; my sister lives in London, so we reconnect. We're both doing the puzzle anyway; why not do that together?

If you have to decide to do something every single time, you just won't do it. Surrender control to your past or the environment. 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. You want to do the same thing: "After breakfast, I'll call my sister and we'll do the puzzle together." You want a set rule so you don't have to decide to do it; these things become habit. People should reintroduce connection by trying not to do things alone, in the easiest way possible, in a way that's most likely to become habitual and doesn't add more time to their busy day.

William, thank you. This question is going to come out of left field. You're given the chance and the power to do one thing to save humanity and make everyone happy. What would that be? I would make sure there's perfect justice. If there's perfect justice, everyone who misbehaves knows there will be consequences for their behavior. I think the one thing humanity won't get its way out of is people being horrible to other people. But if there's perfect justice, everyone who's horrible to someone else will stop doing that, and people will be better to each other.

What would be the cost? You can't get away with anything anymore. I speed all the time because I know I can get away with it. But perfect justice would have the advantage that it's harm to others. In the past, we cared about property crimes a lot and not so much harm to others. I would want perfect justice to come with harm to others. But there's a subjective element to what is just. What we thought was true might be appalling a thousand years from now.

Thank you for writing an incredible book. *The Social Paradox* is exceptionally timed. It feels like we're drifting from our tribe, getting further from knowing what it is to be human. We're feeling the consequences—mental health crisis, suicidal ideation, purposelessness, opioid addiction. This book helps us understand the balance between autonomy and connection. We need both, but we need to get the balance correct. It's confronting in the nicest possible way.

Thank you, Stephen. I can't wait for people to read it. 53% of you listening haven't subscribed. Could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show, subscribe. We'll listen to your feedback, find the guests you want, and make the show better. Thank you so much.