Speaker 1: She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2: I'm tiff. This is Role with the Punches and we're
Speaker 2: turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
Speaker 2: to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Speaker 2: Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Speaker 2: Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
Speaker 2: all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
Speaker 2: custody and children, family violence and intervention orders, property settlements
Speaker 2: and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so
Speaker 2: reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
Speaker 2: test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Bill von Hippel, Welcome
Speaker 2: to Roll with the Punches.
Speaker 1: Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 2: Tell you what I'm pum. I'm pumped for this conversation.
Speaker 2: Where have you been my whole life?
Speaker 1: I've been just getting older.
Speaker 2: I feel like when I landed upon the stuff you
Speaker 2: do and started looking at everything that you talk about
Speaker 2: and your research, and I'm like, these are the questions
Speaker 2: that fascinate me. And I didn't know there was someone
Speaker 2: out there giving the answers to this stuff trying. I'm
Speaker 2: down for it. Do you want to explain to my
Speaker 2: listeners what it is you do?
Speaker 1: Sure. So, I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and what that means
Speaker 1: is that I'm particularly interested in how our attitudes, not
Speaker 1: just our bodies, but our mind has been shaped over
Speaker 1: evolutionary time. And my particular interest is the last six
Speaker 1: million years. So that's the time span since we separated
Speaker 1: from our chimpanzee cousins, and so I'm particularly interested in
Speaker 1: what happened during that time period to the best of
Speaker 1: our knowledge, and how the things that happen and let
Speaker 1: our psychology be different from theirs.
Speaker 2: How did your interest land in this space in the
Speaker 2: first place.
Speaker 1: That's a great question. So when I started grad school,
Speaker 1: this is back in the nineteen eighties mid eighties, I
Speaker 1: had no idea that there was even such a field.
Speaker 1: Like I'd never heard of evolutionary psychology. Everybody knows evolutionary biology.
Speaker 1: You know how our body gets shaped and whether we're
Speaker 1: big or strong, have hands or hooves, you know, whatever.
Speaker 1: But I didn't know that psychology was shaped the same way.
Speaker 1: I've never thought about it, and I was I was
Speaker 1: starting grad school, and we always had this picnic at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the year. This is at the University
Speaker 1: of Michigan, and so the beginning of the year, it's
Speaker 1: still summer, and it's still nice, and there's this big
Speaker 1: picnic and all the grad students come and all the faculty,
Speaker 1: all the academics come, and we had this new professor
Speaker 1: who had just joined us. He had been a professor
Speaker 1: at Harvard, but he was switching over to be a
Speaker 1: Michigan and I was a brand new Chrestien. So he
Speaker 1: and I were both arriving at the same time. But
Speaker 1: of course he's eminent and I'm and nobody, And I
Speaker 1: asked him, what do you do when he starts telling me,
Speaker 1: and he's an evolutionary psychologist. His name is David Buss,
Speaker 1: by the way. He's now at Denier, City of Texas.
Speaker 1: Super lovely guy, super productive and smart, and he's telling
Speaker 1: me what he does. And I'm like, that's wild, that's
Speaker 1: totally cool. I've never heard of such thing. And so
Speaker 1: they said, well, look, you're welcome to work for me.
Speaker 1: And I said, that's a great idea. Let's put it
Speaker 1: on hold for a decade or two because it doesn't
Speaker 1: sound very politically correct. And my colleagues are all these
Speaker 1: squishy lefties, which I'm a little bit of a squishy
Speaker 1: left too, but they don't like that stuff, and so
Speaker 1: it's not going to It wouldn't be a good career
Speaker 1: move for me. I'd rather wait tell him a little
Speaker 1: farther down the pike.
Speaker 2: Oh, how interesting? And so where were you? Where did
Speaker 2: you think you were headed? Where did you want to
Speaker 2: dive in?
Speaker 1: Well, but before I started doing that, and what I
Speaker 1: actually did do for the first so, I've been in
Speaker 1: the field for about little over thirty about thirty five
Speaker 1: years almost, And so for the verse twenty, all I
Speaker 1: did was try to understand social psychology, so attitudes and
Speaker 1: memory and judge in decision making, things like that that
Speaker 1: are sort of the basic, but not worrying about where
Speaker 1: it all came from, just the way we are right now.
Speaker 1: And then I started. Then I was a professor, and
Speaker 1: so I felt like, all right, it won't do any
Speaker 1: harm that I can start. I can come out of
Speaker 1: the closet, so to speak. And so I did, and
Speaker 1: I started asking the same questions, but well, where did
Speaker 1: it come from? Why is it that way? And when
Speaker 1: we ask why, what does it help us understand? It
Speaker 1: might be different?
Speaker 2: I know there was a period of time that only
Speaker 2: got I don't even know when I started asking the questions,
Speaker 2: but I know, especially since starting this show we're on
Speaker 2: almost nine hundred episodes now, wow, And there was just
Speaker 2: this really poignant time where everything just led me to Okay,
Speaker 2: but what what was the purpose of that? There must
Speaker 2: be because everything, because I started to learn that everything
Speaker 2: had a purpose.
Speaker 1: So well, there's random garbage, but mostly I agree with
Speaker 1: you completely that if it's important, it has a purpose.
Speaker 1: If it's like trivial, do you prefer, you know, blue
Speaker 1: cars or a green car? You know, there's probowly no
Speaker 1: purpose to that for these kind of random little things.
Speaker 1: But the big things in life have a purpose. And
Speaker 1: then the questions what's safe to that purpose?
Speaker 3: Mmm?
Speaker 2: I work with a lot of people I do. One
Speaker 2: of my last workshop I did last year was it's
Speaker 2: called why the Fuck Are we Stuck? Or what the
Speaker 2: Fuck Am I stuck? James?
Speaker 1: That's a good title.
Speaker 2: The idea that we we end up stuck and there's
Speaker 2: so many things that influence our behaviors, in our minds
Speaker 2: and our thinking, and we and we My first lesson
Speaker 2: in the University of tiff was you are a great storyteller,
Speaker 2: and you need to start learning when you're telling stories
Speaker 2: and when those stories might be reality or just a
Speaker 2: comfortable yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's that's way harder than it seems like. There's
Speaker 1: this wonderful research. I don't know if you've ever heard
Speaker 1: of Matekauzanaga, but he's this early split brain researcher where
Speaker 1: he would do research on people who had such bad
Speaker 1: epilepsy then it was threatening to kill them, and so
Speaker 1: in order to control it with the surgeons would do
Speaker 1: is literally your brain in half, because your two lobes
Speaker 1: are basically independent things, but they talk to each other
Speaker 1: on this dense network of fibers called the corpus colosum.
Speaker 1: And so what Gazanaga does is he cuts people's corpus. Well,
Speaker 1: he doesn't do it. He works with people with the
Speaker 1: surgeon has cut their corpus closum right through, and so
Speaker 1: now they've got two sides of the brain that can't
Speaker 1: even talk to each other. Now, the wild thing about
Speaker 1: that is that, you know, if you've ever had internal
Speaker 1: conflict where you can't decide if you want to do something,
Speaker 1: imagine what that conflict's like like if there's actually two
Speaker 1: of you inside there. And so for example, if you
Speaker 1: wanted to have a donut, but you kind of think
Speaker 1: you shouldn't, right, maybe you're training or watching your diet
Speaker 1: or whatever. You might start to reach for it and
Speaker 1: you say, oh, if you really shouldn't meet that now,
Speaker 1: and you stop, and he say, but I'm kind of
Speaker 1: like getting you start and with these guys, but all
Speaker 1: that happens inside you, you know, back and forth in there.
Speaker 1: What these guys do after their surgery is one hand
Speaker 1: will reach for the doughnut, the other hand will reach
Speaker 1: out and grab it. And now the fight takes place
Speaker 1: kind of in a real time. And then what's so
Speaker 1: interesting is that over time that stops, like one hand
Speaker 1: starts to reach, the other hand starts to stop it,
Speaker 1: and they can see the conflict and so then they
Speaker 1: just kind of work it out by deciding. Right. But
Speaker 1: here's the key. So now, the way your brain works
Speaker 1: is really weird. It crosses, and so like my left
Speaker 1: hemisphere actually goes to my right eyeball and my right
Speaker 1: hemisphere goes to my left eyeball. So with that annoying
Speaker 1: feature aside, what you can do when somebody has their
Speaker 1: brain sliced in half is you can present different images
Speaker 1: to both sides of their brain. Now, we know that
Speaker 1: only one half of your brain can talk. That's where
Speaker 1: language sits. That We don't feel that because it just
Speaker 1: goes back and forth. But if your brain's cut half,
Speaker 1: you feel that. And so what they what gazannagain his
Speaker 1: colleagues would do is he'd show them these photographs and
Speaker 1: in one picture they'd see a snowy scene. And then
Speaker 1: he'd say, Okay, what are you looking at? And he'd
Speaker 1: give them a bunch of options. What's the closest to
Speaker 1: the snowy scene? And they'd pointed a shovel. Now he'd ask,
Speaker 1: the side of the brain that's pointing at the shovel
Speaker 1: is the side they can't talk. So now I'd say
Speaker 1: to them, why are you pointing the shovel? Now, the
Speaker 1: tricky thing is that the side the brand that can
Speaker 1: talk is looking at a chicken coop. And so you'd
Speaker 1: think it will go I don't know, because it doesn't
Speaker 1: though right, It has no idea. But instead of what
Speaker 1: it does immediately, it goes, oh, well, chickens make a
Speaker 1: lot of poop. And so I thought the shovel was
Speaker 1: the closest match to the chicken poop because they got
Speaker 1: to shovel it out. It's just making it up. But
Speaker 1: the amazing thing is they have no idea. They're making
Speaker 1: it up. They're telling stories just like you're saying, and
Speaker 1: they're doing it in within seconds, and they have no
Speaker 1: idea because the brain can't talk to itself. But what
Speaker 1: Gazannager pointed out is we probably do that all the time.
