William von Hippel - The Social Leap

Full transcript: William von Hippel on London Real

3:20 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is William von Hippel, the author and expert in the field of evolutionary psychology. You studied at Yale and the University of Michigan and are now a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. Your book, The Social Leap, the new evolutionary science of who we are, where we come from, and what makes us happy, traces our evolutionary history to show how events in our distant past continue to shape our lives today.

3:46 You’ve published over 100 articles and been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Economist. William, welcome to London Real. Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. Great to have you here. First of all, what’s your impression of being in London?

3:57 I know you grew up in Alaska. You live in Australia. What’s the vibe like in the city? Oh, I love the city. It’s literally one of the greatest cities of the world.

4:06 The weather is not ideal, but everything else about this place is fantastic. It’s such a multicultural, fascinating place, great food, interesting people, and the buildings look like they’re out of a merry pop-and-set or something like this. I can’t get my head around it. Right. Do you notice anything strange socially when you watch Londoners or Brits?

4:26 Brits, you know, they always assume that you’re American, that you’re a tourist, right? And in truth, I am. But I think that they just assume that you’re in town to get your picture taken with a bobby and, you know, eat at a pub. So I think that’s the dominant theme, at least when they interact with me. Yeah, people still ask me if I want like a vat receipt or something.

4:46 Yeah, exactly. Black cabbies say, where are you from? And I’m like, London, because I’m almost 20 years and I’m pretty much a London. I mean, exactly the same in Australia. If I go to the tourist parts of town, they say, I’m sorry, the weather’s not good today.

4:56 I was like, yeah, where do I care? Yeah, yeah. Look, we got so much stuff to talk about. I also find it fascinating because one of the reasons you’re here is because you’re a great storyteller, which is kind of what your book is about when it comes to evolution. And you really do have a great way of walking us through this.

5:11 And I think we’re going to start with maybe why you wrote the book. And I got a funny feeling we’re going to go back maybe seven million years in history. But for people that are going to kind of listen to this story, it’s because we want to bring it to the present and talk about maybe why we do the things we do, why we feel weird social pressures and maybe link it back to kind of leadership and everyday interactions with our fellow humans. And maybe we can finish off with your 10 easy steps to getting to the good life, which you come to the end of the book.

5:40 Sure. I hope we can do that. Also, just want to say, like for London Real, you know, we’ve been doing this for about eight years, had about 500 people on the show. But, you know, our mission is to create a mass scale transformation of humanity into a fully empowered, conscious and cooperative species. So when I put someone in the chair, what we’re trying to do is kind of get rid of a lot of the tribalism that we see out there and say, these humans aren’t, you know, left or right or, you know, or this gender or that gender or black or white.

6:07 They’re humans making human decisions. So it’s kind of great to have you here because we’re trying to, to a certain extent, break down social barriers. We also talk a lot about fear and about risk taking. And, you know, a lot of my guests try to get people to do great things with their lives and to realize that kind of we’re all in this together and we kind of need to give back to humanity. So I think we’re going to hit on a lot of cool themes.

6:30 That’s excellent. I mean, that’s I totally love that agenda. And I would add that I think our past tells us a lot about the threats that we have going forward and the opportunities we have going forward because human nature is full of really great stuff. But it’s full of some pretty rough stuff, too. And so if you really want the world to be a better place and all of us do, of course, you want to be mindful of the pitfalls, but also the opportunities.

6:50 Yeah. And maybe we can understand them better if we understand our evolution. One of the thing is that we have something called the London Real Academy where people come through and I push them in these kind of eight week online accountability programs. And I use a lot of this stuff in the program because most people are in such fear about being judged by their peer group. And yet it’s kind of my job to push them into that fear.

7:12 And a lot of times that means broadcasting themselves, starting podcasts, publicly speaking, sometimes starting businesses, which means they have to put their ideas out there. And people a lot of times they get freaked out and they kind of get paralyzed. So, you know, public speaking is one of people’s dominant fears. And at one level, you think, how could that possibly be? You don’t get beat up public speaking, right?

7:33 You don’t fall and hurt yourself public speaking, but it does give you the opportunity to say something shameful in front of a large audience and you’ll never retrieve your reputation. So when you think about it psychologically, it makes perfect sense why we’re so afraid of doing that. Right. And yet when we look at our heroes in this world, of course, whether they’re like the great fighters or the hip hop artists or Gandhi, all those people took these massive risks and lived these lives of purpose.

7:58 Yeah. Well, look at Franz Klammer. I don’t know if you remember when he won the Olympic downhill, wherever the heck that was around 1980 or maybe even late 70s. But he just comes through the line. He was halfway in control, the whole run.

8:09 And he turns to the camera and they said, what do you think? And he goes, to win, you must risk to lose. And then goes running off. And I always remember that line. I was a kid watching the Olympics and of course he was my hero.

8:19 And that’s exactly right. You don’t win the Olympics by going 70, 80 percent. And you don’t make these big changes without taking big risks that, you know, often you could end up ground up and spit out. But often sometimes it could really make a big difference. And they feel like life and death because I think what we’re going to talk about today, they used to be life and death.

8:36 Yeah, absolutely. And yet in this quote unquote modern world, if we want to live kind of a life of meaning, and we’ll talk about happiness later too, you kind of have to go against the grain. And then the thing I find really funny is it is when I teach, what I end up using actually is I end up using social pressure to get them actually to do things they wouldn’t normally do and not to let each other down in teams. And they end up bonding with people they’ve never met from around the world in order to kind of gamify and be successful as a team.

9:04 So it’s just a weird way. And again, you know, I don’t know the science behind it. So I’m looking to talk to you about this. Well, you’re doing the right thing. Okay, good. So let’s talk about this book, The Social Leap. Why did you write it? And why did we start seven million years ago?

9:17 So the reason I wrote it is that I’d spent the last dozen years trying to get my head around this story where I’m just a regular old psychologist who wants to understand how people are today. And the more I started looking at what we know about how people are today, the more I kept thinking, gee, to understand that we need to know where we came from. So we know why people do those things because we do a lot of unusual things. And that kept pushing me farther and farther back until finally I got to the point where our common ancestors were chimpanzees, which is about seven million years ago.

9:46 Now, chimps are a great model, and you can learn lots about us just by studying them. You don’t even need to study where we diverge from them. But we’re different from them in so many important ways. Such as? Well, we’re fundamentally group-oriented. We’re fundamentally cooperative. They are not. They’re fundamentally competitive.

10:03 And in fact, you can see that in our eyes. If you look at a chimpanzee, their eyes are all brown. They disguise the direction of their gaze. So other chimps are smart enough that if I did that, they would go, oh, there’s something over there. But they disguise that by making no whites. Their eyes are all brown. We evolved away from them to have white sclera to our eyes.

10:21 You would only do that if literally when I do that, the chances that you’re going to help me achieve that goal, whatever it is, are higher than the chances that you’re going to interfere. So for a chimpanzee, if he sees some tasty food, he thinks, well, you’re going to get there first, so I don’t want you to know I saw it. For a human, if I see a tasty food, I’m thinking, you’re going to help me get that. And that’s fundamental cooperation that’s just in our DNA.

10:43 Interesting. A lot of people would say we’re not very cooperative, but we are. We are. We’re wildly cooperative. The problem is, of course, that we can use that cooperative energy for evil just as well as we can use it for good.

10:53 And industry changes everything, which maybe we can get to towards the end, because that’s a different world than what we evolved in. Absolutely. OK, so seven million years back where we were with the chimpanzees, we’re in the jungles, right? Yeah, that’s right. And that’s when a major shift happens.

11:08 Yeah, so the major shift is really was taking place over about a 30 million year period, which is the Great African Rift Valley in East Africa, which runs from the Red Sea in the north down to Mozambique in the south. And continents often smash into each other, but they sometimes tear apart and go their separate ways. In the case of Africa, it’s tearing in half. Well, not in half. Most of it’s going to the upper left. Some of it’s moving to the lower right.

11:30 And that’s creating all that tectonic activity along the Rift Valley. So over the last 30 million years, the right side of the Rift Valley, the east, has been slowly rising up and as a consequence drying out. By around seven million years ago, there’s basically no major rainforest left on the east side. And so what you’ve got are animals that are superbly adapted to living in the trees. Chimpanzees are kings of the canopy.

11:53 Even amazing tree climbers like leopards won’t go after a group of chimps in the trees because they’ll be torn to pieces. So they’re wonderful up in the trees, but you put them on the ground. Their knees don’t lock. Their hips can’t straighten out. They’re slow and ungainly.

12:05 They’re anybody’s dinner. Hyenas, lions, leopards, anybody who wants to. Even saber-toothed tigers in those days could easily chomp them on the ground. So by seven million years ago, they’ve got no choice. If they don’t want to starve, they’ve got to come out of the few trees they’re in and cross the grass.

12:20 And so how do they do that? How do they survive this incredible evolutionary pressure cooker? And the answer, basically, is for a few million years they just skirt around the edges and they’re really living on the edges, the fringes of the opportunities in the savannah. So they’ve gone from this awesome position at the top to this terrible position almost at the bottom. And they could have been extinct if things hadn’t worked out.

12:44 Yeah, I think you run that thing a hundred times like you’re god of your own world and you just replay that. Nine and nine times you’ve got either extinction or some timid animal that lives on the edge. Which means we don’t exist. Which means we do not exist. We are not having this conversation.

12:58 Okay, so there’s a lot of weird probabilities in this scenario. This is this survivorship bias. So we look back and we’re like, okay, this is what happened. But it wouldn’t necessarily happen again. There’s zero inevitability to it. I mean, the thing is, imagine what would happen if our own parents decided not to be amorous that night, that key night that we were conceived and went to the movies instead. Like literally, your half-sibling and my half-sibling are having a different conversation in a different place.

13:20 So the probabilities that any one human exists are infinitesimally small. But the probabilities that people like you and people like me are running around are pretty high. Now, in this case, the probability of that event going the way it did, I think, is really light. Really slim. I think that a couple key things happened to go our way and it was probably a lot of luck.

13:39 Okay, but it forced this species to adapt and through what, mutation? Yeah, it would be largely mutation and basically what you got is by three and a half million years ago, so kind of halfway between then and now, our ancestors are Australopithecines and they basically look like a chimpanzee. If you go to the zoo and you see an Australopithecus and a chimp, you’d be amazed that the chimp is standing straight up and you’d think it’s a chimp. You’d have no idea you’re looking at a different species because they look so similar.

14:07 And so they’ve gained barely any brain power. They’ve gone from about 380 grams to about 450 from a chimp to an Australopithecus. In three million years, that’s only 70 grams of brain. A brain size. But they’re bipedal. They’re upright.

14:20 And that changed everything because there’s some unintended consequences of bipedality, of walking on two legs that gave us opportunities that we then latched onto and that sent us in the direction we are today. Okay, so just simple walking, which they had to do to survive? No, there’s a lot of argument about why that is. We can talk about how we know this if you’d like, but we can look at the old tools that are left lying around, and we can look at chimpanzees, how they are today.

14:47 And that tells us that our ancestors, Australopithecines ancestors, could not envision a world with unfelt needs. So they couldn’t plan for a future that’s different psychologically from what’s in their mind now. A chimpanzee can’t do it either. They can imagine a world where they feel the needs they feel now. So if they’re hungry, they can imagine, well, I need to go eat termites, so I’ll peel this leaves off this branch and go eat them.

15:10 But they can’t envision a world in which they’re not hungry. Or when they’re full, they can’t envision a world in which they’re hungry. Australopithecus, from the best that we can tell, was no different in that regard. And what that means is that they couldn’t, lots of people talk about, well, maybe we walked upright to carry food. Maybe we walked upright to carry a weapon that we thought we might need.

15:27 Well, they can’t envision what they might need. They can only feel what they want right now. But if you’re an Australopithecus and go earlier, you’re like a recent immigrant to the savannah, and you’re trying to cross the savannah, and you know you’re king of the tree, but you know your danger, your food on the ground, what are you going to feel every time you go out? Fear. Yeah, you’re going to feel fear.

15:49 And so my guess is that what they wanted was to have some kind of weapon in their hand. They want a stick or a stone to try to help, because they will use those sometimes, although not often. But they wanted, they would have evolved to the point where they wanted that. And then the more you carry that, the more advantages you’re going to get by walking upright. Okay, as opposed to using the four-limb walk, which we see chimps do.

16:07 Which they do now. They can do both, but they knuckle walk. And the thing is, it’d be hard to use a stick properly in knuckle walk. Okay. Now, there’s also, there’s some caloric advantages to bipedality.

16:17 There’s the man-the-hunter hypothesis where we slowly chase down. There’s probably, anytime you get to a really big event, like walking upright is, changing everything about our bodies and the way things, the way our organs hang and all the rest, you probably have multiple causes. But I think one of those causes was fear. And the desire to have some kind of weapon in their hand in case they were attacked that they could try to poke at or beat at an animal that was attacking them.

16:40 Okay, and again, this is over the course of millions of years. Yes. So it’s very slow. Absolutely. Okay, but the mutations or the new ways they do things are adopted by others, or you survive on the back of it.

16:52 Yeah, so if you and I are both trying to walk upright because we’ve got, we’re trying to protect ourselves, because we’re afraid, and I have some weird mutation that allows me to stand a little straighter, maybe lock my knees, maybe lock my hips. I can stand up easily. You’re always using up energy just to stay semi upright, and so I’m going to have more kids than you are. So the random mutations that happen to help you walk upright would have been really useful for our Australopithecines ancestors, not so useful for a chimpanzee living in a tree, because now it’s got these legs that don’t climb quite as well as basically forearms.

17:24 Okay. And so random mutations, once there’s a benefit to being bipedal, to walking upright would have pushed you in that direction. Now, a lot of people are probably thinking, okay, what’s so big about walking? Like, how could that create the evolution into who we are now with these brains? Well, we can visualize these new futures and plan things out and stress and heavy anxious and all that stuff.

17:45 So why does that make a difference? So it makes an enormous difference, because what it did is it changed our bodies in really important ways. Our hips lengthened out, our chest started to interact with the world laterally rather than vertically, so chimps are always going up and down trees. Once you’re upright, there’s no up and down. You want to swing things side to side often.

18:01 So a chimp’s chest is kind of pointed upward. Yeah, their pecs are all aiming upward, and all their musculature aims upward to scramble up a tree. Right. An Australopithecus is not all the way to us, but it’s much more lateral. Okay.

18:13 And also, a chimpanzee is using its arms like to support its whole weight, so their arms are kind of like legs and their stiffness, and they’re same with their wrists. Our wrists are very flexible, our shoulders are very flexible, and all that enabled, unintentionally, but it just was a byproduct of bipedality, all of that enabled the single most important invention in military history, which is the capacity to kill at a distance. Once you have the capacity to kill at a distance, which no other animal really has, they can maybe kill over a short distance, but kill over a long distance, now a larger force of weaker individuals can kill a smaller force of stronger individuals.

18:48 Okay, now, if it’s not obvious to anybody, how can I kill at a distance if I’m bipedal? Sorry, I didn’t finish that sentence today. I’m glad you pointed that out. So, what it does is all that laterality allows you to throw, and so if you watch a chimpanzee throw, they basically use two arms, and they throw very ungainly like that most of the time. You watch a human being throw, you step forward with your opposite leg, you start to rotate first your hips, then your chest, then your elbow, then finally your wrist comes through, and it turns out that generates an enormous amount of elastic energy that goes through all of your tendons, ligaments, and muscles, and so at the end of the throw, it’s like the snapping of a rubber band.

19:23 A chimpanzee can’t do that. Wow. And so we throw with incredible speed and accuracy, they throw inaccurately and with not much speed. Most people would not think that throwing a rock is the greatest military invention in history. I know.

19:34 It’s the beginning of it. Okay, but it is, actually, because, I mean, first of all, watch a pitcher in slow motion in America throw that ball. I mean, it is a massive entire body movement. It is. You can get that ball going 120 miles an hour, and that can kill an animal.

19:47 Yeah, and so here’s the thing. Once you have the capacity to kill at a distance, now, here you and I are australopithecines wandering across the savannah together, maybe in a group of 20 to 50, and a lion runs at us. We’ve literally got no choice but to scatter. Even though probably all of us could, like with a rock or a stick that we’ve got in our hand, beat that animal to death, you know full well whoever goes first is going to end up lion food. Whoever goes second is going to be in its mouth, too.

20:11 Third, fourth, and fifth aren’t looking too good. Maybe if you’re the sixth one to get there, you’ve got a decent shot at it. If you’re all motivated and organized, and you stick with it, right? But you’re not going to. You’re not going to be.

20:21 I’m like, really, please, after you. You go first, and you’re like, no, my friend, I’m after you. But if we can kill at a distance, before that thing ever gets to us, we can start pelting it with stones. And even if we aren’t strong enough to kill it with one stone, if stones are coming at it from 20 motivated animals or 50 motivated animals, well, we’re going to drive it away. Okay.

20:40 And so that’s the key. It’s not just the capacity to throw the stone and to harm the animal, but it’s the requirement that we start working together. Wow. And prior to that, chimpanzees just don’t work together well. They don’t cooperate very well.

20:51 But there was now, for the first time in our line, enormous evolutionary pressure for us to cooperate with each other. Because if we all throw stones together, literally we’ll all be safe. If we decide, I’m going to run for it, and you’re going to throw stones, well, then we’re all in trouble. You’re the stone thrower. You’re probably going to get eaten first, but the rest of us can’t run as fast as the lion anyway.

21:10 So we’re all in trouble, but for the first time, literally, if we band together, we all benefit from it. So our individual goals and our group goals come into perfect alignment for the first time in our line. And so the actual act of throwing now creates this social structure and this brain. Aren’t we always told it’s the opposite, like the brain is there to manage all these social relationships? It is, but that’s exactly right.

21:32 The reason our brain gets so large, first of all, throwing is not rocket science, right? Once the animal figures out to do that, in principle, you don’t need to get any smarter. And remember, australopithecines are barely smarter than a chimp. But now think about what a group could potentially do, because now if we can start envisioning the future, now we can start planning a hunt, and we can figure out, all right, you go on that side, I’ll go on this side, the mastodon comes in the middle, we drive it into that pit, and we’re eating like kings.

21:56 So for the first time in our evolutionary line, being a lot smarter actually allows us to pay the rent on that huge amount of brain. So, I mean, imagine being a zebra that suddenly got incredibly smart. What are you going to do with those brains? You’ve got hooves, you can’t build any tools, you’re eating grass, you can’t get better food because you’ve got a bigger brain, maybe you can have an epic conversation about Einstein or something with a zebra next to you, but you can’t pay for that metabolic cost of that brain.

22:21 But if you’re an animal that can start to work together, that already has hands, that you can start to use for tools, now you can start being a more effective hunter, and you can start paying the metabolic cost, the extra calories that you need to bring in to pay for that big brain. And so you just see, three million years, barely any increase in brain power, and then we just take off after Australopithecus when we start socially banding together. Is this your theory or has it been banded around before?

22:46 It’s been banded around before. All I’m doing in this book is drawing it all together. I’m laying out what I regard as the most sensible timeline, the vector that lines up as many of the data points as possible. Lots of people would agree with this, like the throwing hypothesis, for example, has been around for 40 years at least. There are obviously people who disagree and say, no, that timeline is wrong, and I think it came down at a later date or an earlier date or something like that.

23:10 Wow, okay. So this is interesting, and also it feels like with evolution and mutations, all you need is kind of a little momentum one way, and then it’s going to start going your way, right? That’s exactly right. So my favorite example is this, now we don’t know for sure about this particular gene yet because the discovery is less than a year old, but there’s this Notch2NL gene that basically what it does is it makes your brain remain as stem cells for longer, meaning more division into new cells before it dedicates itself to being neurons and no longer dividing.

23:40 And so the Notch2NL gene appears in our line about 12 million years ago in a new form. And what happened is, and this is pretty common with evolution, that it accidentally duplicates itself on the genome. So now you’ve got two of them, and the second one gets turned off. Well, that’s a great opportunity for a new evolutionary opportunity because, well, I’m repeating myself, that’s a great opportunity because the old gene is still doing its job, and now you can get the new gene to do something new and interesting without compromising what the original job needed to be.

24:10 Now, that gene sat there for literally about 9 million years until around 3, 3.5 million years ago, it duplicated again and then they turned on. Now, so why did that happen coincidentally right at the perfect point? Well, obviously it didn’t. It probably happened literally thousands of times across those millions of years. But every time it happened in the past, you’ve got this really smart ape who’s like, not gaining any real benefits out of being smarter than all the other apes.

24:35 It doesn’t get more food, it can’t pay the price, it’s got this big brain, and the consequence is that it’s actually a disadvantage. Okay, because there’s no throwing and no organization. Yeah, there’s no, they’re not cooperating, they’re not working together. So you wouldn’t even know. It’d be like having a genius ant out there, we’d never know and it would die.

24:48 Exactly, exactly. It doesn’t get any more food because it’s a genius ant. So this genius gorilla slash ape slash human, this common ancestor of ours, that probably happened many times, was costing it more than it was gaining. Maybe it wasn’t a big cost, but it wasn’t gaining much from it because they’re fundamentally competitive. So it’d be too smart for its own good, maybe?

25:06 In a way, yeah. Okay. And so then, by the time we get to Australopithecus, now, well, more brains, there’s more opportunities for this whole group. Now the group can start to have emergent properties. So, for example, if you put three chimps together and they go off to hunt monkeys, which happens a lot, they’ll catch three times as many monkeys.

25:22 But that’s not really an emergent property to a group. It’s just three individuals being three times as effective. Each individually having as effective as it would be, and now all as a group. Right. You put three humans together to catch monkeys, and I’ll say, you wait on that end.

25:35 I’ll wait on this end. He’ll come and yell. We’ll catch as many as we can. We’re going to get six times as many monkeys. There’s an emergent property to our group.

25:42 And that would have existed once we get to the point where we’re fundamentally cooperating with each other rather than fundamentally competing with each other. Okay. And now our brain starts, size begins to grow. It takes off. Okay.

25:54 And that’s a function you believe of, right place at the right time, and now this gene can be used. Yes. And then if you’re using it, you’re procreating, you’re surviving. Yes, exactly. And then it’s a long timeline, but actually things happen fast.

26:05 Yeah. So in the three million year, three, three and a half million years since then, our brain goes from now, three and a half million years gains you 70 grams. You’re now at 450. Our brain is 1350. So we’ve more, we’ve like tripled the brain size in the time since Australopithecus.

26:19 Quite, you know, in the same duration where we barely gained anything, because now there’s enormous returns on that investment. And those returns just keep compounding. By the time we get to Homo erectus, we can see evidence of division of labor. We can see evidence of planning for the future. And then they invent fire, or they’ll control a fire.

26:35 Well, now they can get more nutrition from their food. And so if you look at the ribcage of an Australopithecus or a chimpanzee or any other ape, it sticks out like this, and they got a tiny cranium. What that tells you is a lot of gut to support a little bit of brain. We have this really flat ribcage in this big old head. That tells you a tiny bit of gut is supporting a lot of brain.

26:55 For a tiny bit of gut to support a lot of brain, you’ve got to be getting very high-quality food. And that partially means a lot more meat because it’s calorically more dense, a lot more fat. And that’s because you’re hunting intelligently. You’re hunting more effectively. And it also means cooking your food, because once you can cook your food, you can really see a lot more nutrients than when it’s raw.

27:12 And you can tell that just sniff a raw steak and sniff a cooked steak. The cooked steak smells delicious. That’s your genes telling you there’s a lot of good things in there. The raw steak doesn’t smell so nice. And are you convinced that that is why we evolved because of the cooking?

27:27 Or could it be something else? Well, all these things are going to be multiply determined, right? There’s not one thing. I’m a big believer in this cooking hypothesis. That’s Richard Wrangham’s work at Harvard.

27:38 But I’m also a big believer that the process was well underway by the time it got there. It was almost an inevitability that we would find a way to control fire because every step of the way, our brains were giving us new advantages. And then those new advantages in turn supported those big brains. Okay. What else are we picking up along the way in terms of socialness, baggage?

27:58 What else is happening? Because now it’s what we started to see. Now we’re working our way toward homo sapiens, right? So once we get to homo erectus, we now got about a 950 gram brain. It’s a lot bigger than a chimpanzee.

28:11 It’s twice as big as an Australopithecus, although they have a bigger body, so it’s expected. But it’s not nearly as smart as we are. But they’re a homo species. They’re getting a lot more clever. And you start to see all sorts of signs that they’re rising back to the top of the food chain.

28:27 And so that has good things and bad things. So finally, the throwing put us back on the pathway to achieve what our chimp cousins had achieved, which is being at the top of the hierarchy where they live. Okay. But now it’s in a totally different world, right? And there’s advantages and disadvantages.

28:42 And one of the disadvantages for our modern world is that think about what happens now when homo erectus can organize themselves. They can plan for the future. They can have division of labor. Well, now they’re killing animals that are way larger than they are with relatively simple weapons. And so what that means is no animal’s really a threat to them anymore, at least not as a group.

29:01 Of course, they may still be killed by a lone saber tooth or something when they’re walking by themselves. But as a group of homo erectus, there’s only one other animal on earth that can kill them. That’s another group of homo erectus. And so what that means is that this evolved tendency we have for cooperation and kindness and all that, suddenly met a problem. And that is we can’t be that way toward everybody.

29:20 Because if I’m going to be kind, if I’ve just met you and your group for the first time and we’re out in the Savannah and I’m friendly to you, you might say, oh, golden opportunity. Let’s kill all of them and take what they have. And so suddenly I’ve evolved the tendency to treat you with a great deal of wariness if you’re not in my group. And so if you look at the rates of conflict between chimpanzees, physical conflict with each other inside the group, they’re literally 500 times more conflictual with each other than we are, more aggressive to each other within their groups.