Speaker 1: He just set up this really exotic situation where he
Speaker 1: could catch you at it. But the rest of us
Speaker 1: are doing that all the time. Right.
Speaker 2: I always talk about the realization in boxing, and it
Speaker 2: could very well. You might tell me right now that
Speaker 2: it's still a story i'm telling. In fact, I'm almost convincedies.
Speaker 2: But I realized when I stepped into the boxing ring
Speaker 2: and I started sport of boxing. I always talk about
Speaker 2: this moment in time where I realized I've been telling
Speaker 2: stories and I didn't know myself so and the boxing
Speaker 2: ring became this place or as close to it as
Speaker 2: I've ever felt where that can't happen because whatever I
Speaker 2: am innately hardwired for will play out before my conscious
Speaker 2: mind can think, choose and tell stories. Yeah. Great, thank
Speaker 2: God for that. Otherwise you've just deconstructed my entire philosophy.
Speaker 1: For no, I don't want to do that, and I
Speaker 1: agree with you. It's you know, we once now when
Speaker 1: you're when you don't know what you're doing, if you're
Speaker 1: a novice and it's your first day in the ring,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work that way. But once you actually know
Speaker 1: what you're doing, once you become expert, all the decision
Speaker 1: making processes that usually take place up here shift back
Speaker 1: into our premotor motor cortext back here, and you don't
Speaker 1: you don't think anymore in the way that you think
Speaker 1: about should I have a burger tomato? Or should I
Speaker 1: have pizza? You know what movie do I want to see?
Speaker 1: That kind of thinking doesn't really take place anymore once
Speaker 1: you're physically an expert in the boxing ring or a
Speaker 1: golfer or anything you want, right, it's all happening in
Speaker 1: a different part of your brain, and so the storytelling
Speaker 1: has just gone, especially something like boxing, where you know,
Speaker 1: I could tell you how cool I am on a
Speaker 1: golf course, and I can tell you all about how
Speaker 1: I usually play better than today, but you haven't punched
Speaker 1: my face, and there's no there's no the rubber. It
Speaker 1: never meets the road right in quite the same way
Speaker 1: that it does in a boxing ring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Oh I love that talk. Can you talk
Speaker 2: about I guess there's a few pillars of what I'm
Speaker 2: fascinated by, but that resilience, courage, and fear underpin and
Speaker 2: kind of became an obsession for me. And I'll give
Speaker 2: you context around the idea of resilience. I remember a
Speaker 2: point in time where I was like, everyone's putting resilience
Speaker 2: on this pedestal. But I think that a lot of
Speaker 2: what is being framed as resilience is dissociation. Because when
Speaker 2: I stepped in the boxing ring and was being in
Speaker 2: inverted verted commas courageous, I was actually avoiding vulnerability. I
Speaker 2: was dissociating. So I was doing what scared others people,
Speaker 2: and I was framing that is my own courage And
Speaker 2: that was a story that I was telling until I
Speaker 2: realized it was a story I was telling so resilient.
Speaker 1: It's the funny thing because it's super hard to differentiate
Speaker 1: resilience from dissociation, from just steparating yourself, or even from
Speaker 1: vulnerability but refusing to admit it. And so as for example,
Speaker 1: one of my close colleagues, works with the police and
Speaker 1: ambulance drivers, to people who are first responders who come
Speaker 1: upon a scene where somebody's got multiple gunshot wounds or
Speaker 1: there's drowned children, and how horrible things happen, right, And
Speaker 1: if you ask, you know, lots of people think they
Speaker 1: want to do that job in they last forty five
Speaker 1: minutes and they go the first job, this is horrible.
Speaker 1: I can't do it, but lots of people just keep
Speaker 1: doing it. And the tricky question, though, is are you
Speaker 1: doing it but you really are ptsding out the wazoo,
Speaker 1: like you are really suffering, but you do it anyway?
Speaker 1: Or are you just fine? Are you dissociating, are you
Speaker 1: just separating yourself and you compartmentalize that stuff, or have
Speaker 1: you found a way to really allow what's happening to
Speaker 1: watch over you but to be strong and robust to
Speaker 1: it anyway? And I think when we think about resilience,
Speaker 1: it's that last thing I know for what was happening.
Speaker 1: It's not nice, but I can handle it. That's what
Speaker 1: I think people mean when they say resilience. They don't
Speaker 1: mean I force myself not to think about it, and
Speaker 1: I somehow become a different person, and they don't mean
Speaker 1: I can't sleep at night, but I keep doing my
Speaker 1: job right. And so the kind of resilience where you
Speaker 1: don't suffer from it and you're able to keep doing it.
Speaker 1: What the data suggest is that where that comes from.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's a bit of luck, like if
Speaker 1: you've got genes that are resilient, you've got a better
Speaker 1: shot at getting there right. But where it also comes
Speaker 1: from is not having too much bad things happen to you,
Speaker 1: because especially if you're really young, when they happened, it
Speaker 1: disrupts what we call your HPA axis, your hypodermic pituitary
Speaker 1: adrenal axis in your brain, and you you no longer
Speaker 1: get a proper fight or flight response. So if you're
Speaker 1: overwhelmed as a child, that doesn't happen anymore. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, if you live this super lithful existence and
Speaker 1: you've lived life in this little silver spoon, the little
Speaker 1: gold cage for nothing bad's ever happened to you, you
Speaker 1: also never developed the skills, and so there seems to
Speaker 1: be this happy middle ground. The resilience comes from this
Speaker 1: place where you get a little bit of bad things
Speaker 1: happening to you and not at such a furious pace
Speaker 1: that you can't deal with it, and then you just
Speaker 1: slowly learn to handle it.
Speaker 2: I worked with the ambulance Victoria when we went into
Speaker 2: lockdown in Melbourne online with them, and was at the
Speaker 2: same time as I studied epigenetics through a health platform
Speaker 2: here PhDa sixty and the same time that I started
Speaker 2: the podcast, I was having come a SETAs I was
Speaker 2: working through some of my own story of childhood trauma
Speaker 2: and piecing that together and starting to connect dots. And
Speaker 2: one of the questions that came up with that reminded
Speaker 2: me of was so learning some of these personality traits
Speaker 2: from biological sense through the epigenetic platform of pH three sixty.
Speaker 2: And I remember thinking, I realized this sense of comfort
Speaker 2: slash familiarity that I felt in the boxing ring, which
Speaker 2: eventually we have to go that's weird, that's not typical TIF,
Speaker 2: So what's the deal with that? That's a funny place
Speaker 2: to feel at home and familiar? And then and I went,
Speaker 2: is it a specific personality type or trait that is
Speaker 2: going into these roles as first responders? We're also having
Speaker 2: a lot of mental health conversations. Is there a biological
Speaker 2: trait personality trait that gets people susceptible to mental health
Speaker 2: struggles or is there a relationship with that a little
Speaker 2: bit like my relationship with the boxing ring, where I
Speaker 2: was drawn into a space maybe because of experiences that
Speaker 2: it happened to me and a feeling of unconscious safety
Speaker 2: or familiarity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, we don't know
Speaker 1: what brings people into those fields. Often it's just a
Speaker 1: strong desire to help. Often people don't know themselves very well.
Speaker 1: They think, oh, I'd love to be a doctor, and
Speaker 1: then the first time they see blood and gore everywhere,
Speaker 1: they pass out and they go, oh, de friends that
Speaker 1: I wouldn't love to be a doctor. You know, I'd
Speaker 1: love to buy I remember thinking, do you know the
Speaker 1: martial art? I think it's called kendo or ken po.
Speaker 1: I can't remember anymore where you use these swords and
Speaker 1: you yeah, I thought, God, that looks like so much fun,
Speaker 1: and so I went, I signed up for it to
Speaker 1: give it a try, and you were Look, you're like
Speaker 1: a hockey goalie, ice hockey goalie. You're covered in pads
Speaker 1: except for the very top of your head. It's just
Speaker 1: like a little cap on it. And the whole goals
Speaker 1: to hit you on the top of the head with
Speaker 1: the stick as our as you can. And I lasted
Speaker 1: one class. I was like, oh my god, that is
Speaker 1: the most horrible experience and this terrible headache. Right, And
Speaker 1: so that you can be drawn to things because you
Speaker 1: don't know what is involved, and so you think this
Speaker 1: is going to be fun, but it turns out it
Speaker 1: doesn't suit you at all. And I suspect a lot
Speaker 1: of the people who go into those kinds of fields,
Speaker 1: boxing or first responding or anything any of those types
Speaker 1: of things where they're not for everybody. A lot of
Speaker 1: the people are making a mistake. They don't know themselves,
Speaker 1: so they don't know what they're getting themselves into. But
Speaker 1: a lot of people know exactly what they get themselves
Speaker 1: into and they do it really well, and they are
Speaker 1: super important, especially first responders. You need someone in ambulances,
Speaker 1: you need police officers going to the crime scenes, right,
Speaker 1: And so the question is is what enables that? And
Speaker 1: we don't know. I mean, that's why this colleague mind
Speaker 1: is working on this problem. But what I suspect is
Speaker 1: it's going to be people who are just the kind
Speaker 1: of right middle ground amount of trauma and are genetically
Speaker 1: just pretty robust to that and maybe had the good
Speaker 1: luck that their childhood taught them it's okay. Every time
Speaker 1: they were challenged, they were equal to the challenge. You
Speaker 1: didn't overwhelm them, and they slowly built up the skills
Speaker 1: rather than having it all come crashing down on them.
Speaker 2: What year did you write your book about.
Speaker 1: The Social Paradox, the one that just happened? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: my early book, The Social Leap, came out in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: and then I just finished The Social Paradox. So let's see,
Speaker 1: I finished writing it in early twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 1: then it probably I was done by June or so,
Speaker 1: and then it came out about a month ago now.
Speaker 2: And what were what were the questions in that that
Speaker 2: you came upon after finishing the other book, Like what
Speaker 2: was the new angle?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What drove it? Yeah? So I was visiting this
Speaker 1: friend of mine in New York City and he I've
Speaker 1: known him since her little kids, and you know, he
Speaker 1: was particularly well to do as a child, but fine,
Speaker 1: and then he made a gazillion dollars, like crazy rich,
Speaker 1: and so he invited me over to dinner at his house.
Speaker 1: He invited me over to dinner at his house in
Speaker 1: New York, and I was just super excited to see it,
Speaker 1: because like, he's so wealthy. I've never seen what homes
Speaker 1: look like by people to make that much money. And
Speaker 1: so I go visit him and his life is over
Speaker 1: the top. I mean, you've never seen such a fancy
Speaker 1: apartment in your life, and you know, the maid's off
Speaker 1: there cleaning, and the cook is in there making dinner
Speaker 1: and asking us what we want and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And so I turned him and I'm like, Steve Man,
Speaker 1: your life is over the top. And he goes, you know,
Speaker 1: it seems that way, but it's I'm not any happier,
Speaker 1: It's not really any better, And I'm like why, and
Speaker 1: he's just like listing all these problems he have. You know, Well,
Speaker 1: we can't decide which where to go on holiday. My
Speaker 1: wife wants to do this fancy trip. I wanted to
Speaker 1: do that fancy trip, and we're arguing about it. My
Speaker 1: daughter's trying to get into this fancy kindergarten and hasn't
Speaker 1: doesn't know what to get accepted. The cook and the
Speaker 1: maid don't get along, and is this constant sous to
Speaker 1: come I was just like, I look at it, like,
Speaker 1: are you not saving? Like I felt sort of superior
Speaker 1: to him in that moment. How could you not appreciate
Speaker 1: that the amazing life you have, right? And I just
Speaker 1: felt like I was done at his inability to appreciate
Speaker 1: the amazing things that he had. So then about a
Speaker 1: year or so later, I'm reading Frank Marlow's amazing book
Speaker 1: on the Hods of hunter gatherers who are hunt gathers
Speaker 1: live in Tanzania, and they still live very traditional lifestyle,
Speaker 1: and they live right where humanity originated, and so Homo
Speaker 1: sapiens started there. And so they're really an interesting group
Speaker 1: because it's possible that they're living the lifestyle that our
Speaker 1: ancestors lived when we first started out right. Nobody knows,
Speaker 1: but we think there's a good chance because it's the
Speaker 1: same environment, same pressures, etc. And so I'm reading about
Speaker 1: these people and I'm realizing, you know, compared to them,
Speaker 1: I'm a multi millionaire. Two. They bury forty percent of
Speaker 1: their kids before they ever reach adulthood. They don't have
Speaker 1: a single thing set aside for tomorrow. They own almost
Speaker 1: no possessions because everything they own they have to put
Speaker 1: on their back and carry when they move from one
Speaker 1: camp to another, which they do every few months, and
Speaker 1: the list goes on. They're posed to the elements all
Speaker 1: the time, and so compared to them, I'm azillionaire. It's
Speaker 1: just like Steve is azillionaire compared to me, and I
Speaker 1: don't go through my life appreciating it. Don't go God,
Speaker 1: I'm so happy. And in fact, when I started looking
Speaker 1: into it, I realized they're actually probably happier than we are.
Speaker 1: When you ask the Hudsa how happy they've been, they
Speaker 1: give you much higher numbers than when you ask. You know,
Speaker 1: Europeans are Americans and other day they collected with un
Speaker 1: togethers show the same thing. If anything, they're happier than
Speaker 1: we are despite really hard lives.
Speaker 2: This love is so much war like life is going
Speaker 2: in one direction real fast, and it feels like our
Speaker 2: results is as humans are going in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2: It's like we are learning a lot. We know disconnection
Speaker 2: and loneliness and all of the things that are really bad,
Speaker 2: and our mental health is suffering. Yet technology and and
Speaker 2: advancement is pushing us the other way. What is going
Speaker 2: on and how can we as individuals combat that? What
Speaker 2: do we need to know.
Speaker 1: Those are great questions. So to start with the first one,
Speaker 1: what's going on? I don't know, but I can tell
Speaker 1: you what I think is going on, and that is
Speaker 1: that our most fundamental need that we evolved when we
Speaker 1: left the trees, so when we stopped being basically chimps
Speaker 1: and slowly evolved into humans around six starting around six
Speaker 1: many years ago, is our need for connection. Because once
Speaker 1: we got forced out of the rainforest, we suddenly had
Speaker 1: to rely on each other in order to not get
Speaker 1: eaten by all these predators that we didn't even care
Speaker 1: about when we're basically chimps when we were living in
Speaker 1: the trees because they couldn't catch us. We're up there
Speaker 1: doing our thing, and we're kings of the canopy, just
Speaker 1: like chimps are today. But once we are on the ground,
Speaker 1: even a chimp on the ground is easy dinner for
Speaker 1: any big cat, and they're easy dinner for hyenas and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So what the data suggests the way
Speaker 1: we solved that problem is by bonding together and connecting
Speaker 1: tightly to one another in a way that chimps just don't.
Speaker 1: And so my favorite example of how we connect and
Speaker 1: our fundamentally cooperative nature can be seen in our eyeballs.
Speaker 1: If you look at the eyeballs and a chimpanzee, they're
Speaker 1: all brown. And so when a chimp diverts its gaze
Speaker 1: and looks over, let's say, down to the left, other
Speaker 1: chimps can't tell because it's disguising the direction of its gaze.
Speaker 1: And what that tells you is that a chimp doesn't
Speaker 1: want other chimps to know what's caught its attention because
Speaker 1: they're fundamentally competitive with one another. That the other chimps
Speaker 1: knew what it was looking at, they might try to
Speaker 1: get it first. Whereas humans have a white sclare to
Speaker 1: our eyes. We're advertising the directions of our gaze. So
Speaker 1: when I look down like that, you can see that
Speaker 1: at thirty paces away, and you instantly know Bill's looking
Speaker 1: something over there, which means Bill wants you to know
Speaker 1: that he's advertising that because he thinks you're going to
Speaker 1: help him solve whatever the problem is, the opportunity or
Speaker 1: the threat that he's discovered, right, and so shifting that
Speaker 1: fundamentally cooperative orientation is what allowed us to survive on
Speaker 1: the savannah. When suddenly we're basically everyone's dinner. The second
Speaker 1: thing that we need, so that's connection. The second thing
Speaker 1: that we evolve though, is a strong desire for autonomy,
Speaker 1: to do our own thing, to self governed, to choose
Speaker 1: our own path. And the reason that autonomy is so
Speaker 1: important is that you need to also stand out a
Speaker 1: little bit so others will choose you to be on
Speaker 1: their team, in their coalition, so the partners will choose
Speaker 1: you as a mate. You have to have something about
Speaker 1: you that's a little bit better in some ways than
Speaker 1: other people that are available. And so autonomy allows us
Speaker 1: to decide, well, here's what I want to do, Here's
Speaker 1: what I think I could be the best at, and
Speaker 1: here's where I'm going to dedicate my energy and efforts
Speaker 1: so that I can really develop competence in the domain
Speaker 1: that matters to me. Because of course, no one knows
Speaker 1: better than you do that you might enjoy boxing, or
Speaker 1: that you might enjoy stamp collecting or whatever it is
Speaker 1: you know that people like to do. And so the
Speaker 1: problem is, though, that those two needs are directly in
Speaker 1: competition with one another. So to the degree that I'm
Speaker 1: connection oriented, I get together with you and you say, hey,
Speaker 1: I really want to see a rom com and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wanted to see a schwarzeneggerflick. And then we have like,
Speaker 1: if I do my autonomy thing, I just say see
Speaker 1: you later and I go off of my own. But
Speaker 1: if I do my connection thing, we have to compromise,
Speaker 1: and so I have to sacrifice my autonomy. Then of
Speaker 1: course the same holds whenever I if I do the opposite,
Speaker 1: if i decide to go do my own thing, then
Speaker 1: I'm not forming connections. I'm just so satisfying myself. And
Speaker 1: so those two needs. Evolution kind of played a dirty
Speaker 1: trick on us. Those two needs are in a direct
Speaker 1: tension with one another, and we have to find a
Speaker 1: balance in order to be happy. Now, what I believe
Speaker 1: is that our ancestors found a very different balance than
Speaker 1: we found. And it comes right back to the way
Speaker 1: you started your question with loneliness and technology and all that.