29:46 But if you look at the rates of conflict between groups compared to our between-group conflict, it’s one to one. We’ve got so much kinder to each other inside our group, we haven’t got any kinder toward each other when they’re in different groups. And that’s because the unfortunate consequence of rising to the top of the food chain by virtue of our cooperative abilities means that we could no longer extend them to other groups. So we’re naturally suspicious of groups that aren’t ours.

30:09 Yeah, we’re super tribal. You know, I had Jaron Diven in here who did Gun Germs and Steel, and he goes to Papua New Guinea a lot, and he said there it’s, you know, very localized tribes, you know, kind of maybe back to these kind of 180, sorry, 150 Dunbar number groups. And he said it’s very common for two people to meet each other for the first time in Papua New Guinea to sit down and try to piece together all of the people they know so they can find a reason not to kill each other, because that’s in their DNA.

30:33 You know, stranger, you’re not part of my tribe, I got to kill you and maybe eat your brain. Right, and it’s actually worse as you get closer to the equator because there’s an additional problem. And that is as we move closer and closer to the equator, there’s more and more pathogens per square mile that vary. And so if you live in Sweden or where I grew up in Alaska, there’s four pathogens and we all are immune to them. If you live in Papua New Guinea, there’s millions of pathogens and across the same valley, you live on the other side of the valley, for all I know, you’ve been exposed to something I never have been.

31:02 And so even if I want to be kind to you, even if I want to get to know you and be friends, chances are decent that you’re going to make me sick. And so our ancestors would have gone, you know, you’re a risk to me if you’re from another group and so I’m going to be conflictual with you and that’s actually safer. If you and I fight every time we meet, well then we don’t mingle and you don’t get me sick. Okay, so we’re starting to get these kind of tribalism in our DNA that we’re living with today.

31:26 That leads to proliferation of languages, a proliferation of religions, it leads people to be highly ethnocentric and we’re stuck with that somewhere inside us. Now, I totally agree with you when you say it’s in our DNA, it is. And I would just add that one thing to remember about humans is that once we went down this cognitive pathway where now we live a life where we’re not born knowing what we need to know, we literally need to learn it from each other. Once we went down that pathway, our genes had no choice but to relinquish control over our brains.

31:54 We have a trillion connections in our brain between our neurons, trillions maybe, but at least a trillion connections in there and we only have a couple of billion base pairs in our entire genome. And so, you know, maybe a billion, maybe a few, I can’t remember exactly, but one’s in the order of billions, one’s trillions, which means that if our entire genome was dedicated to wiring our brain, it couldn’t do it. And so what that means is our brain literally needs to wire by virtue of experience.

32:18 And so it can’t become fully developed until we’re out in the world experiencing it, which means that our genes can’t control us anymore. So yes, these things are in our DNA, but the genes don’t determine what they do, they just give us a push. And so if something that helps our genes, they give us a pretty big push. If it’s a more trivial issue, they may give us a smaller push, but part of what we do is driven by that push and part of it’s driven by the life experience that we gather.

32:41 And if you look at the behavioral genetics, you know, across all the things they’ve looked at for the last 50 years, we find that our traits and our attitudes and preferences are about 50% genetic and about 50% based on kind of environmental learning. Okay, so we can think our way out of it. We can. And so those of us who grew up in cities have the really awesome opportunity that it’s not a tribal world anymore, that I go up to you, you’re a stranger, and if I order coffee from you, I don’t expect you to kill me and take my wallet.

33:10 You’re better off giving me my coffee and taking my money. In the long term, that benefits both of us. And so we’ve escaped this horrible reality that Diamond talks about in New Guinea, where literally, I’ve got no choice but to come into conflict with you if we don’t have relatives or friends in common. And now we’ve switched to a world which probably took a long time, but we’ve switched to a world where culturally, we just assume, well, things are very different now.

33:31 There’s no need for me to get in conflict with you. We’ve solved this problem that you might attack me or I might attack you to take each other’s stuff by virtue of living in a society where there’s rules that are indifferent to our own preferences that we all have to follow. Okay. But it’s still lurking there somewhere down underneath. Yeah.

33:47 I mean, when we lose our cognitive sense, is it easy to default back? I mean, I just ran an example. They say when you go into the prison system in the U.S., it’s all race-based. You’re either black or white or Latino. Yeah, I bet.

33:57 There’s no reasoning around it. You have to go with your clan or die. Right. I mean, is that a good example or not? It’s probably a great example.

34:03 Yeah. I’ve been blessed to not be in prison, so I don’t know, but there’s lots of, I mean, that’s what the average movie looks like, right? And so I’m sure that there’s a lot of truth to that. So the thing is that we’re blessed to be in a world where we don’t need that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to come back really quickly. And you can see it come back, and just people who otherwise were doing great together as soon as our nations come into conflict with each other.

34:24 And so I remember quite distinctly during the first desert storm, so Bush Sr., when Iraq invaded Kuwait and where the United States got involved with this big coalition. I was teaching at Ohio State University at the time, and there was a kid who wore this shirt, and it said, I came all this way to smoke a camel, which is kind of a joke about a cigarette. But what the shirt showed was a circle with the crosshairs and a caricature of an Arab person on a camel.

34:48 In other words, he’s making light of killing somebody because we depersonalize people when they’re in a group that we’re now in conflict with. And so I promise you that, you know, a week before that, he would never wear such a racist thing and feel so negatively toward an Arab person. But now, because he sees us in conflict with him, that old tribal sense of that we’ve got inside all of us can come up and come up really quickly. Yeah, and we see this even more with the internet, social media, because now there’s not a real person we’re looking at across the way.

35:17 It’s this weird image, this detachment, and that’s when things can get even crazier. Because you can just troll people you don’t know. It’s super hard to be really vicious to somebody in front of your face. You have to find that people are rooter in a car if your windows are up than if your windows are down. Like, I honk at you with your windows up.

35:34 You’re all your windows down. Like, hey, mate, I’m sorry. Would you mind moving over a little bit? I need to get by. It’s just human nature that the more distance there is between us, be it glass of your car or be it your other side of the internet, the nastier we can become.

35:46 Yeah, and I’ve had the same experience. I’ve put people in that chair who sometimes my audience will be like, why do you have that person on? You listen to their story, walk a couple miles in their shoes, and you’re like, oh, I understand them now. Yeah. They were age or unrealistic, blah, blah, blah.

35:59 But it’s like, oh, no, they’re human. And now I understand them, and maybe we can cooperate. Absolutely. I’m a big believer that it’s hardly ever someone’s pure evil or pure great, right? Almost all of us have good and bad in us.

36:11 And so what that means is that there’s probably a lot to learn from almost all of us. And so I don’t like deplatforming people. I don’t like saying, no, we have to interrupt that person’s speech or something like that. I’m a big believer in letting people have to say what they want to say and letting the audience decide what value there is in that conversation. Yeah, that’s a whole discussion to have, the whole deplatforming thing, because, yeah, maybe we’ll get to that at the end.

36:32 What else do we need to know about what’s going on here? I know you talk about people gossiping and the whole storytelling concept and how we kind of build coalitions by lying to each other. Can you talk about some of these things? Because when we hear these words, we think that’s bad, but obviously it exists for a reason. Yeah, that’s right.

36:52 So it’s complicated. You’re interleaving a bunch of complicated ideas, and I’m happy to go through which anyone you want, but to start with the gossip one, so gossip is a great mechanism to control people’s behavior. And so if you look at our chimpanzee ancestors, it’s very hierarchical. Might makes right. And they’re all happy with that.

37:09 That’s just the world they live in. Human beings don’t work that way. And the reason we don’t work that way is we’re really, really good at communicating. So if we’re in a small group of hunter-gatherers and you’re the toughest and you start throwing your weight around, well, you got to go to sleep eventually, right? And we’re really good at talking.

37:24 And so let’s say that I don’t know if somebody else feels the same way I do. I’ve come to not like you, and I’m tired of you lording it over me. And so I don’t know if Bob here feels the same way. And so I can say, boy, you know, what do you think of him? It’s really interesting, isn’t it?

37:37 And Bob can say, oh, you know, I think he’s a total jerk. And then I know we’re on the same page. You go, yeah, I love the guy. And then I can go along with that, right? So we can be really subtle.

37:45 Pinker talks about this, subtle ways of using language, right? But then the question is, once we decide, once we find people who are on the same page as us, now we can go after you. And, you know, when you go to bed tonight, we can end it for you. And so what’s happened over time is we’ve developed this process. The first thing we do is kind of gossip and make fun of you.

38:04 And most people immediately will stop doing whatever they’re doing. So you are tougher than I am, and you are better hunted than I am, but you don’t like all of us gossiping and make fun of you. And so you’ve learned your lesson. Because I know the power of the group. Because I’m part of that group when we go kill a mammoth.

38:17 Yeah, exactly. I think we kill a mammoth, you can take care of me easily. I can take care of you. But if you don’t learn your lesson there, then we literally start to ignore you. And so you come and start talking to me, and I literally talk over you and I talk to somebody else.

38:28 Now almost every human learns their lesson at that point, right? Think about right now, people make fun of you, you feel terrible. People ignore you, you feel terrible. Well the reason is, our ancestors who couldn’t feel terrible when someone made fun of them or when someone ignored them took the next step, which was that. And so you needed to be guided by the group’s behavior in these regards.

38:45 Okay, so that stuff’s ingrained in us to do these things. And so of course gossip can be malicious and of course it can have a variety of qualities. But it plays such an important role of regulating group life that people do it all the time. And you know, we love to hear it. We’ve evolved to love to hear it because it allows us, on average, every member of the group is highly unlikely to be at the top, right?

39:04 We’re all more likely to be in the middle. And so it allows all of us in the middle to regulate those who are on the top. So of course we’re super interested in it. Right, okay. And he also gives us the barometer of what’s happening.

39:14 Yeah. Also educates us on how we need to behave. Yeah. And it kind of takes out the outliers. Yeah, that’s right.

39:20 All of us have done things that we’re ashamed of in the past. All of us have done things that would denigrate us in front of our group. So if you knew all the things I’ve done in my life, you wouldn’t think as highly of me as if you only knew those public things. And so why does it, how does it work that way? Well, I have a good sense of shame.

39:33 And I think to myself, if I do that in public, people aren’t going to like me anymore. I’m going to regulate my behavior. Or if I make a mistake, I think I’m never going to do that again. And so we self punish or we make sure we don’t do it in the first place. Even if it might be in my interest, you and I are a party together.

39:48 There’s only one more ice cream cone and we’ve got it before you. Well, I’m going to then feel guilty or ashamed if other people saw it or whatever. And so I just don’t do that because it might serve me the first time when I get the ice cream cone and you don’t. But no one’s inviting me to their parties anymore. So it’s not going to serve me in the long run.

40:04 All right. So all this social pressure is building up. Yeah. It’s allowing us to stay alive and the group to function. Yeah.

40:10 Okay. Doesn’t necessarily always serve us today and we’ll talk about that. No. And so you asked about lying and that’s an important twist on it, right? Because now we can start to manipulate gossip.

40:18 I can think, you know what? I’m a guy, but I’d like to have some of the stuff you have. Maybe your wife, maybe your spear, maybe something. So if I can turn my group against you by making stuff up, you know, maybe I could succeed. Now, of course, it’s a huge risk because if I get seen through, rather than getting all the benefits I wanted to get by getting rid of you, now they’re going to get rid of me.

40:37 And so one of the ways that we solve that particular problem is that we can tell ourselves that it’s true. We can literally self deceive. And so I can start to believe that, you know, I’m a better person than you or I’m more moral than you and the group really does need to get rid of you because you really haven’t been a good person. And so even though you’re really the finest member of our group, I can find ways to try to nudge you out, to try to push you away because I truly believe it myself.

40:58 And then if it does come home to roost, I’ll be like totally surprised. No, no, no. I’m a totally moral guy and I’ve seen you do all these horrible things. I’m surprised you guys are reacting this way. That’s how you justify the line.

41:08 Yeah, by not knowing your line, right? Right, okay. And we’ve seen that happen lots of times. Tell me about storytelling. There was obviously the great book Sapiens by Yuval Hari, who kind of did a really nice job of showing the power of a story, I think, in the first part of that book.

41:22 And he basically said that basically all of our societies, money, our corporations, are all a story. Yeah. And without that story, they wouldn’t exist. Tell me about storytelling. Yeah, so I totally agree with Harari.

41:33 I think that that’s where we are now. And for me, what’s particularly interested in my focus is, well, where does it come from, right? Why is storytelling so important? And what you think about are incredible communicative abilities. I can paint a picture for you of a place you’ve never been.

41:46 Well, if once I can do that, I can start giving you the painful lessons that I’ve learned in my life that you don’t have to actually suffer through in order to learn yourself. So here we are, maybe a million years ago. We’re sitting around the fire, and I tell the story about how I was out hunting and was surprised, attacked by a lion. And you can see where I’ve been badly scarred and this arm doesn’t work very well anymore. So I paid a huge price, but I survived it.

42:07 And now I’m telling you this story. You’ve paid no price at all. You just heard my entire experience. You saw how I, in the last minute, used my knife in some certain way, and that played an incredibly important role in allowing me to survive. And so you think, if that ever happens to me, that’s what I’m going to do.