Speaker 1: And I believe that the reason that this has happened
Speaker 1: is we called it an evolutionary mismatch. And so think
Speaker 1: about fat salt and sugar on the savannah, where you know,
Speaker 1: millions of years ago, or even hundreds of thousands years ago,
Speaker 1: fat salt and sugar were crazy rare, really hard to find.
Speaker 1: So whenever you found a source of any of those
Speaker 1: three things, you hubered up as much of it as
Speaker 1: you possibly could, because even if you're not hungry, who
Speaker 1: knows is the be any more tomorrow, best to eat
Speaker 1: as much of it as you can. Well, now, we
Speaker 1: live in a world where fat, salt, and sugar are everywhere,
Speaker 1: and we still have this tendency to need more of
Speaker 1: it than we really need because we're trying to stockpile
Speaker 1: when we don't live in a world where stockpiling is
Speaker 1: necessary anymore. And so we've got this evolved tendency to
Speaker 1: do something that's very old and changes very slowly, and
Speaker 1: then we've got this modern cultural pro situation where we
Speaker 1: don't need to do it anymore. And that's the mismatch
Speaker 1: that our old evolved self hasn't caught up with our
Speaker 1: new cultural self of what the way our rich world
Speaker 1: opportunities exist. I think the same thing has happened with
Speaker 1: the autonomy and connection. I think basically the story here
Speaker 1: is that because we're so tightly connected to each other,
Speaker 1: even though our ancestors led these egalitarian lives where everybody
Speaker 1: got to make their own decision, nobody's in charge nobody
Speaker 1: can tell you, Tiff, you're coming with us and we're
Speaker 1: going north. You could say I'd rather go south. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. We all go north and you go south.
Speaker 1: You're lying food and we're all fine because you can't
Speaker 1: strike out on your own as a human, and so
Speaker 1: you if you really want to go south, you have
Speaker 1: to talk us into it. And if you can't, well
Speaker 1: then you've got to go north. And so I think
Speaker 1: that opportunities for autonomy were actually really rare in our
Speaker 1: ancestral past that we principle they're always there. In reality
Speaker 1: they never were. So we need connection more than autonomy.
Speaker 1: But we've all to want autonomy more than connection so
Speaker 1: that we would grab it whenever we actually could. And
Speaker 1: the problem is now autonomy is like fat, salt and sugar.
Speaker 1: It's everywhere, And so cities give you endless autonomy. Education, wealth,
Speaker 1: all these things give you autonomy and opportunities. Technology is
Speaker 1: probably the biggest source of autonomy because you and I
Speaker 1: can do We can live in the same household, We
Speaker 1: could do whatever we want, never even see each other.
Speaker 1: I could drone in my latte when you go to
Speaker 1: the shops. You know, we could do anything. We want
Speaker 1: without without needing each other at all anymore. And the
Speaker 1: problem is that what that means is that our psychology
Speaker 1: hasn't cut up to our reality. We need to connect
Speaker 1: with each other, but we want autonomy, and so we
Speaker 1: keep making their own choices.
Speaker 2: How is it with these behavioral drivers like you just said,
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about examples, and they're so strong that they
Speaker 2: make us take action sometimes and in the case something
Speaker 2: of four years, and consciously we don't recognize it until
Speaker 2: one day we do. So I remember sitting in a
Speaker 2: therapist's office ten years after moving from Tazzy to Melbourne
Speaker 2: and having a conversation, and at some point that conversation,
Speaker 2: I realized I'd moved to Melbourne in my late teens
Speaker 2: to be brave, be special, be independent and show everyone
Speaker 2: at home fucking how amazing I am so that they
Speaker 2: would love me. And I'd spend ten years becoming a
Speaker 2: version of myself that no one could relate to and
Speaker 2: cutting myself, being disconnected, and then building a facade, so
Speaker 2: I'd essentially ran the opposite direction. I was so disconnected
Speaker 2: from what I and I was like, how have I
Speaker 2: done this? For a decade? As I was in teens
Speaker 2: I was like, how the fuck have I done this
Speaker 2: for a decade? This is and not known that this
Speaker 2: is what was going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the problem is that every one of those
Speaker 1: individual decisions would have made sense, but the collective made
Speaker 1: no sense at all. And so if each step along
Speaker 1: the way, imagine that I'm standing right next to you
Speaker 1: going piff, do you really want to do this? And
Speaker 1: you're explain to me, yes, I do, and here's why.
Speaker 1: Here's how much fun this will be, you know if
Speaker 1: I stay in Tassy, And then here's how much fun
Speaker 1: it'll be if I do if I go to Melbourne,
Speaker 1: And every step of the way you could do that,
Speaker 1: because remember, we've evolved to want the autonomy. We want
Speaker 1: to do our own thing, but we need the connection.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that what we don't realize is
Speaker 1: that every time we choose autonomy, we're actually we were
Speaker 1: buying necessity, sacrificing connection unless we somehow got really lucky
Speaker 1: and we surrounded ourselves by people who want to do
Speaker 1: exactly what we want to do. And so the day
Speaker 1: you come home and say, hey man, I'm moving to Melbourne,
Speaker 1: and all your best friends go, that's what I was secret.
Speaker 1: Let's go right. That would be perfect, but life rarely
Speaker 1: works that way. Sometimes you get lucky and it does,
Speaker 1: more often than not, it doesn't, and so you keep
Speaker 1: breaking connections or slowly wakening them because you're making the
Speaker 1: right choice in the moment each time. But the collective
Speaker 1: of all those choices is very much the wrong one.
Speaker 1: And we find ourselves suddenly down the road having talked
Speaker 1: to the people who matter to us in a really
Speaker 1: long time, have let our marriages get weak, have let
Speaker 1: our friendships leapt, have not been in contact with their family,
Speaker 1: and we're just not happy anymore. And we may have
Speaker 1: been a huge success. I call these people sad success
Speaker 1: stories because they may have done great things, they may
Speaker 1: be head turner running the CNN, are all sorts of
Speaker 1: important people, but they in getting there, they kept paying
Speaker 1: a price that they didn't realize they were paying. Because really,
Speaker 1: the whole reason we evolved to autonomy, to become confidence,
Speaker 1: to actually become more valuable to our friends, it's not
Speaker 1: to disconnect ourselves from them. It's to make them want
Speaker 1: us even more. But if we lose sight of that fact,
Speaker 1: if all we want is to be a success and
Speaker 1: be better at things, then we've lost out of the
Speaker 1: whole point of being better in the first place, which
Speaker 1: is to tighten our connections.
Speaker 2: Drive to want to be special or stand out or
Speaker 2: you know, be successful, which is at odds with the
Speaker 2: need for belonging and to fit in. So we all
Speaker 2: want to fit in. It's like I don't I don't
Speaker 2: fit in. I don't fit in. I don't fit in.
Speaker 2: But also I want to feed in, but I want
Speaker 2: to be special. How do we remedy that? What's the
Speaker 2: solution to managing those two things?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see at an individual level this is really
Speaker 1: hard because everybody has their own balance point. But what
Speaker 1: I believe is that on average we're all overweting autonomy
Speaker 1: and underweighting connection. And the best example I can give
Speaker 1: you that shows that, well, there's many examples, but here's
Speaker 1: a real clear one. So the first city started about
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago. It was in Mesopotamia and what's
Speaker 1: now eastern Iraq. I'm a town called Rock Steven mentioned
Speaker 1: in the Bible. You know, Noah's great grandson or something
Speaker 1: was the king of a Rock or that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So it's a very important early city. So city has
Speaker 1: been around for five thousand years up until about two
Speaker 1: hundred years ago, only one in ten humans on the
Speaker 1: entire planet lived in cities. Ninety percent of us lived
Speaker 1: in the countryside in rural areas. Starting about eighteen forty
Speaker 1: United States and the closer to nineteen hundred elsewhere in
Speaker 1: the world, people started moving to cities in mass And
Speaker 1: so now by two thousand and seven, fifty percent of
Speaker 1: all humanity lives in cities. And so we now to
Speaker 1: pass that more than fifty percent of humans are in
Speaker 1: cities right in the country. Now you think, all right,
Speaker 1: if all humans all of the world are voting with
Speaker 1: their feet to live in cities, they must make you happier.
Speaker 1: Lo and behold the opposite. People are happier in the
Speaker 1: countryside than they're in the city. And so we just
Speaker 1: keep making the wrong decision over and over again. And
Speaker 1: why do we do that, Because in the moment, the
Speaker 1: autonomy choice go to Melbourne is the right choice, develop myself,
Speaker 1: become the person I want to be, and stick around
Speaker 1: and connect with family and friends seems like the wrong choice.
Speaker 1: So what I try to tell people is, well, can
Speaker 1: you find ways to do both? And you have your
Speaker 1: cake and eat it too, And one way to do
Speaker 1: that is say, all right, well where am I disconnected?
Speaker 1: Who are the people that matter to me? And how
Speaker 1: can I reconnect them with them in a way that
Speaker 1: doesn't sacrifice my autonomy. Because once you have to sacrifice
Speaker 1: your autonomy, we'll stop doing it. You have to know yourself.
Speaker 1: You're just not going to do that, but you will
Speaker 1: when you're quite old, but when you're younger, you just
Speaker 1: won't do it. And so what I tell people is,
Speaker 1: think about all the activities you do throughout the course
Speaker 1: of the day, and think about the ones that you're
Speaker 1: doing alone. Do those with somebody else, and don't sacrifice
Speaker 1: your autonomy. Do the activity you want to do, but
Speaker 1: there was somebody else who wants to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Now that hopefully what that means is do it in person.
Speaker 1: So like, if you love to box and none of
Speaker 1: your old friends do, well, that's a bummer, but maybe
Speaker 1: it's time to make some new friends who also love
Speaker 1: to box. But if you love to do some things
Speaker 1: that you can do boxing you can't do online with folks.
Speaker 1: But like, for example, I love to do the crossword
Speaker 1: and my little sister loves to do the crossword. She
Speaker 1: lives in London and so we don't chat that often previously,
Speaker 1: but once COVID hit, we got in this habit of
Speaker 1: doing the crossword together. So she wakes up in the morning,
Speaker 1: it's laid afternoon here, she makes some morning coffee, and
Speaker 1: then we just do the Crossford together and kind of
Speaker 1: chit chat while we do it. And so we're satisfying
Speaker 1: our autonomy needs. We're both doing the Crossford anyway, but
Speaker 1: now we're simultaneously satisfying our connection needs. And that for me,
Speaker 1: it's the best answer I can give in our modern
Speaker 1: lives is find a way to do the things you
Speaker 1: really love to do with other people. Sometimes that means
Speaker 1: you have to buy new people because you don't know
Speaker 1: anyone who does what you do, or it has to
Speaker 1: be in person and your folks, you know who you
Speaker 1: do it with them aren't there. But sometimes that means
Speaker 1: finding a way to do it online where you can
Speaker 1: just be on the phone or zoom or whatever and
Speaker 1: connect with old friends at the same time.
Speaker 2: And was it so hard in all different contexts to
Speaker 2: do the thing we know we should do, but we
Speaker 2: keep doing the thing that is shipped for us? What
Speaker 2: do we keep choosing the ship thing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's two reasons for that. The reason one is that, remember,
Speaker 1: if I'm right, we've evolved to want autonomy more than connection,
Speaker 1: but we need connection more than autonomy, and so actually
Speaker 1: we keep making the right choice. So if you and
Speaker 1: I are hanging out and you say, man, I really
Speaker 1: want to see around common ask I really want to
Speaker 1: see Schwerzenker film, I say, okay, I'll see after the movie,
Speaker 1: and we just both go into our separate theaters. Now principle,
Speaker 1: that's not a bad thing to do, right in reality
Speaker 1: that we come back out and we haven't had the
Speaker 1: same experience. We can't really talk about it because we
Speaker 1: saw different movies, and so were slowly just sort of
Speaker 1: separating our lives. We're becoming disconnected. And so each one
Speaker 1: of those choices might be defensible, but the long term
Speaker 1: consequence of repeatedly doing that is indefensible. And then the
Speaker 1: second reason for that is that sometimes the things that
Speaker 1: are best for us aren't fun in the moment, and
Speaker 1: so we get in the fight between our now self
Speaker 1: and our future self. And the self that we want
Speaker 1: to be wants to do, you know, wants to train
Speaker 1: harder or eat better or study more. But the self
Speaker 1: that we are right now, wants to put their feet up,
Speaker 1: watch Stevie and have a beer. And those fights are
Speaker 1: as old as humanity itself, because it's always a struggle
Speaker 1: between what you know will be good for you in
Speaker 1: the long term and what you think will be fun
Speaker 1: in the immediate term.
Speaker 2: So true. I came back from the Himalayas late last
Speaker 2: year and just absolutely adored being in that space. And
Speaker 2: I live in Elwood and so nice little beach. I
Speaker 2: love it. I love it, but it is suburbia. And
Speaker 2: I made the deal that once a week I would
Speaker 2: take it a half day drive down to the dan
Speaker 2: Nongs and hike with no no audiobooks, no podcast, no music,
Speaker 2: just me and the wherever the hell the trail wherever
Speaker 2: I landed. And it was a battle every time. It
Speaker 2: was a battle, like in the moment, this is a
Speaker 2: waste of time. I could just go to the beach
Speaker 2: and just get it done. And it was like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's old TIF talking. And the minute I got down there,
Speaker 2: I could just film my whole nervous system just dissipate
Speaker 2: into bliss.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's it's super hard. Thomas Shelling. I won
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize in economics had these great stories. When
Speaker 1: he was a little kid, he was reading about this
Speaker 1: Holler Explorers. I don't remember which one, we'll say admiralble Bird,
Speaker 1: and the guy would go out in the snow with
Speaker 1: no shirt on, just so that he could toughen himself up.
Speaker 1: And so Shelling was like, okay, I'm going to do
Speaker 1: that too. He's a kid, right, and so he says,
Speaker 1: I'm going to sleep at night with no blanket and
Speaker 1: no pajamas, just a mind to wear, and I'll toughen
Speaker 1: myself up. So he gets in bed and he's got
Speaker 1: no blanket on, and in two seconds he's breathing and
Speaker 1: he pulls it on. So the next night he says, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll hide my blanket, and so I don't do that.
Speaker 1: So of course he knows where his blanket was. He's
Speaker 1: breathing for whatever, he goes and gets it. You keep
Speaker 1: setting yourself up, and so the struggle that you're having
Speaker 1: is you know what will actually make you happy once
Speaker 1: you pull it off, but it's not easy to pull
Speaker 1: it off in the moment. The lazy, comfortable thing is
Speaker 1: to do nothing. And so the best way to force
Speaker 1: yourself to do these things is to try to make
Speaker 1: them a habit. And the best way to make things
Speaker 1: a habit is to do what we call surrendering control
Speaker 1: of your decisions to the environment. Now that sounds weird,
Speaker 1: but it actually means something really simple. You don't want
Speaker 1: to have to decide is today the day I'll go
Speaker 1: down to the mountains and go for a hike. You
Speaker 1: want to have that decision or to made for you,
Speaker 1: and so you make yourself a deal. Every Thursday morning,
Speaker 1: after breakfast, I get if that suits you, I get
Speaker 1: my car and go. And then when Thursday comes around,
Speaker 1: you've already made the decision to go, and so it's
Speaker 1: a whole Even though you still might feel some resistance,
Speaker 1: it's easier to go than it is to let yourself
Speaker 1: down and not follow through on your commitment. Whereas if
Speaker 1: you say I'll decide each every day whether today's today,
Speaker 1: you could just saying no, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow for weeks, right,
Speaker 1: And so the key is to make something habit, you
Speaker 1: have to find a regular time and set of occurrences
Speaker 1: in which you state yourself, that's what I will do.
Speaker 1: And it works incredibly well.
Speaker 2: Thursdays was my day. Incidentally, there you go, you must
Speaker 2: have known what about relationships and dating in today's world
Speaker 2: and environment, because that has changed a lot.
Speaker 1: So relationships, Yeah, then they have changed a lot. It's
Speaker 1: really interesting. There's a number of pluses in mind, since
Speaker 1: on the plus side, relationships that start online, long term
Speaker 1: relationships that start online have a better chance of lasting
Speaker 1: than long term relationships that start almost anywhere where you
Speaker 1: meet in person. And so at least that's the most
Speaker 1: recent data I've seen. I can't promise you that'll prove
Speaker 1: to be truice because it is changing fast.
Speaker 2: What do you think that's based on?