42:22 And so you don’t need to pay this enormous price. So we would have evolved to find storytelling super valuable. If you look at every other animal on this earth, when they are born, they have to basically learn the group’s knowledge over again, and there’s no way to carry it forward and ratchet up on top of it, to scaffold on top of it. Okay. Human beings are the single exception.

42:40 A small child can learn what only geniuses knew a long time ago, because we can tell those stories. They can stay way past a person’s lifetime. And so we would evolve the tendency to want to hear these stories, because they’ll give us the important lessons about how to live in our society, and we would evolve the tendency to want to tell these stories. Because, you know, once I get older and I’m not such a good hunter anymore, well, maybe you guys are thinking, hmm, time to get rid of Bill.

43:04 But if Bill knows all sorts of valuable things for your group, and if I can tell those stories, well, now I’m still of value to you. And maybe I can get a better partner, maybe I can get lots of good things. And so we would have evolved from a long time ago this tendency to want to listen to stories, to be fascinated by them, because they’re so helpful for us to survive, and a tendency to want to tell them. And we know, in fact, that when you go to hunter-gatherer societies, if you look at what they talk about during the day, it’s, you know, the social and economic problems of the time, catching food, finding food, conflicts.

43:33 But at night, they shift to start telling stories around the fire. And so it’s probably the control of fire that lengthened out the day. We couldn’t do any real work anymore. It wasn’t bright enough, but we were safe, and now we can start telling stories. And that probably played a critical role in allowing our culture to become cumulative and to really take off.

43:51 Right, it’s like an evolution hack, right? A story can be worth a hundred thousand years in a gene mutation. Yeah, we’re shaping the world. This is the social-cognitive niche. It’s also known as gene culture co-evolution, where our culture changes our opportunities.

44:04 We can now get weaker so long as we get smarter, because we’re benefiting from all this knowledge. Also, whoever talks about the ideas will also be in control. So it’s in your interest to be a great storyteller, because then you get more stuff, and people follow you. And every story I tell can make Bill look a little better than he probably was in real life. And so I can come to believe in Bill plus 20 percent.

44:25 He’s a little bit better guy, and so Bill plus 20 percent is going to get stuff that real Bill wouldn’t get. And if I’m the storyteller, then the stories that I tell always has Bill coming off. Sometimes I’ve got to make him look a little bad, because, you know, you’re not going to believe it otherwise. But I’m never going to tell you as bad as he really is, and when he’s good, he’s going to be a little bit better than he really was. So I can plant the seeds of my domination, so to speak, in other people’s minds.

44:47 Right, and this is the art of exaggeration, and you’re saying it’s natural. It’s totally natural. This is how we succeed. If I can plant my ideas in your mind, my beliefs, my goals, well, I’m guaranteed to be a success in life, because now you endorse them yourself, and you’re going to go out and try to achieve them, and then the world’s going to be a better place for me. And you have a part in your books, like when I go to tell you something, if I give it like a 25% exaggeration, I might get a little more of a dopamine spike.

45:11 You’ll remember me, remember my story, so it’s natural for us to do that. That’s right, and the other side of that coin is that we also evolve, because remember, once we became group living, a group of random animals that don’t feel the same way and don’t know the same thing is not a very effective group. But a group of animals who have the same knowledge and the same emotional response to that knowledge is now a very effective team. And so on top of everything that we’ve just been discussing, we also evolved to have this desire that no other animal to our knowledge has, which is to share the contents of our mind and to share the emotional reaction to those contents.

45:43 And so this exaggeration is in part driven by the fact that I want to be sure you share my emotions. And so if I tell you about what happened today that was slightly outrageous, well, you might think it’s funny, and you might not share my emotion where I’m slightly annoyed because the baker didn’t give me what I ordered or whatever. You go, aha, that’ll teach you. But if I make the story a bit more outrageous, I can guarantee you’re going to share my emotions.

46:04 And once I can do that, now I’ve evolved to want to share emotions, and now I feel better and you feel better. Nothing makes us more upset than to tell a story where we’re feeling really upset and everybody laughs at us, right? And so in order to prevent that, well, we make whatever happened to be a lot worse. And now I guarantee that you’re outraged too. You and I are on the same page.

46:23 We feel good, we feel a bond, and we can go off and conquer. And so what made our groups effective actually made us more effective as individuals as well. And so we seek this out. And when you look at effective groups like a SEAL team or a suicide squad or whatever, that’s what they have. They have the common experiences and the common emotions.

46:40 They all have an enemy, a common enemy, or an ethos they believe in, and that’s what links them. That’s right. Now, I have the privilege of working with the special forces in Australia, and those guys are always on the same page. That’s a huge important part of it, and especially if they’re under fire. You don’t want people going, well, I think we ought to be doing, you know, raising your hand and arguing.

46:56 You want everybody to have the same mission goal in mind. And so they’re experts at that. You know, they emotionally feel the same way. They know what the goals are, and they know how to achieve it, and they know they can count on each other. And they do that through storytelling, really.

47:09 They do that through storytelling in massive preparation before they go, and then they talk about it after the event. Right, and then they have the whole history, the symbols, everything. When you join that group, you know exactly what you’re joining. Right, okay. Let’s talk about sex and reproduction, because now this is starting to happen, and I’m curious what you see in the chimpanzees versus the Homo erectus, and then even the Homo sapiens.

47:34 How does that sexual selection start playing in, and all the other things that go with it? Yeah, so it’s a great question, because reproduction is the currency of evolution. You could live a million years. If you don’t have kids, you’re evolutionarily irrelevant. So survival only matters to the degree that you live long enough to have kids.

47:52 And so we look at, like, some rock stars or some other people who live really these fast lives and who die young, and we say, boy, what a tragedy. Well, it is, but evolutionarily it may not be. There may be a lot more offspring out from those rock stars than there are from people like me who live a much slower lifestyle. So reproduction is everything, not happiness, fulfillment, longevity. No, reproduction is the key to evolution.

48:15 Now happiness, fulfillment, and longevity matter to you and me as individuals, but they don’t matter to our genes. Nonetheless, our genes will use happiness as a tool. And so if you think about it, we’re drawn to happy people. They’re compelling. We think, well, they must be a success because they’re happy.

48:32 And so happy people have everything better for them. In fact, if you look at data, if you track people over very long periods of time, you can look at people before they even met the person they’re going to marry. And you can ask how happy they are then and then how happy they are as their marriage takes off. And what we actually find is that even before I ever met my partner, if I’m someone who’s likely to stay married, I’m happier than if I’m someone who’s likely to get divorced.

48:54 So it makes sense, of course. It’s easier to be married to happy people. And so happy people get lots of benefits. So when I say evolution doesn’t care about happiness, I mean it doesn’t care in the moment that you’re happy. But happiness is contagious, and it does tell you things about people.

49:07 It’s like confidence. If you meet somebody who’s confident, you say, well, I’ve only known you for a little while. You may not look very special to me, but you seem to think you’re special, and you’ve known yourself for a long time. So maybe I should take you a little bit more seriously than I would otherwise. Same holds for happiness.

49:22 If I’ve only known you for a little while, you don’t seem like much to me, but you sure are happy. So something must be going right for you, and maybe I should be trying to get in on that. And so happiness, it’s super important interpersonally, but intrapersonally, it’s just a tool that evolution uses to get us where we want to go, to get us where our genes want us to go. Okay. Reproduction being a key example.

49:42 Okay. Reproduction ramifications for all of this stuff happening here. And I know different species have, you know, different traits as far as reproduction, and then it gets crazy, and testicle size, and all that stuff happens. So what are some of the basics that we should know, and what do we know from our ancestors? Yeah.

49:58 So the key for reproduction is that humans are pair-bonding species. And so it’s not the case that females, you know, females tend to be choosier because they’re putting more energy into reproduction. The analogy that I like to use is, imagine that there was a new rule in the world that if, in order to save any money for retirement, you had to have a joint account, otherwise you just couldn’t save money. It would be burnt or something like that. And to make a joint account, it requires one man and one woman.

50:22 And you can have multiple one man, one woman accounts, but every account is one man and one woman. And for every one dollar that the man puts in, she has to put in a million bucks. That’s basically what reproduction is. So if for every dollar I had to put into an account a woman put in a million bucks, basically any woman with a pulse who said, do you want to set up a retirement account with me? I’d go, yeah, here’s my dollar, right?

50:42 Because I know when I retire, I’m going to share in, and she’s already put in a million. On the other hand, she’s going to be super picky, right? Because for every dollar she gets to me, she has to put in a million. Now, it’s not a fair deal for her, but if she’s stuck with that deal, she’s going to want to choose the best guy she can. That’s a big scale factor, one million to one.

50:59 I know. And in truth, our biology is probably more ratcheted up than that. So if you think about what is the obligatory minimal investment for a man to have kids, it’s a teaspoon of sperm. And so I don’t know how many calories that is, but it ain’t many. If you think about the minimal obligatory investment for a female, it’s a larger egg than the sperm cells.

51:17 That’s the start. And then it’s nine months of gestation, you know, pregnancy, and then two years of lactation, breastfeeding in our ancestral environment. So she’s putting in a three-year caloric commitment compared to his three-second one, right? And so I suspect it’s like a billion to one. Now, if we were species that required no bi-parental care, like it was her problem, all women would just mate with the very best guy.

51:40 Brad Pitt would be the father of all of us, right? But because we are pair bonding, it takes more than one person to raise a kid because we’re born knowing nothing, and we’ve got to let our brain develop, well, that requires a couple working together. In the same way that birds have to work together when the baby’s stuck up in a nest and needs to be fed and can’t get out on its own. So birds tend to pair bond, and humans tend to pair bond. Okay.

52:01 Which means monogamy to pair bond. Exactly. It means monogamy in most societies most of the time. Now, there’s exceptions. If you’re a stunningly awesome organism, women are going to say, well, I’d rather be your third partner than his first partner.

52:13 So they’re going to still go with you. But that’s unusual. By and large, we get monogamy, and it’s often serial monogamy. You know, you pair it up for two months, five years, whatever, and then you shift and you move along. Okay.

52:25 But what causes women to choose men? You know, given that they’re doing, we both choose, but they’re doing more of the choosing because they’ve got a greater cost. Well, they look for what we call honest signals of quality, things that can’t be faked. So I could say, oh, yes, I’m super smart. I solved Einstein’s equation before he did.

52:42 But how are you ever going to prove that? Maybe I’m just telling you nonsense. So they look for evidence that can’t be faked. And one example of that, and this is another, there’s an example where lots of modern societal problems come from that, is risk-taking. So male risk-taking is a really good signal of quality because if I take a big risk, you know, in a war or on a skateboard or in any of a wide variety of contexts, and I survive it, that shows you I’m one heck of an organism.

53:10 I’m strong, I’m fast, I’m clever, whatever it took to survive that risk. If I take the risk and I fall, but I bounce back up, it also tells you I’m a heck of an organism. Bill flew through the air on a skateboard, landed on a railing, bounced four times, and hopped back up and was ready to go again. That’s the kind of organism I’d want to have kids with. If I take a risk and curse splatter, and that’s the end of me, well, she’s learned that that wasn’t the right organism for her.

53:32 But if that’s the best of my capability, that’s what’s going to happen because it’s an honest signal. And so women look for these honest signals in their partners. Now, they may think, I don’t want men who take big risks. But in truth, taking big risks are what give men these opportunities. And that’s what testosterone does to men.

53:48 Exactly. Makes them take risks. It makes you risk seeking, and it makes you much more tolerant of interpersonal conflict and violence. Okay, do some people disagree with you that we are a serial monogamy species? Well, there is argument about this.

54:01 And so the thing about human nature that’s so fascinating is that because we learn about half of what we learn from our environment, there’s going to be lots of models of mating. And so if you look around the world at any one time, you’ll find some polygynous cultures, and you’ll find various exceptions to that largely monogamous rule. But if you’re willing to say, okay, well, human beings, their behavior is so flexible, culture is so strong, they can do whatever they want, sometimes it’s going to go against their evolutionary interests, and that group will disappear.

54:29 You know, the Shakers who made that wonderful furniture in the United States but didn’t believe in sex. That was a very strong culture that disappeared very rapidly because without sex, they don’t reproduce, and there’s no more Shakers. So human beings can do whatever they want. It can be something that’s dramatically against evolution, or it can be something that’s kind of evolutionary or orthogonal, neither here nor there, or it even can be slightly against the tide.

54:53 But what you’re going to expect on average is that people are swimming with the tide. And what you get on average with that is serial monogamy, at least until the point where we now have migrated away from the equator, and we may be agriculturalists or we may still be hunter-gatherers, but we have the capacity to store food, and then hierarchy starts all over again. And now you’ve got a bigger storage of food than I do, and so of course a woman’s going to pick you.

55:17 She’d rather be your second wife than my first because she knows you can take care of her, and I can’t. But if we’re back in our original ancestral societies, which are called immediate return hunter-gatherers, you eat today what you killed today, well, you kill an animal, you share it all out, there’s nothing to store for tomorrow, we’re going to eat it as fast as we can. How are you going to support more than one wife? You just can’t. So it started off with risk-taking being that honest attribution of you, but then it later moved on to resources.