Speaker 3: Better questioning on I suspect it's a needle in a
Speaker 3: haystack problem that if there's a really perfect person out
Speaker 3: there for you, your chance of finding them online is
Speaker 3: better than in real life.
Speaker 1: Because you could meet infinite number of people online, and
Speaker 1: in real life you can only meet the folks that
Speaker 1: happen to shop at the store, go to the bar,
Speaker 1: or go to the gym. You know, it's a much
Speaker 1: smaller collection. And so it's a complicated one though, because
Speaker 1: if you live in the country and there's not many
Speaker 1: people available to you, your relationships tend to last just
Speaker 1: because there's no better alternatives. But if you live in
Speaker 1: the city and there's lots of alternatives, your relationships don't
Speaker 1: tend to last because you're constantly tempted by this other
Speaker 1: person who might be a better master for you. And
Speaker 1: so what the web does always that they don't have
Speaker 1: to be in your face. You don't have to get
Speaker 1: on tender once you have a relationship, but you can
Speaker 1: when you're trying to set one up, and then you've
Speaker 1: got just an enormous scope of possible people. So I
Speaker 1: think that's the cause, but we don't know. But here's
Speaker 1: the thing. When you get on the web and you
Speaker 1: start this process, the world is a very different one
Speaker 1: for men and women, and in a way that doesn't
Speaker 1: match well. So men on tender live in Peru or
Speaker 1: South Africa, by which I mean they live in a
Speaker 1: very unequal economy. About twenty percent of the men get
Speaker 1: about eighty percent of the interest, and so they're getting
Speaker 1: swiped right, and then the other eighty percent of the
Speaker 1: men get hardly anybody showing any interest in them at all.
Speaker 1: So for a very small percentage of men, they live
Speaker 1: in the living large, And of course, when you live
Speaker 1: in that large, you tend not to commit. You want
Speaker 1: to keep dating forever because there's lots of people who
Speaker 1: are interested in you. For women, it's more like living
Speaker 1: in Denmark or Sweden. They live in a very equal
Speaker 1: society where basically all women get some interest on tender
Speaker 1: gre or than others, but basically all of them get
Speaker 1: a fair bit of interest. The problem is that even
Speaker 1: though they get a fair bit of interest, they're not
Speaker 1: reciprocally interested in the guys who are necessarily interested in them.
Speaker 1: They're still chasing the twenty percent that all the women
Speaker 1: are chasing, and so it doesn't that the front end
Speaker 1: of the process doesn't match up very well. What I
Speaker 1: suspect but don't know, is that both men and women
Speaker 1: age out of that, like that's a real fun state
Speaker 1: of affairs, maybe when you're means in early twenties, But
Speaker 1: then you kind of learn your lesson if you still
Speaker 1: if you're swiping the same guys that all the other
Speaker 1: women are and they're not committing to you, they just
Speaker 1: date forever. And you also start to realize these guys
Speaker 1: who you've been overlooking have lots of positive qualities that
Speaker 1: would make them a really wonderful partner, and maybe you
Speaker 1: shouldn't just be latching on to those features that show
Speaker 1: well on Tinder. And so I think we live in
Speaker 1: this kind of weird world where on the front end
Speaker 1: it's a bad thing, it sets men and women up
Speaker 1: for disappointment, but on the back end, the relationships that
Speaker 1: do start that way tend to last.
Speaker 2: Our environment I was talking a lot about our environment
Speaker 2: and how our environment influences us, and I guess our
Speaker 2: environments changed so much over the years, especially now that
Speaker 2: people know that we can control people by dopamine and
Speaker 2: addiction and stimulation. So how what do we need to
Speaker 2: know about the stimulation of the environment around us these days?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. If you look at
Speaker 1: the way we respond to our world, our world would
Speaker 1: be almost overwhelmingly over stimulating for people, even though if
Speaker 1: we I machine a few just one hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: much less one thousand or ten thousand years ago. If
Speaker 1: you look at hunter gatherers societies, they sit around a
Speaker 1: lot chatting the same small group of people that they
Speaker 1: always chat with. And if you look at the act
Speaker 1: what they can do for leisure, there's only a few choice.
Speaker 1: If you could look at what they do, they don't
Speaker 1: read right there's no books in on together's societies, and
Speaker 1: so they're only exposed to the ideas of their immediate
Speaker 1: group and their immediate group's ancestors and the stories that
Speaker 1: are told around the fire. We have, every good idea
Speaker 1: every human's ever had is available to us in a
Speaker 1: book form, or in a movie or instagram, you know,
Speaker 1: tiny reels. There's all sorts of ways that you can
Speaker 1: absorb information in today's world really really rapidly. And so
Speaker 1: one way to look at the change over time is
Speaker 1: to go back and watch a movie that has made
Speaker 1: the fifties or early sixties, and you're like, nothing's happening.
Speaker 1: It's just crazy slow compared to a movie that we
Speaker 1: would watch now, it's all happened in bambam bam bam.
Speaker 1: And so the weird thing about it, though, is that
Speaker 1: the word boring doesn't emerge in languages until relatively recently. Now,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that our ancestors weren't bored some of
Speaker 1: the time. I suspect that they were. But boring became
Speaker 1: a problem when stimulation was are readily available that we
Speaker 1: could escape it easily. Whereas you know, none of you
Speaker 1: don't have to say gee, I mean so annoying that
Speaker 1: I can't fly. That'd be really nice if you could fly.
Speaker 1: We'd all love, probably love to be able to do it,
Speaker 1: but it's just so irrelevant to our lives. Of Course,
Speaker 1: I can't fly across the valley. Of course I've got
Speaker 1: to get into my car and sit through traffic or
Speaker 1: walk through the you know, across the stream, or whatever
Speaker 1: it is I don't want to do, And so we
Speaker 1: don't think about absurd counterfactuals that aren't possible, like life
Speaker 1: could just fly or bean myself over or something. I
Speaker 1: think our ancestors, even though a lot of what they
Speaker 1: do is probably boring, it just didn't occur to them
Speaker 1: that it could be otherwise. And now, because this world
Speaker 1: that we live in is so over stimulating, it always
Speaker 1: occurs to us and within seconds on board, I want
Speaker 1: to do something else. And so because something else is
Speaker 1: still available, right, we can fly. Now, we can beam
Speaker 1: ourselves up, so to speak. And so I think the
Speaker 1: problem arise is that this isn't We didn't evolve in
Speaker 1: a world like that, and so it has these weird consequences,
Speaker 1: one of which is, if anything, it might increase dissatisfaction
Speaker 1: because instead of being casually cool with the fact that
Speaker 1: we can't fly. Slash we get bored. We get really
Speaker 1: upset when we get bored. Slash can fly, and we
Speaker 1: want to fix the problem immediately.
Speaker 2: Hell, how have you changed living your life as a
Speaker 2: result of being in this world of research and interest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good question too. I've started to realize
Speaker 1: that connection is just much more important than I was
Speaker 1: ever giving it credit for, and so I try to
Speaker 1: be really conscious about all, Right, my autonomy things matter
Speaker 1: to me. I love my work, that's autonomy stuff. I
Speaker 1: want to write my book, I want to do the
Speaker 1: research that I'm doing. But I when the opportunites for
Speaker 1: connection come along, if they're expected, we're all good at it.
Speaker 1: We're all good about arranging a date, going with our
Speaker 1: friends to a movie, doing the connection things that we
Speaker 1: plan in advance. But what I've tried to become better
Speaker 1: at is doing the connection things that just suddenly emerge
Speaker 1: that I wasn't expected. And that's particularly important with small children,
Speaker 1: because you never know what they're going to do and
Speaker 1: they might be having this wonderful connection moment that I'm
Speaker 1: in my past. I've been Give me a minute, I'm
Speaker 1: busy and now I just close the laptop and I
Speaker 1: tried to. I'm not perfect about it, but I try
Speaker 1: to reconnect the moment I see that opportunity.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I am. I think the thing I love
Speaker 2: about coaching and being interested in this space is it
Speaker 2: forces me to always be self aware. And you know,
Speaker 2: every time you think you opened the door on self awareness,
Speaker 2: there's another there's a fucking door there. You're like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, like, oh, six months ago, I thought I'd arrived,
Speaker 2: and here I am standing in the door, keep rhyving.
Speaker 2: But it fascinates me, and I guess there was the
Speaker 2: beginning of that was confronting, because it's like, well, first,
Speaker 2: the first thing is why I uncovered this Some information here,
Speaker 2: some intel that was fascinating has the potential to keep
Speaker 2: me stark or make me miserable, make me angry about it.
Speaker 2: But now I guess I've selled into it and I
Speaker 2: love it. I love facilitating conversations where like I don't
Speaker 2: like to say coaching, I just like to say, yeah,
Speaker 2: that facilitating conversations because I'm learning too, and this.
Speaker 1: Is what I there's no harm in that, right, I've
Speaker 1: learned more from teaching than i've learned as a student, probably,
Speaker 1: but the teaching and coaching is connecting, and so the
Speaker 1: communities that you and I've landed at the same space,
Speaker 1: which is these autonomy things that I do. I want
Speaker 1: to make them more fun for me and more valuable
Speaker 1: by now trying to transmit them to others.
Speaker 2: I remember laughing years ago when I realized, you know,
Speaker 2: like my I look back at my resume and there
Speaker 2: was I worked a lot in hospitality, loved it for
Speaker 2: a lot of years. When I was younger. I worked
Speaker 2: a lot in customer service, and then in sales roles,
Speaker 2: and you know, you know, when you would write the
Speaker 2: cover letters or you would write a little description on
Speaker 2: your resus may have wanted, you know, and there was
Speaker 2: this emphasis on people. I love people, you know, I
Speaker 2: love relationships. I love people. When I started going when
Speaker 2: I've uncovered that, oh there's some stuff when I in
Speaker 2: childhood I need to deal with, and the stuff I
Speaker 2: wanted to deal with was connection and relationships. It was
Speaker 2: like I struggle to let people get close. I struggle
Speaker 2: to actually connect. And I was like your my story
Speaker 2: was oh look, little salesperson, and you're oh, yeah, because
Speaker 2: you love people and connection it's like, no, yeah, you
Speaker 2: love it, but that's not doing it. That's you telling
Speaker 2: yourself a story. You're doing it when really you're fascinated
Speaker 2: by your inability to do it, which made me laugh.
Speaker 2: It was like, oh, huh, story, Well, I'll.
Speaker 1: Tell you what you know. The Socrates says, no, yourself,
Speaker 1: and he'd be very proud of you, because most of
Speaker 1: us score our whole lives and never admit that to ourselves.
Speaker 2: I'm sick. Give me myself, the Socrates give me a
Speaker 2: deadline on when I might know myself fully.
Speaker 1: One always hopes that you get closer to that answer
Speaker 1: right before you kick off.
Speaker 2: What else, I guess what are your biggest messages that
Speaker 2: you like to open people's eyes to, just for for
Speaker 2: living better, for being? Like happiness? What is happiness? What
Speaker 2: do we think happiness is?
Speaker 1: What helps? I mean? The one thing I always try
Speaker 1: to remind people because it's important, is that almost all
Speaker 1: of our traits are about half genetic. And so the
Speaker 1: day you're born, or actually the day sperm meats egg,
Speaker 1: the photograph has been taken, about half that picture is done,
Speaker 1: and the rest of the picture is going to get
Speaker 1: filled out as you go through your life, and the
Speaker 1: unfortunate truth about what the data show is that parents
Speaker 1: don't matter very much. We like to think parents matter
Speaker 1: a lot. They'd metter a lot in one way. They
Speaker 1: give you a happy childhood or they don't, and they
Speaker 1: can really mess you up if they give you a
Speaker 1: very unhappy childhood, that we know. But if you have
Speaker 1: the sort of typical childhood where they treat you reasonably
Speaker 1: while and all that kind of stuff, they don't have
Speaker 1: much influence on who you become as an adult. About
Speaker 1: seven percent is what the data show. Wow, though, about
Speaker 1: fifty percent is your genes, About seven percent is what
Speaker 1: your parents did, and then about forty three percent is
Speaker 1: just the random stuff that you experience in life with
Speaker 1: your peers and the things that happen to you and
Speaker 1: the things that you do. We don't know what those
Speaker 1: things are yet, but we know that statistically that's what's
Speaker 1: going on. And so what that means a bunch of things.
Speaker 1: One of the things that it means is that, you know,
Speaker 1: cut yourself a break if you're not getting to where
Speaker 1: you want to be because you may be fighting your
Speaker 1: genes that make it harder for you to get there
Speaker 1: than it is for other people, and so you might think,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm working on this just as hard
Speaker 1: as Bob over there, but he's getting you know, he's
Speaker 1: he's losing way faster, becoming fitter faster, or getting better
Speaker 1: at holding computers, whatever it is you want to do
Speaker 1: faster than I am. Well, maybe you know Bob's genes
Speaker 1: just take them in that direction, in yours don't. But
Speaker 1: whether your genes take you there or not mean you
Speaker 1: can't get there on your own anyway. And so my
Speaker 1: favorite data to show that point is there's obesity is
Speaker 1: more genetic than most things, at least in our modern environment.
Speaker 1: It didn't used to be, and we don't quite know
Speaker 1: why that is, but the data show that obesity now
Speaker 1: is about seventy percent genetic. Nonetheless, if you look at
Speaker 1: people who have genes to be thin, moderately overweight, or obese,
Speaker 1: and then you look at what they actually are, you
Speaker 1: see that most people are in the category where the
Speaker 1: genes would put them. But if you're not in the
Speaker 1: category where e genes would put them, you're almost always
Speaker 1: in the healthier direction. So people who have overweight genes
Speaker 1: are more likely to be thin than they are to
Speaker 1: be obese. People who have obese genes are more it
Speaker 1: can be just overweight or maybe even thin. Then they
Speaker 1: are to go into the morbidly obese direction. And so
Speaker 1: that's determination. That's like I'm going to be fit. I'm
Speaker 1: going to do what it takes. Now, if you're lucky,
Speaker 1: you've got genes that just make that easy for you.
Speaker 1: You get up in the morning, you eat it, you
Speaker 1: have a chucolate milkshake, You walk to your car, and
Speaker 1: that's all it takes. You've now exercised for the day,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and your body's metabolism is so fast
Speaker 1: you're off to the races. If you're not lucky, it's
Speaker 1: hard work. But people put that hard work in they
Speaker 1: get there anyway. And so agency really matters. Deciding what
Speaker 1: you want to be is important. And what I suspect
Speaker 1: but don't know, is that what underlies those data is
Speaker 1: that the more your genes push you in the wrong direction,
Speaker 1: the more you find shortcuts half ways around what your
Speaker 1: genes are trying to get you to do. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if you look at self control, what it means to
Speaker 1: have good self control, it turns out it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: I can stare at that bag of potato chips and
Speaker 1: not eat it. What it does mean is that when
Speaker 1: I'm in the grocery store and I see the bag
Speaker 1: of potato chips, I just don't buy them because I
Speaker 1: know full well that when I get home, if they're
Speaker 1: in the cupboard, I'm eating them, right. And so people
Speaker 1: of good self control have way better life outcomes than
Speaker 1: people who don't, and the reason is because they structure
Speaker 1: their environment in ways so their genetic weaknesses don't stymy them.
Speaker 1: You know, in my own case, if you make brownies,
Speaker 1: especially proper American brownies that are really chuclated and delicious,
Speaker 1: I'm going to eat them, whether I'm hungry or not.
Speaker 1: So I just don't buy those suckers. And less there's
Speaker 1: some special occasion where I say to myself, you know what,
Speaker 1: I could hoover up that whole pan, No big deal,
Speaker 1: because I'm not going to have them around for a
Speaker 1: long time again. And so that's the kind of key
Speaker 1: to happiness and to all these things is you want
Speaker 1: to find the path of least resistance for yourself. And
Speaker 1: usually what that means is doing your best to structure
Speaker 1: your environment in such a way that will make success
Speaker 1: more likely for whatever it is your goals.
Speaker 2: Are I think I've got two last questions, these market
Speaker 2: last ones and less more pop up in my I've
Speaker 2: written that many things down. I can't even read my
Speaker 2: own note thing here because I keep doing Oh I
Speaker 2: want to know about that happiness? Can we be both
Speaker 2: happy and remain ambitious.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And so the main thing is that there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with wanting to strive your whole life. In fact,
Speaker 1: all of us kind of do in some way. Some
Speaker 1: of us are more striving than others. But everybody wants
Speaker 1: to be valued and wants to be seen by their
Speaker 1: friends and family as contributing something important to the group.
Speaker 1: And we've evolved to want that because our ancestors, who
Speaker 1: cost more calories than they brought in typically got a
Speaker 1: thwack in the back of the skull one day when
Speaker 1: they're walking along, or they woke up and everybody's gone.
Speaker 1: They get abandoned, and then they became hyena food. And
Speaker 1: so we've evolved a strong desire to contribute. So that's
Speaker 1: natural and normal and one way that manifest and the
Speaker 1: modern role is be ambitious, to want to achieve. But
Speaker 1: what you also want to do is you want to
Speaker 1: say all right, Well, how ambitious am I? And can
Speaker 1: I set my sites in such a way that I
Speaker 1: set them in advance and then I reward myself by
Speaker 1: doing the social things that that trait actually evolved for.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that you need to make those
Speaker 1: decisions in advance. If you say, are at all I'll
Speaker 1: stop working as hard when I've been promoted to the
Speaker 1: level I want to be, it's a guarantee you'll never
Speaker 1: stop because once you get to be a manager, you
Speaker 1: want to be general manager and you just keep resetting
Speaker 1: your site. That's human nature. But if you say to yourself, okay,
Speaker 1: I can have a very happy life if I'm general manager.