55:46 Yeah, resources and hierarchy. And so if we look at our… We can track our maternal and paternal lines genetically. So our maternal line, we can track with our mitochondrial DNA, and we only inherit it from our mothers, and so we can look back at all the diversity in our mitochondrial DNA. And then we can track our paternal lines only through our Y-linked DNA, because of course only men have a Y-linked DNA.

56:06 Now, even if you’re a woman, your father has one, so you can track it through that. And when you do that, you find that there’s probably one and a half to two times as many women in our background as men. So there’s been a lot of guys that have been cut out of the mating game altogether, and there’s been a lot of guys who monopolize more than one woman. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean polygyny at the time, it could be serial monogamy, it could be mistresses, there’s lots of ways to get there.

56:29 But it does mean that there’s a value for males to take risks, you know, to get rich or die trying. Whereas women are almost guaranteed to have kids. There’s a lot of diversity on the female line, which suggests that patience is probably going to be all it takes to be a female and to be a success. Whereas males could easily not ever be chosen. And so what that suggests is that males probably evolved to take bigger risks than females, and testosterone is probably the hormonal mechanism that makes that happen.

56:54 Okay, and that was something that just survived through evolution. Yeah, our animal ancestors, we see that in chimpanzees, we see that in lions, we see that all over the place. And the higher testosterone you have, probably the more risks you took, which means you probably fathered more children. Yeah, that’s right. And so we even know from these wonderful data, if you made it, right?

57:12 We know from these amazing data in the Philippines that the higher, when they measured people’s testosterone and then wait and see who got paired up, people with higher testosterone levels were more likely to attract a partner. Okay. Now, if someone’s watching us today, whether they’re male or female, what can they, you know, glean from this? I mean, I want to get to that at the end, but I’m asking right now, so should that mean that a woman should say, well, okay, I should know I’m naturally attracted to risk takers, and that’s not always good behavior?

57:34 Or should the men say, wow, okay, maybe I need to take more risks if I, or what, you know, what is that? That’s a great question. Okay. So first of all, remember, human diversity is extraordinary because the environment plays such an important role. So I guarantee you, there’s women out watching this who literally are not attracted to risk takers at all.

57:49 All they want is a stable provider or somebody who they can predict or whatever the issue might be. And so, you know, women often provide for themselves. We have the good fortune that we live in a world now where there’s no discrimination. So they can say, I don’t need any provider at all, right? They can completely decide what they want.

58:04 And so they may or may not be attracted to risk takers, but on average, they will be, right? They’ll have, because the genes are going to nudge them in that direction. And so that means, of course, that on average, if that’s what women want, that’s what men are going to do. That’s sexual selection. We have to fit what the other side is looking for.

58:21 And so male female is guided, male behavior is guided by female preferences, and female behavior is guided by male preferences. It has to be. And so how does sexual selection act on us? Well, it pushes us toward being risk takers. Now, what is it?

58:33 On average. So what does that mean? Well, for some of us, if I’m a risk taker, it’s probably a bad idea for me to go in the boxing ring and try to beat people up because I’m going to lose. That’s not going to be a risk that’s going to work out for me. Maybe an intellectual risk.

58:44 Maybe a risk in another kind of domain. Maybe I play really risky chess moves. You know, that… Right. Or write books or write articles or talk about crazy ideas.

58:52 Exactly. Or try to make music to a new genre, push music in a new direction. Those are big risks because you could be humiliated if it doesn’t pan out. And so women are going to, on average, be attracted to that. But what it also means is that our sons and daughters are going to behave that way, too.

59:08 And so when we try to sterilize the playground and have only soft fall everywhere and nobody can do anything that ever gets hurt, that’s not going to suit little boys. Especially as they go through puberty, they’ve evolved to take risks, to have rough-and-tumble play. We know that in all male mammals. That’s how they kind of negotiate the hierarchy and learn to do things and try to attract the opposite sex. And so what it tells me is we ought to be designing our school yards or our activities for people that allow risk-taking but in a slightly safer domain.

59:36 You don’t want any death, of course, but you need the opportunity to at least get hurt a little bit or there’s no risk there, right? Right. So you can’t take it out completely. They’ll find it somewhere. Yeah.

59:44 And they’re going to find it in a worse way than what you’re trying to protect them from. All right. Let me ask you another question. Seven million years from now, will we be so evolved that our choosing mechanisms could be completely different? Or will we always hold this DNA in us?

59:55 Yeah, that’s a great question. Look, we’ll certainly change dramatically. And remember, the key is that reproduction is now is the currency of evolution. And we no longer live in a world where survival is that big of a deal because if something goes terribly wrong with me, I can get fixed. I can go to the hospital.

1:00:09 So something that would have killed me in the past won’t kill me anymore. Something that would have helped make me a little bit better, stronger, whatever. Well, my strength doesn’t even matter that much anymore. I can get a job where I make a lot of money strong or weak. So the evolutionary pressures on us have changed entirely.

1:00:24 And all they are now is what makes you have bigger or smaller families. Okay. Now, we didn’t evolve to want to have kids. We evolved to want to have sex because our ancestors didn’t know how to have kids. And so we have a desire for sex, but we’ve now disconnected that from reproduction.

1:00:39 And so that old desire to have sex, which guaranteed large families all through the past, suddenly doesn’t do anything anymore. And so the interesting question is, well, what happens to population? And if you look at the industrialized world, in every single industrialized country on Earth, women are not having enough children in order to replace the current population. You need about 2.1 kids per woman. And in some countries, we’re down to one and some change.

1:01:01 You know, 1.1 even, I think, might be the lowest. Certainly by 1.4. And what that means is countries are just going to shrink. Now, right now, they don’t shrink because of immigration, but that’s going to change. Right.

1:01:11 It’s not long before the countries that people are immigrating from have become wealthy as well. And why would you leave your home? You don’t longer. You don’t have to anymore because of strife, war, or economic opportunity. That will exist everywhere.

1:01:22 Right. Well, hopefully the economic opportunity part, not the strife. So this is a massive shift. I mean, seven million years from now, there’ll be two guys sitting down in floating chairs talking about this, where all of a sudden everything changed because now it’s not the survival of the fittest. Everyone can reproduce them they want.

1:01:38 They’re choosing not to. So now the genes that get passed on have nothing to do with… Yeah, with what helps you survive and reproduce. And also, don’t forget, we’re not far from being able to adjust our genes as well through CRISPR technology and stuff. Now, I don’t personally worry about that that much because we know that almost every…

1:01:53 CRISPR is gene editing, right? Yeah, that’s right. So before you hack… You could hack a sperm or an egg or their combination once they’ve combined. Right, okay.

1:02:03 And you could just change things. And we’re doing that already in plants and animals, and we’ll be able to do… It’s already happened in humans once. In China with a baby? In China, yeah.

1:02:13 Okay. Because human traits tend to be polygenic, meaning lots of genes influence any single trait, and it’s also the case that they’re… I think the term is plyotropic, meaning that genes have effects on multiple traits, which means that if I decide to tweak myself to become a little smarter, I’m also tweaking myself to become a little something else that I don’t necessarily want to change. So if there was a smart gene and an extroversion gene and a tall gene and a cool gene, well, that’d be easy.

1:02:40 I go, click, I want all five of those. But there’s not. And if I tweak this gene, I could be accidentally tweaking that gene as well. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen happen in China. He’s tried to protect, I think it was against HIV or something like that, but he’s made changes that we have no idea what the consequences are going to be.

1:02:55 All right, so there’ll be some ramifications for our own gene editing. That’s right. Which is a weird part of our own self-mutation that’s going to take us in weird places. Dangerous places? Very dangerous.

1:03:05 It’ll be great when we do things like get rid of single gene diseases, because those are easy. If you can adjust a gene, those are obvious fixes. I’ve got this one mutation on this one gene or this one rare version of it that’s not a good thing. It’s going to make me sick. It’s going to give me Alzheimer’s.

1:03:20 It’s going to do whatever. Let’s get rid of it. But once you’ve solved that, which would be great, that’s going to be an awesome thing. Now, all you’ve done is avoided illness, and not even all illness. As we know, for example, there’s an important gene that causes Alzheimer’s, APOE gene.

1:03:35 But that’s just, it has a small effect. Alzheimer’s probably driven by lots of genes. So we’re not going to solve big things like Alzheimer’s with G-Net, at least I don’t think we will. We’re probably going to get rid of some of them, and same with breast cancer and things like that. Get rid of a couple key genes.

1:03:49 That’ll help. But you’ll still have all these illnesses. You’ll still have all these traits. Some are bad. Some are good.

1:03:55 And because we rely on sexual reproduction, there’s all that mixing up and recombination, which means every generation, they’re going to be different again. You can’t just be the way you want to be. You can’t just get better, so to speak. Okay. What about 100,000 years from now, because I keep saying seven million, but it might as well be 100,000.

1:04:11 Is it possible we won’t even have sexes? Is it possible that we’ve just created a procreation time until we don’t need men and women anymore? It’s very possible. In 100,000 years, we won’t have changed so rapidly that there won’t still be male and female. But you might not play a male and female role, and you might not experience male and female the way that we do today.

1:04:31 Because there’s positive and negative consequences about everything, right? And so evolution gives one hand and takes with another. It’s great to be a guy if you’ve got a pee in the bushes. It’s not so great to be a guy when you get into all this conflict because you’re testosterone-driven and you’re not thinking far enough ahead in the future like you should be. And so women outlive us.

1:04:48 And, you know, women are rapidly taking over the world, right? They’re much better at staying in school. They’re much better at studying. They’re much better doing lots of those things. Now, that doesn’t mean they’re inherently better.

1:04:58 It means the way we’ve currently designed society, they’re proving to be more successful with that. Okay. And so, you know, there’s costs and benefits for all these things. Biologically, what we could change ourselves is highly unlikely, but we may move away from these kind of standard gender roles because they’re no longer playing the function that they originally played. Talk about leadership.

1:05:17 In the book, you talked a little bit about elephants and baboons. What do we learn about our own leadership and some leadership from back in the day? Sure. Well, so leadership is a great example of how this early evolution has important implications for the way we are now. So if you look at Australopithecus, they are now, for the first time, working together as a team.

1:05:35 They’re learning to… I believe it happened around then, but if it’s a little later, it doesn’t matter. You know, whenever the stone throwing really took off, they’re now working together as a team. They’re… The group goals and the individual’s goals are aligning perfectly, and that means a real push in the direction of collectivism and a real dampening of our individualism.

1:05:52 So when I’m alone in Australopithecus going, I don’t want to throw stones. There’s a lot of pressure on me, either to end and get rid of me or I’m going to have to go along. And so, there was a massive movement toward collectivism and toward collective action. But that doesn’t actually eliminate this earlier individualistic, hierarchical, selfish, self-oriented organism that existed in our chimpanzee past. It’s just dampened it.

1:06:14 It suppressed it. And so, the question then is, well, when is that going to come out? Because all of us feel attention all the time. In fact, you know, the two most fundamental tensions about being a human are between autonomy and relatedness. All of us want autonomy.

1:06:27 We want to be able to do our own thing. But if you’re too autonomous, you can’t maintain relationships because you’re constantly leaving and doing your own thing. And so, when you make a decision to marry, or even a decision to have good friends, you’re sacrificing some of your autonomy because today you’re going to see a movie you didn’t want to see because that’s what your friends have chosen, right? And so, that’s the fundamental human tension. And that tension comes out in spades among our leaders.

1:06:48 And the reason for that is, they’ve got the whole group depending on them. So, that collective orientation is much stronger. You know, here I am, the general of the army or the head of the corporation, and my whole corporation depends on me and doing the right thing for my group. But now, as a leader of this group, I’ve got all sorts of opportunities to get benefits that my group doesn’t necessarily get if they’re just rank and file members. I might pay myself better.

1:07:09 I might get perks and privileges. The girls might be more interested in me, whatever might happen. And so, what that means is, nowhere is this tension felt more strongly than in our leaders. Between what I call the elephant side, because of their ecology, elephants are these really fair leaders where they just are very group-oriented and what I call our baboon side. Because of their ecology, baboons are very self-oriented leaders, very selfish.

1:07:31 They don’t really help their group at all when they’re the leader. They just lord it over everybody else and benefit themselves. Okay, and break up any kind of coalitions in the group. Yeah, chimps are much better at that than baboons are, but baboons, of course, they’ll benefit by their capacity to do that as well. And so, the upshot is, so what’s going to drive a person to be an elephant or a baboon to be this elephant-style leader where you really look out for your group and your group serving, and if you benefit, it’s only because you’ve done right by your group.

1:07:57 You know, your whole stock has gone up or your military unit was successful. Or what’s going to make your baboon leader, where you’re really just holding everybody down and trying to have the best things. And of course, personality, be part of it. The more I’m dominance-oriented, the more I’m selfish, the more I’m narcissistic, the more those things are going to make me push toward the baboon end. But also, just the fundamental inequality in your social structure.

1:08:18 Elephants have no inequality. They’re all eating as much shrubbery as they can walk by to maintain this massive bulk. They’re herbivorous, so they can’t, there’s no better foods for them to eat. Baboons are wildly hierarchical, and they benefit from the inequality that exists because there’s better quality food, there’s meat rather than just grass, there’s seeds, there’s female mating opportunities that the males can monopolize. Whereas when a female elephant is fertile, she’ll signal that for miles around, and every male comes to fight it out.

1:08:46 So she doesn’t, there’s no benefit to being right there. You can’t monopolize her unless you really are the strongest. And then you might as well leave because you’ve got nothing to gain by sticking around. So humans are the same way. If you have a really unequal system where there’s a vast difference between the haves and the have-nots, well then when you’re a leader, it’s really your baboon side’s going to come out because you need to look out for yourself.

1:09:06 Otherwise, look how far down you can drop. But if you’re a human in a very equal corporation or a unit or society, well then it’s not such a big deal if you fall because the people below you aren’t that far below you. And so you’re psychologically not feeling so much pressure to look out for yourself, and you’re feeling more like I need to take care of my group. I’m thinking of like the Syrian leader Assad as one of the leaders that you might say is like a dictatorship.

1:09:28 It’s a total baboon. He’s got a long way to fall, doesn’t he? He’s dead if he loses that job. And so however many people he has to kill, he’s just doing it. That’s what I think people don’t remember.

1:09:36 They forget about ISIS like maybe Russia, maybe Syria. It’s like they don’t lose the election. They’re dead. Yeah, exactly. They’re dead when you lose.

1:09:45 Look what happened to Qaddafi. What a horrible way to go, right? And so if I know that’s around the corner, if I don’t maintain my job, I mean even in a lot of those societies where you’re not going to be murdered, at the very least you’re going to lose your assets, you’re going to lose everything because the next person’s going to take everything you have. Yeah. And so we have so fortunate, those of us who live in these industrialized democracies, where there’s such strong rule of law that you can minimize that.

1:10:06 You can never prevent it, right? You’re going to get baboon leaders. They’re going to happen. But you can minimize the damage they can cause and you know that in the next cycle you’ve got a good shot at replacing them with an elephant-type leader. Yeah, it’s interesting to see, you know, with Trump and Obama, he’s kind of trying to undo a lot of the stuff he did, you know, which kind of seems like, you know, a little bit of an old-school baboon tactic.

1:10:27 It is. It’s going to undo or erase the previous leader. Yeah, and on the one hand, that’s sort of a baboonish thing to do, but on the other hand, that’s what any leader will try to do in a system whereby if they’ve got a different ideology. So if I’m Obama’s vice president and now I win the election, you know I’m not going to undo those policies because I worked with him in the first place. I obviously endorse those.

1:10:45 But from the other side, I really probably disagree with a lot of those policies. So part of it is going to be the more baboon I am, the more I’m going to try to do that, particularly since even if sometimes I would have otherwise liked the idea. I think that’s the signature of a baboon. So if you are my predecessor and you put in a new rule, and I changed it just because I’m in charge now, even though it was actually benefiting everybody, and in some ideal world, if I could be totally objective, I’d say, yeah, that was a fine idea.

1:11:11 That would be a baboon thing to do. But if you set up a policy that, you know, free donuts, and I’m thinking, yeah, that’s not such a good idea. We’re going to have health problems. I’m going to change it over to free bagels or free whatever. Then that’s arguably just the constant conflict of different leaders, right?

1:11:26 I’ve had a few people in here talking about leadership. Simon Sinek has a book called Leaders Eat Last. I’ve had Jaco Willink in here, The Navy Seals, and he’s all about a leader’s job is to listen. Leader’s job is to build coalition. A leader’s job is not what you think of it.

1:11:41 A lot of people probably have the baboon vision of a leader yelling orders, sitting at the top of the food chain. But real leaders are building coalitions. They’re listening to people’s problems. Real great leaders. I’m totally right with the real great ones.

1:11:55 Maybe also in structures where there’s not a power dynamic as well. The problem is that the real awful leaders of our world are the baboon types, right? And there’s tons of them. And what’s so interesting is if you read these autobiographies of people who are in these struggles, like these revolutions in various countries or even political parties, they all talk about how we had this vision for what we were going to be like when we took over and if they’re honest, they often say, and we were nothing like that at all.

1:12:19 When we got in charge, boy, the perks of office were so great and pretty soon we were indifferentiable from the people that we took over from. When they’re honest. Castro, does he come to mind or not? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing is that in some ways, he actually led a more modest existence than you might predict.

1:12:33 Right. But in some ways, of course, he was a pretty horrible leader. He’s pretty dictatorial. Yeah, because they wanted to give everything back to the people and take away from this capitalist state, but it ended up being this dominant state, right? Yeah, that’s the downside.

1:12:45 So the only humans where capitalism ever worked was the original humans, hunter-gatherers. Every immediate return to hunter-gatherer society, when you kill a large animal, you share it out. So that’s to each according to their need, and then from each, everybody tries their hardest because we’re all on the edge of starvation. But the second that we have any capacity to store anything, well, communism just doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit our species.

1:13:06 It works well for ants. It doesn’t work well for humans. And so that’s why E.O. Wilson said, it’s a great idea, wrong species, right? So the problem with Castro’s ideal is, if he could have made that work, if psychologically communism were plausible, well, then it could have flowered and been a very productive society, and conceivably he could have been in a position to execute.

1:13:25 But Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Castro, all those guys, they end up overseeing this economic collapse, basically, because we’re not that species. Whenever we can store food, if we’re in a situation where we’re all supposed to contribute, everybody slacks off. We know that psychologically. The only time you don’t get that when you’re these immediate return on togethers, where we live in small groups, we can gossip about each other, saying, you’re not pulling your weight, get out there and catch something, or tomorrow when you wake up, we’re all gonna be gone.

1:13:52 And we can regulate each other’s behavior really well. Once we shift it to agriculture, it just doesn’t work. Talked about the modern industrial world and how that brings out individualism. So now, so say London, for example, also completely connected, inter-connected, profiles on social media, and now I’m in a real modernized place. Does this pull out individualism more?

1:14:13 It’s wild, right? So the first thing that happens when you think about the origins of cities, which are about 5,000 or 6,000 years old, that began in the Middle East and kind of spread from there, is that you start interacting in a world of strangers. And so no longer. Can you imagine that every time you bumped into someone in London, you go, all right, who’s your cousin, who’s your father? Like, to do this New Guinea game?

1:14:31 You’d never walk five feet. And so we’ve slowly, over time, as cities started to develop towns, villages, cities, we started to get used to strangers. And so then we become anonymous. And now, for the first time in the history of our planet, we have privacy as a species. We can go into our own unit or a quiet place where nobody’s around and do things that nobody knows about because we’re anonymous in that context and people don’t know me in London.

1:14:55 I can do whatever I want to do and then leave. And so it freed us up and it created this world of privacy that had never existed before. And now, as you point out, fascinatingly, we’re actually shifting back because now social media, so I misbehave and I come to your city and I vomit in your Uber and I mistreat your Airbnb and you give me a lousy review and suddenly Bill opens up. He gets on Facebook and he’s being trashed by people who don’t know him, but that’s okay because they found me.

1:15:21 And so my reputation follows me in a way that I could escape it. You know, basically, for the last 10,000 years, up until a few years ago, we lived in this new world and now we’re suddenly shifting back. Okay. And so what does that mean? Well, it’s both good and bad, right?

1:15:35 So any change is both good and bad. I want my own privacy, but I do want to know that you’re behaving yourself. And so I kind of like a lot of CCTV cameras out there in the world. And so when you try to blow up a train, it doesn’t take the police long to track you right back to your house and now you’re arrested, and so I don’t have to worry about you blowing up another train. Like, that’s a great thing.

1:15:55 But it’s not such a great thing if I’m now doing what I ought to, what ought to have been kind of a private action in my own home or outside on the street or whatever. You might know about the social credit scheme in China, where if you cross, if you jaywalk across the street, there’s cameras that’ll face recognize you and then you’ll lose points. If you buy too many potato chips in the shops and so you’re eating unhealthy food, you’ll lose points. And so the social credit scheme, we think, but those are private actions, right?

1:16:24 If you want to jaywalk and risk getting hit by a car, I kind of think that’s your prerogative, right? It’s chaos if everybody does it. So we try, if it gets too out of hand, we’re going to make the laws stricter. But when the laws are the way they are, we’re pretty happy. If you want to eat potato chips to your heart’s content, I regard that as your privilege as well.

1:16:41 And so suddenly we’ve got this kind of big brother-type world. But in actuality, our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a big brother-type world. It was that gossip we talked about already. That’s basically big brother. And so the negative side is that sort of lack of autonomy and freedom.

1:16:56 The positive side is the much greater relatedness. And the fact is, human beings don’t behave very well when they’re all on their own. I mean, think about all the things that you do in private versus all the things you do in public. It’d be a rare human being who does the exact same stuff, right? Even just walking around naked versus putting your clothes on.

1:17:11 You know, we try to look our best. And so you don’t want a world where everybody feels like they can just do whatever they want. You’ve got to have a world where we conform and follow rules. And so we’re pushing back to gaining some leverage on that side. Right. Okay.

1:17:24 Talk to me more about this modern world. Like, these days, everybody can be on social media. You can upload a video and talk about what’s going on with yourselves. I mean, it’s hyper-connected. And, like, part of my job, like I said in my academy, is to push people.

1:17:38 The biggest thing is to just get your ideas out there and stop worrying about being judged. But it paralyzes so many people. You know, what can we learn about what we used to do, the risk-making, taking stuff? And now we’ve got this new media where we’re basically being evaluated by 3 billion people online at a time, which is, by definition, overwhelming. Yeah, so it’s hard because…

1:17:59 So imagine that I’m hanging out with 10 of my friends and I say something really stupid, or somebody makes a racist joke and I laugh before I realize, boy, that’s super inappropriate, so I do something wrong. Up until now, you got away with it, right? Oops, my bad. Please don’t tell anybody or whatever. And even if you did tell, well, no one saw it, so maybe building mean it or maybe it didn’t happen quite as you say.

1:18:22 Yeah. But now, if it’s tweeted, if it’s on social media, there’s this permanent record of my misbehavior. And so that’s super costly. And so we get really, really nervous when we start to do things in public because we know that, yeah, there’s a big upside, right? I could enhance my reputation.

1:18:39 I could plant my ideas of the way I want the world to be. I could plant it in other minds. And remember, that’s what makes me a success, to persuade. But on the other hand, it could go the other way dramatically. And so I put my video up online, and everybody in my high school class gives it a thumbs down and say, you’re a terrible band.

1:18:56 Well, we were a terrible band, so they’d be right in saying that. But that makes me feel terrible because in our ancestral environment, that’s a sign that I’ve really lost status. And now, I’m not going to get the partner I want either coalitionally. You’re not going to hunt with me anymore because I’m a loser. The girl who I wanted to partner up with doesn’t want to be with me anymore when yesterday she did, but now my stock has changed.

1:19:16 And that volatility of being out there in front of the whole world in an unchangeable way. I can’t go into social media and fix something that’s already out there. That’s really rough, right? It is scary. And you’d be right to be really wary of it, to be careful about what you do.

1:19:31 But, of course, if all you ever are is careful, then you’ve got no impact at all. Nobody wants to hear your really, really guarded words. We listen to bureaucrats speak and we’re like, there’s nothing interesting on this channel. Yeah. So the level of anxiety is up.

1:19:43 I mean, you’ve got people like Jack Dorsey going on people’s shows and basically saying, now, everything will be recorded forever, you know, with blockchain and with all of this is wet. So basically, your digital footprint will be around forever. There’s no escaping that. People now mine up tweets from 10 years ago and pull them out and show them to each other. Now, the contrast of that, fascinatingly enough, is our President Donald Trump, who people are like, you know, you slept with a prostitute, you did all this stuff, ah, whatever, whatever.

1:20:09 And he just glosses over it and just continues to lead. It seems like a very, you know, old-school savannah move. It is an old-school savannah move. Where he doesn’t let anything touch him because he just doesn’t, he kind of holds the frame. Is that a leadership move, an alpha move?

1:20:22 It is an alpha move, but it’s also, we don’t know what touches him in his private moments, right? And so for all we know, some of the things that he’s a really good job of blustering over, yeah, no big deal, prostitute or whatever, he’s aghast about in private. I think he is. I mean, I think Saturday Night Live bothers him and like, those things do bother him. That’s what the data suggests, at least from those who are around him.

1:20:41 But it doesn’t seem to affect his support because of the way he seems to play it off. He doesn’t apologize. Things that I would have told you a President would have done four years ago, would have been like, he would have been out of office 14 times. You’d never get elected. But Trump’s not.

1:20:54 It’s kind of fascinating to observe. It is fascinating. And I think part of it is that one of the consequences of these permanent digital footprints is we all become really careful. And so there’s something fascinating about someone who’s not careful, who just says stuff that he knows is inflammatory. Because you know what, you would never say something inflammatory if you didn’t believe it.