Speaker 1: That's my goal, And all you need to do is
Speaker 1: track where am I now, where do I need to
Speaker 1: be to get there? And am I making the right progress?
Speaker 1: And every day you've made that step in the right direction.
Speaker 1: That's enough. Now it's time to take time off and
Speaker 1: enjoy the progress by connecting, spending time with friends. And
Speaker 1: if people do that, they're ambitious and thoughtful about it.
Speaker 1: They can be happy and ambitious at the same time. Now,
Speaker 1: with that said, you can also be happy in ambitions
Speaker 1: the same time. If you give yourself a timeline. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to be a work machine. But I'm
Speaker 1: going to do this for ten years because I'm twenty
Speaker 1: years old and I can really hammer it to on thirty,
Speaker 1: i can put my connections aside. They'll still be there.
Speaker 1: They'll forgive me in ten years. But I'm going to
Speaker 1: do everything I can to be that entrepreneur or boxer
Speaker 1: or whatever it is you're trying to be. But don't
Speaker 1: let that then go to your forty and then to
Speaker 1: your fifty, or you're going to look back and go, shit,
Speaker 1: I've wasted my life.
Speaker 2: Do you think we have generally people have us, all
Speaker 2: of us enough self awareness to accurately understand what our
Speaker 2: expectations so that when we get there we're actually happy.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the thing. We've evolved to get happier when
Speaker 1: we achieve, but for that happiness to fade. And the
Speaker 1: reason for that is that evolution uses happiness as a tool.
Speaker 1: It motivates you to do what's in your gene's best interest,
Speaker 1: to try to be a success, to try to gather
Speaker 1: resources to achieve things. It uses happiness as a tool
Speaker 1: to get you there. And if every time you achieve something,
Speaker 1: you've got happier and stayed happier. Pretty soon you'd run
Speaker 1: out of space and you would have no motivation left,
Speaker 1: and then you get passed up by those people who
Speaker 1: happiness went right back to baseline, so they're more motivated
Speaker 1: to achieve. So the end results is whatever your baseline
Speaker 1: happiness is, that's where you're going to spend most of
Speaker 1: your life, with the exception of if you get lucky
Speaker 1: to form just the right relationships with just the right people.
Speaker 1: But for most of us, that's kind of where we're
Speaker 1: going to be. And so whenever things go really well,
Speaker 1: we get this bump, but it goes away, and so
Speaker 1: you need to expect that and understand that and not
Speaker 1: just pursue the bumps all the time and try to
Speaker 1: be happy with the baseline level of happiness that you're
Speaker 1: endowed with. It's unfortunate some of us are endowed with
Speaker 1: higher baseline happiness than others, and that's to get genetic
Speaker 1: where some of us kind of goes through life totally
Speaker 1: content and from the outside you're like, why is that
Speaker 1: person so happy? They got nothing or they're a schmuck
Speaker 1: or whatever, But they've got it right, and some of
Speaker 1: us have gone through life. You know, we've been in
Speaker 1: that with only very little. But if you can come
Speaker 1: to terms with that and say that's where IM going
Speaker 1: to spend most of my time, I'll get some wonderful
Speaker 1: short term things. But let's not overdo the short term things.
Speaker 1: Let's enjoy the process as we go.
Speaker 2: And what are your thoughts on if you have any
Speaker 2: on generational trauma.
Speaker 1: Of what sort? What do you mean by that question?
Speaker 2: Well, I guess the when it experiences happen, I think,
Speaker 2: I guess I think about I think about the word genetics,
Speaker 2: and we can understand genetics as this almost this medical term,
Speaker 2: like oh I got this genetic disease or I've got
Speaker 2: this genetic mental health condition. In fact, and sometimes I
Speaker 2: wonder is genetics I mean, genetics is evolution. It's here,
Speaker 2: is an experience, and biology goes well in the case
Speaker 2: that experience happens again, will make a change to the biology.
Speaker 2: So genetics is maybe just the remnants of a story
Speaker 2: that once happened and then an adaptation to that, Whereas
Speaker 2: I feel like perhaps some of us are looking at
Speaker 2: it as just some just this purposeless medical anomaly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I guess what I would say is that
Speaker 1: you know, when when really big bad things happen to
Speaker 1: you and your group. That's what I think of when
Speaker 1: I think of generational trauma, like the stolen generation or
Speaker 1: something like that. When it's happening read large to large numbers,
Speaker 1: it's sort of happens largely separate from genetics, because genetics
Speaker 1: change super slowly, you know, over thousands or hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and culture changes super fast, and so
Speaker 1: suddenly people can decide, let's take these kids away and
Speaker 1: raise them in different families or you know, whatever. They
Speaker 1: can say, they can just do it. And those are
Speaker 1: terrible events. But at the same time, all human groups
Speaker 1: have gone through terrible events and have been resilient to them,
Speaker 1: have found a way to survive anyway. The downside is
Speaker 1: that the ones who actually directly experienced them sometimes don't ever,
Speaker 1: they never get back to where they were, and so
Speaker 1: if you're the person who got taken away, your life
Speaker 1: may never be as happy as it could have been
Speaker 1: with a little luck. You don't pass that on to
Speaker 1: your children and to their children, and so there's a
Speaker 1: pretty big research literature that examines this question by looking
Speaker 1: at things like what if you're the child of somebody
Speaker 1: who went through a terrible famine, especially when they were
Speaker 1: pregnant with you, did that change your epigenetics? What if
Speaker 1: you're somebody who's like the child of a Holocaust survivor
Speaker 1: who was in the camps and things like that, And
Speaker 1: we can see clear signs in the next generation. They're
Speaker 1: not nearly as bad as the generation that suffered, but
Speaker 1: like if they if they're the ones are the bad
Speaker 1: thing have to do, they're worst off. But even the
Speaker 1: next generation is not as good as they as everybody else.
Speaker 1: But then by two generations, we don't see effects anymore,
Speaker 1: at least not in the humans. I know of no
Speaker 1: good evidence that that's still there, with some exceptions that
Speaker 1: may be evidence of that that we don't know. And
Speaker 1: so for example, when there's dominant groups in society and
Speaker 1: those dominance hierarchies don't change, the next generation still doesn't
Speaker 1: look as good. And the question is, well, is that
Speaker 1: because of what happened before or is that because of
Speaker 1: actually what's happening right now? And we don't know.
Speaker 2: What's got your attention for the next I mean, is
Speaker 2: there another book, what's or what's a question in your mind?
Speaker 2: What's the fascination.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don't know where I'm going next. I
Speaker 1: always like to take a little time off and see
Speaker 1: what percolates. This book on that I just wrote. I
Speaker 1: didn't even think about when I finished my last book,
Speaker 1: and just it just percolated. And then it just popped
Speaker 1: into my mind. And when it did, it had been
Speaker 1: percolating for so long that it just in an hour,
Speaker 1: I laid out the whole book of what I wanted
Speaker 1: to be. Yeah, so just boom done. And so I
Speaker 1: want to I'm going to do that again. I'm going
Speaker 1: to just let it happen because I'm so busy on
Speaker 1: my day to day job of doing research anyway that
Speaker 1: I'm contentedly worrying along. But I'm thinking about leadership and
Speaker 1: the evolution of leadership and how, you know, because we
Speaker 1: live in a world where good and bad leaders have
Speaker 1: such an enormous impact on all of our lives that
Speaker 1: I'm curious if there's if I can contribute to that problem.
Speaker 1: I don't have any killer ideas yet, so I've got
Speaker 1: nothing to offer, but it's a problem that interests me.
Speaker 2: I really love it. I will be eagerly awaiting because
Speaker 2: I'm fascinated by the stuff that you're learning and teaching
Speaker 2: and looking into. Thanks so much for today's conversation.
Speaker 1: Totally. My pleasure is lots of fun.
Speaker 2: Would you like to direct the listeners to your books
Speaker 2: or anything else that they can access.
Speaker 1: Well if they want to read the books. The evenge
Speaker 1: of my name, Bill von Hipple or William von Nipple
Speaker 1: is I'm the only one so weird name that it is.
Speaker 1: It only directs you to me, and you can see
Speaker 1: both of my books that are all on the Social
Speaker 1: Leap and the Social Paradox are available wherever people buy
Speaker 1: books and audio or hard copy or ebook or whatever.
Speaker 1: I've even started now I've got Instagram my publicist of
Speaker 1: the publishers, like you need Instagram accounts, I've done that
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to be good about it and it's
Speaker 1: fun and so people can follow me that way and
Speaker 1: see what's going on, and they can of course get
Speaker 1: a touch with you directly, because you can find me
Speaker 1: on LinkedIn and you can find me in various places
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: Brilliant. I'd love this. Thank you so much. I'll have
Speaker 2: some links in the show notes for the listeners. So
Speaker 2: thank you so.
Speaker 1: Much, Bill, wonderful, Thank you it's been fun.
Speaker 2: Thanks everyone, she said, it's now never I got fighting
Speaker 2: in my blood.
Speaker 1: The state gardedry, called the Coast Garter gastricarded all the
Speaker 1: coast chard tr