1:21:11 So what we perceive is genuineness. Now, in truth, you might say something inflammatory that you don’t believe because that’s a strategy too. Right. Super rare strategy, right? 99.9% of us are trying to be really careful.

1:21:23 And you say, well, Bill, what happened yesterday? And say, well, I saw a person I really liked. And so I don’t want to be caught up in some me too thing because my intentions were misunderstood. There’s all sorts of risk in all those things. And so I’m going to be careful rather than I’m going to be wild.

1:21:37 But those few of us are willing to be wild where we’re going to come across as really genuine. Do you think part of us are also just tired of the whole political correctness and the digital footprint? And I forgot, there’s probably a better word for it when you just come so desensitized to the same thing over and over again that it’s refreshing to have someone who goes against the norm and doesn’t care about it. It’s absolutely refreshing. Because if you give me that bureaucrat speak, if you say that there was an incident when what you mean was we killed a bunch of people with a drone, but you don’t say we killed a bunch of people with a drone, you say there’s an incident, I’m like, come on.

1:22:06 You and I both know what incident is. You’re not really a trustworthy source because you’re not really willing to say what actually happened. And so we find that disinteresting and disingenuous where somebody says I sent a drone in and I killed the people I regard as bad guys and then sometimes they say, uh oh, I killed some good guys or some innocents as well. You know, we like that because now someone’s telling us the truth. And in reality, our capacity for speech is super complicated.

1:22:30 It allows us to, all sorts of euphemisms. Pinker talks about this a lot when a cop stops me and I want to bribe him but I don’t want to risk saying, are you bribable? And I say, is there any way I can pay that fine right now? Well, there’s nothing jailable about that. He says, no, of course not.

1:22:43 You’ve got to wait for the ticket to arrive. He goes, yeah, actually, you give it to me and I’ll pay for it for you. Bingo, that’s what I was hoping for, right? And so we can use ambiguity to our purposes sometimes but what we don’t like is people who constantly rely on ambiguity. And what do most political figures do?

1:22:57 Well, it’s super hard. Imagine trying to serve a meal that’ll make a thousand people happy if you give them the same food. It isn’t going to happen. And so what happens to this really funky Italian food and really funky Ethiopian food and really funky Japanese food? Well, those aren’t going to make a thousand people happy and it all turns into some kind of mush baby food in the middle.

1:23:13 And that’s how we use speech when we’re talking to the masses. And so it becomes this sort of mushy, bureaucratic, euphemistic, nothing concrete being said. And so when that happens and that’s politically correct, we don’t talk about disabled, you’re differently abled. Well, never mind that your legs don’t work and you wish you could walk. You know, that was a term that came out when I was in graduate school.

1:23:34 I don’t know if people still use it but come on. This is not a good thing that I’ve had this accident and my legs don’t work anymore, right? It’s a bad thing but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have all the opportunities. And so we don’t like it when people start using all these euphemisms and become hyper politically correct.

1:23:49 There’s no reason to be rude. There’s no reason to call you out on the basis of your gender or your ethnicity or your religion. But there’s also no reason why we can’t say what we mean. Well, yeah, that’s what Trump does. And he does it in a huge way.

1:23:59 Yeah, and it doesn’t seem to slow him down at all. What should I tell my students when it comes to risk? I mean, sometimes I try to say, okay, you’ve got this monkey brain. It was developed for a good reason. So you could stay in the Klan and continue to reproduce and continue to eat.

1:24:12 But it doesn’t serve you now in this modern world where every risk looks like a saber-toothed tiger or this or being relinquished from the Klan. But it’s not. It’s actually your chance to do something great or even maybe be seen for higher value or to be proud of yourself. What’s a way to explain that to people? It’s hard to explain and here’s what I always say and it may or may not resonate with you and it may or may not resonate with your audience.

1:24:36 But I regard there being two types of sins in this world. By sin, I mean something we’ve done wrong. We have sins of commission when we did something we should not have and we have sins of omission when we fail to do something we should have done. And when you take a risk, what you’re doing is you’re making there’s a real chance you’re going to commit a sin of commission, right? I’m going to try something.

1:24:55 It’s going to fail and I’m going to have egg on my face in one form or another, physically hurt, emotionally hurt, whatever. But what’s so interesting is if you go back later in life and you ask people about their regrets, unless the sin of commission was awful and they accidentally killed somebody or some of those really rare examples, they’re never on their big list of regrets. They may wish that didn’t happen but it’s not a big deal. The sins, the regrets, the big ones that people have are always the omissions.

1:25:20 I should have taken that opportunity. I should have taken that chance. I should have asked that person out. I should have gone to that new city because you know what? From that, a million things might have happened.

1:25:29 There’s infinite possibility. Whereas I know that if I commit the sin of commission, I take the big risk and fail and there’s egg on my face. So there I was in my ninth grade band and we sucked and we got booed off the stage. Well, you know, now that’s a funny story. It’s not a horrible thing anymore.

1:25:45 Whereas if I never went in front of that group, if I never, I was a drummer actually, if I never gave it a try, maybe I’d be thinking, God, I could have been Pete Moon, you know, I could have been somebody, or Keith Moon, sorry, Pete Townsend, they got blended. But I could have been a real drummer and I don’t know that in fact I’m terrible. And it took a couple booings off the stage to convince me this isn’t going to be where my bread is buttered. Okay, and this is something Jeff Bezos talks about.

1:26:09 He calls it his regret minimization hypothesis. And he used to be at a company called D.E. Shaw in New York City. My brother actually interviewed there back in the day in the 90s and he was like a quant trader. And then he saw the internet happened and he said, okay, books is where I can maximize this and I’m going to get in my crappy car and drive across the country to Seattle.

1:26:27 And for him, it was so when he was 80-some years old on his deathbed, he wouldn’t do what you just say. And he stepped on his life and said, it’s the omissions that I regret, not the comissions. That’s exactly right. And he, because he’s such a logical guy, engineer probably, reverse engineered it out and said, oh, this is the obvious decision. But most of us see the commission pain as more of an immediate pain.

1:26:50 That’s exactly right. It’s super duper strong immediately. But we don’t remember that it fades over time. Massively. And it turns into an asset because it’s a funny story.

1:26:58 Unless it went really bad, which they’ll hardly ever do. And even that more time can’t be funny. Exactly. At least for other people. And so the thing is that comedy is tragedy plus time, right?

1:27:07 And so the thing is that it’s super hard to keep that in mind, but it’s super important. And I try really hard to say, all right, is this the sense of risk for me? Because you can’t take all of them, right? Bill’s not going to go up on karaoke night, trust me. That’s just painful for everybody.

1:27:19 I know that. But there’s some risks that make more sense than others. And there’s some times in my life, you know, Jeff Bezos, when he’s a young guy and it doesn’t have any assets anyway, why not risk it all on a new opportunity? But when he’s got kids to pay for college and all that, it’s sensible to be a little less risk-taking. So you’ve got to be wise about when you do it.

1:27:36 But particularly when you’re young and starting out, or particularly when there’s an opportunity that looks like it might be a unique one, then you have to ask yourself, all right, what’s the worst-case scenario if I take it, and what’s the worst-case scenario if I don’t? And if you think about it in the long term, you’re absolutely right. You’re going to weigh them. And also try to do an unemotional risk assessment. So again, I tell people to take risks.

1:27:56 I tell people, don’t jump in front of buses. But so often, we look at the risk and think, it’s a life or death situation. But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s not. It’s a short-term potential humiliation situation, but it’s really mostly in your brain. Fourteen of your Facebook friends might dislike something.

1:28:12 But otherwise, it’s not as big as you think. That’s exactly right. And even the really big ones, like even if you stuff it up big time in front of a big audience, it dissipates. It matters to you a lot more than it matters to everybody else. So I go up there, it happens.

1:28:24 I give a terrible lecture. I make a fool out of myself. That sticks with me for a long time. And in a way, that’s good because we need negative emotions so we can learn from our mistakes and we prepare better next time. But it doesn’t stick with my audience.

1:28:36 You tell me about the 10 most boring lectures you ever attended. You can’t retrieve them from memory because you just forget about them once they’re over. What you remember are the big interesting things that happen in the world. So we don’t realize that, yes, we get humiliated in front of our friends when they’re looking at each other going, what is this awfulness on Facebook or the talk you’re giving or the performance you’re doing? But it’s gone immediately if it’s not any good.

1:28:56 And again, it will become a funny story that’ll be a little badge of honor. Yeah, and you said something really interesting earlier that, look, we know that taking risk has benefits for us, but if you can’t take the physical risk, then take another risk. And that’s really interesting. So for you, you’re putting ideas out there. You’re writing books.

1:29:12 You’re putting that out there. You could be a musician and be pushing the envelope there, a politician, something that doesn’t have to be getting in the ring, it doesn’t have to be this. So you can really choose or even create a new type of risk these days. That’s right. And that’s such an awesome thing about the age that we now live in.

1:29:29 So literally, our ancestors, pretty much, physical risk was the primary way they could do it, although they could be funny and clever, they could do other things. But physical was a guarantee that it was part of the equation almost all the time because they lived a physical life. But now we live a life where physical doesn’t need to be part of it at all. And so you could literally be, all you were good at is one thing, art or something like that, with you to starve to death in the past, but now you really matter.

1:29:52 And so we have these amazing opportunities. And then the second part of that is that the internet has democratized everything. And so if I’ve got a really wild new form of music or art or something like that and I believe in it, I can put it up there for the world to see when previously I’d go to town agents who go, sorry, that’s not what we’re interested in and the world would never know. So we live in an awesome age where people are willing to take these risks and have something that’s different and worth offering.

1:30:13 Yeah. One of my mentors is this guy named Dan Pena. He calls himself the $50 billion man. He’s an American who lives in a castle in Scotland. But when he finally met me, he said, Brian, you’re not taking enough risks.

1:30:24 And he said, you’re an engineer, which means at MIT, they taught you not to take risks because they teach us how to build bridges that don’t fall down and planes don’t come out of the sky. But he said, it’s killing you. But he says, once you learn how to engineer risk into your life, you’re going to be really successful. So I always remember that. And so I forced myself on a stage where I don’t want to be.

1:30:42 It scares me and I know the downside and it hurts when I suck. But when I crush it, it’s amazing and people forget when I suck. And so Dan says that, he says, Brian, I fail all the time, but everyone focuses on my wins. So that’s what we do here at London Real. Everyone sees our wins.

1:30:56 It’s like the Beatles. You remember 15 of their hits. They had 70 songs that sucks. But no one remembers that. And yet when we go to make decisions in life, we’re just super risk averse.

1:31:06 That’s exactly right. We’re over engineering everything. Let’s make sure that a 5,000 ton vehicle could get across this footbridge. And so it’s exactly that. You have to try hard on these things and it has to hurt when you suck because what made you successful is the first times when you sucked and you thought, oh, I will not let that happen to me again.

1:31:25 I’m going to find a way to make this better, right? If we couldn’t experience negative emotion, you’d still suck. But the fact that you are very capable of regretting those negative events allows you to build from them. Which is part of this evolutionary history that brought us to where we are today. Absolutely.

1:31:38 And you’re right, it has to really suck and that’s what makes it feel great when you overcome that. When you finally get it. Right. So that’s all part of it. And the problem is that when people look from the outside, they look at this finished product and they think, whether you’re a professor or whether you’re a broadcaster or a businessman or whatever you are, they think, boy, that’s God-given talent.

1:31:54 That’s raw and innate and they can produce this perfect product. But they just can’t. They don’t realize, you know, all of us suck big time. And so the first time I taught, I was terrible. The first time I wrote, I was really, really terrible.

1:32:05 Everything is that way. It’s just hard work to get it whatever you regard as your goal. Yeah. And having some sense of where your abilities might lie. Before we get to these 10 easy steps of getting the good life, which is a great way of wrapping that book up, because there’s nothing I missed in here.

1:32:18 I mean, I’m sure there is a little bit. You know, what about aging? Because that’s interesting, because you say, well, maybe we’re going to get in there as well as bit. But as we age, you know, we behave differently, but we don’t want to act too differently when we age, right? Right.

1:32:33 Our priorities change because, so my capacity to contribute when I’m young is very different from when I’m middle-aged, is very different from when I’m old. And so what happens is that people’s priorities change at the same time. And so as my contributions change, because what I can do for the world changes, people track their abilities and their prospects. And so I have very poor prospects in basketball, and so I never put much effort into it, and I’m probably even worse than I would be if I somehow thought I could be good, right?

1:33:00 But that makes sense, because you can’t do everything, right? You have to track where you’re best suited. And so as we age, we start to gain new abilities through the wisdom we’ve got, but we also start to lose some of our abilities through by forgetfulness or by physical deficits as we get weaker or whatever. And so you want to be really sensible about that, and we naturally tend to start moving toward legacy as we get older, because that is something that older people can do.

1:33:22 And so I think that’s an important change that we tend to forget. I would add, though, that one thing along the line in this conversation where we haven’t got to yet that I think is important is that it’s an unfortunate feature of human nature that we’re much more motivated to deal with things when they’re bad than when they’re good. So if you’re trying to raise money and you show me how bad something is that I care about, I’m going to give you money if you’re trying to raise money by saying, look, how much better this has got.

1:33:47 I’m like, hey, man, I don’t need to get involved. It’s getting better without me. And so as human beings, when we’re focused on problems, and of course, there’s always going to be problems, we tend to focus on the bad, and there’s a super negative consequence of that, and that is we don’t notice when the world’s getting a lot better. And so if we think about the world just in our lifetime, I’m a little older than you, but our basic lifetime, when I was a kid, I don’t know if you remember, but Lake Erie caught on fire.

1:34:09 You know, how disgusting does water have to be to burn? Right? And our sewage and stuff has to be in it, that when I lived in L.A. for a few months, when my mother went back to school for a little while, and when you were in the hillside of L.A., the city disappeared in the smog. Now, it’s blue skies.

1:34:25 It’s become an incredibly clear place. There’s so many parts of the world that have become so much better if you look at the kindness of us to each other. So Pinker points this out in both of his books, and this is a super important point. In his book, Better Angels of Our Nature, he shows the data where if you set the rape and homicide rates in 1973, call it 100, whatever they are, we’ll just say that’s 100, and then you track it over time. By the early 2000s, homicides gone from 100 to 50, and rape has gone from 100 to 25.

1:34:51 Now, homicide is much better tracked than rape, but if you ask yourself, what’s more likely for it to be, will rape be underreported more in 1973 or in 2004? You know that it’s going to be underreported more in 1973, where people are a lot less sympathetic about it, and the court system is not as well set up for it. So probably that decrease has gone even more. But if you read the news, you would think that campuses are a hotbed of date rape. You’d think that the world is much more violent than it used to be, that your chance of getting killed are much worse, because everybody focuses on the problems.

1:35:21 And it’d be really nice if they could stop and say, all right, rape has gone way down, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone, so we still need to do something about it. Homicide has gone way down, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone, so it’s still a problem. But it tends to be that we don’t want to admit that, because otherwise we’re worried people will ignore it. And so what that does for me is it says it’s super important for us not to give up in those cases, because it’s human nature to go, well, that just can’t be fixed.

1:35:43 So if I don’t realize that poverty is actually way better all over the world, I say to myself, well, there’s no point in trying to aid other countries. There’s no point in worrying about other places that are poor, because it can’t be fixed. Not realizing that, in fact, it’s being fixed. And Pinker talks about this in the sense of, let’s not look for radical change, let’s look for tweaks to try to make it better, because radical change means throwing away the something that’s not working, when in fact, things are working really well.

1:36:07 From an evolutionary perspective, what it does for me is it says, well, let’s focus on those aspects of human nature that are really positive, like our kindness and our cooperation. And how can we aim them more broadly? But let’s not forget that we evolved to become more cooperative and kind, so we could be more effective killers, right? Evolution doesn’t care about cooperativeness for its own sake. And so let’s try to keep, let’s try to figure out ways to put the reins on our negative side and let’s try to find ways to promote our good side, because in fact, the world is becoming a much better place.

1:36:35 So we are doing a good job of that. Yeah. And I think we need to question what we watch in the media, because if it bleeds, it leads, and it’s meant to get our attention from an evolutionary standpoint with bad news. Yeah. Bad is stronger than good.

1:36:48 And so if I go out of my cave and I get eaten today, that’s the end. If I go out of my cave and I kill something and eat it, well, that only got me till tomorrow. So the good thing can only help me a little. The bad thing can hurt me a lot. And so we evolved to be much, much more focused on the bad, on the negative.

1:37:05 They carry a lot more weight. But in reality, the good is everywhere. And if we could allow ourselves to focus on that, keeping in mind that bad is stronger than good. One nuclear bomb ends everything, right? But we forget that all these other things are coming along and getting a lot better.

1:37:21 And as you point out, they don’t get in the news. They get ignored. Another great day here, you know, 200 years ago, 70% of the world were farmers. You know, how could you ever get a great coffee if everybody has to spend all their time, you know, tilling the land at very low productivity? So these changes that have happened over the last 50, 100, 200 years are so important for the way we live our life today.

1:37:45 Yeah. Infant mortality rates as well. And yeah, Stephen has a great thing when he says, the news never says, well, today, 100,000 people live because… Escape from poverty. Escape from poverty.

1:37:56 Yeah. And things like that. And I think that’s why it’s important to have, like, gratitude practices that you do through your day so you can just remind yourself as a human of these negative loops that we do. Absolutely. Because it’s super easy with a world full of terrible news because that’s news, the good stuff isn’t.

1:38:12 And then occasionally really, really awful stuff that you can now see in real time on somebody’s cell phone or, you know, some video that some terrorist organization has put up. So we’re exposed to all the nastiness but we forget that that’s such a tiny percentage of the actual events. Far more people die slipping in their bathtub than die from terrorism. But dying slipping in your bathtub just doesn’t make the papers. Yeah.

1:38:35 And so we overestimate the cost of these horrible negative things that we see and we underestimate the power of all the good that’s going on all the time. What are we going to do about this tribalism that we see, this divisiveness? I guess it’s very apparent in America. I don’t live there, but all my relatives say, Brian, I can’t go to a barbecue or a dinner party without a fight breaking out. And then that kind of also ties in sometimes to maybe our treatment of the environment where it just seems to be disconnected from us.

1:38:59 I don’t know. I mean, what are your thoughts on that? It’s a hard one to beat. The problem is that it’s human nature to both bicker about status, because remember, when we talked about sexual selection, for me to get chosen, all I’ve got to do is be better than you, right? Because you and I are the two that are available in this group, and so everything is relative.

1:39:16 So I’m going to bicker with you constantly when you and I are nudging each other to try to be higher status so that we’ll get chosen. That’s an important factor because reproduction matters a lot. But when our group comes in conflict with another group, we’re going to put our differences aside because that’s a real problem. That’s an existential threat. That’s just a status-bickering problem about who’s going to get which girl or whatever, which dinner, whatever the case might be.

1:39:37 So what that means, though, is that we will get along a lot better when there’s external threats that we need to worry about. And the United States is a perfect example where they’re the world’s lone superpower. And so the biggest threat to a Democrat in America is no longer the Soviet Union. It’s a Republican and vice versa. And so previously, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, they would get along with each other because there was something really bad out there.

1:39:59 Now they don’t regard it as that big of a deal anymore. You can see signs when it becomes one. So, you know, 9-11 changed everything but only briefly. Then it settled right back tomorrow. Everyone got together and cooperated.

1:40:08 Everyone in New York City was nice to each other for a couple years. And then it went back. Then it goes right back to where it was. And so the thing is that the problem is that in truth, if I’m a Democrat and you’re a Republican and we live in New York City, we are each other’s biggest threats because I see the world as wanting. I want the world to be this way.

1:40:23 You want it to be that way and in that sense, it can really seem like a zero-sum game. Now the reality is if a large chunk of people think one thing is good and another large chunk of people think the opposite is good, probably the truth lies somewhere in between them, but neither side is prepared to see that. All right. So we should know that about it. Thoughts on the environment?

1:40:42 Well, the environment is a great case because once you’re rich enough that you want to go outside and not be smoking two packs of cigarettes when you go for a jog, you start to pay the money that it takes to clean it up. And so LA is a perfect example. The Lake Erie is a perfect example. They’re catching these big, beautiful fish out of Lake Erie which you can eat now rather than being highly toxic and no fish anyway, and LA is nice and clean. And so that’s because America is a rich enough country and then I’ll say, all right, let’s clean up the mess we made getting rich.

1:41:08 But of course, other countries got to go through that exact same process. So China is getting rich right now and you go to Beijing and the smog is out of control on most days. Now that’s very fixable and it will be fixed because Beijing is getting rich and they don’t want to live in a smoggy city. They want their city to be nice too. And so then you start paying the extra amount that it costs in order to not use highly polluting fuels or whatever.

1:41:30 Now the big one of course is that down the road is global warming and the problem is that that threat is so far in the future that it’s really hard for human nature to fix that because we have to pay a big price now so that our grandkids can benefit from it and we just didn’t evolve to do that. The world was so risky that we’re not going to pay a big price for grandkids. We’ll pay a little price. But we may not ever survive much less have grandkids. So we’re not willing to really give away big things.

1:41:53 So long-term planning really isn’t a human thing. It’s not. We can talk about it. Yeah. But we don’t really.

1:41:59 We’re not good at it. It’s exciting. And eventually we’ll do it because you know what? We’re super good at solving our problems once it becomes self-evident that there are problems, right? And global warming is not self-evident yet, although a lot of people think it is, but it will be.

1:42:11 Right now, in a lot of places, I grew up in Alaska. It’s a lot warmer now in the summer. The winters aren’t quite so long and cold. It doesn’t really feel like a problem, right? On the other hand, if you’re in an Inuit village, the permafrost is melting and your house is sinking.

1:42:23 That’s a problem. And so when it becomes everybody’s problem, then people are going to do a… They’ll band together and they’ll do… You know, it may be too late to change the temperature, but we’ll change the consequences. That’s the question.

1:42:33 I mean, you’re talking about local phenomenons where I fix the pollution in L.A. or I fix Lake Erie. But if everybody’s working and thinking about a local issue and then the global issue continues… Yeah, we’re horrible at that. Right.

1:42:42 But you’re optimistic. I’m very optimistic because in fact, the world has been very warm in the past and animals dealt with it. Now, it’s going to be very hard on lots of humans. But if we… Once we realize it’s happening, I’ve got to believe that humans are going to help each other out to try to make those who are really suffering from it not suffering as much.

1:42:59 And it’ll just be different. Yeah. It’s really interesting because, you know, a lot of our content is on YouTube. And so I have people that come on here and talk about global warming and they don’t all say it’s a problem. Some people say it’s a scam and it’s overdone and it’s used by political parties.

1:43:13 And it’s interesting to see how these clips when they can, and again, anonymously be liked and watched, they’re massively consumed and people have a lot of different opinions that they might not share at the dinner table when they’re being judged. And so it’s interesting for me to watch as a content creator to see that there’s a lot of people that don’t believe the consensus. I think that also happened with electing Trump. No one would have said they would have elected him before Election Day when all of a sudden it happened.

1:43:41 So again, it’s a weird social experiment. No, that’s exactly right. And the thing is that, you know, 99.9% of us don’t have the expertise to actually judge it for ourselves. Correct. We rely on a couple of climate, a couple of thousands, but comparatively, a couple of climate scientists to say this is what they did a show.

1:43:57 And whenever that happens, it’s kind of a guarantee that people are going to decide, well, my bread is buttered if I believe, or my bread is buttered if I don’t believe. And so we like to congratulate ourselves that we’re objective scientific people, but in reality, we’re not. We didn’t evolve to find the truth. We evolved to find the answer that suits me best and then to persuade other people of that answer. And so at any one time, one political party might be being more scientific than the other, but trust me, there’s no fundamental reality to that.

1:44:26 There’s not a group of science deniers and a group of science acceptors. You turn the equation around and you say, oh, look, pesticides don’t harm you. They’re not going to make you sick. Boom. You’re going to get opposite sides and you’re going to get the people who are previously denying science to say, oh, I believe that.

1:44:40 And people who are accepting science to say, no, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Organic food is healthier and I just know it. So no one’s being objective, really? No one can. It’s not in our nature.

1:44:50 We can’t agree with each other. If we’re not objective either, we’re just as exactly as bad as everybody else. And so I make a living by being wrong, but hopefully by being right on often enough. You know, other people fix it when I’m wrong because they disagree with me and their bread is buttered by seeing it differently. But hopefully being right enough that we can slowly make some kind of progress.

1:45:07 And then science are these proven things that then we can use as a basis to move on. Building blocks, right? We step on them and go forward. Tell me about these 10 pieces. Maybe we can’t get through all of them.

1:45:17 There’s no need to do all of them by any means. Maybe a couple of them that are important. So again, to 10 easy steps. One is stay present. Seek out sweet moments.

1:45:25 Guard your happiness to stay healthy. Accumulate experiences, not stuff. Prioritize food, friends and sexual relationships. We got to talk about that one. Cooperate.

1:45:33 Interesting. Embed yourself in community. Learn new things. Play to your strengths and seek the original source. Tell me about your favorites in here.

1:45:40 And why make this list? Yeah. So it was actually my editor’s idea to put the list in. And she’s like, let’s sum all this up and see what we’ve got. It sounds like an editor’s thing to do.

1:45:50 I wasn’t really sure. And I said, well, all right. I’m willing to do that so long as we accept that I can say there’s no set solution. I can’t promise what will make you happy. I can say what makes people on average happy.

1:46:01 And so my 10 steps aren’t, this will solve your problems. They’re like, on average, this is a great thing. And so stay present is a good example. We evolved to think the future, to simulate the future and to make plans. And that’s our huge advantage over other apes.

1:46:16 They can’t do that. And so for an ape to try something out, they physically got to do it. But if I want to get the girl, I can say, all right, let me see. I’ll try to sit in the next room biology class. Oh, wait a minute.

1:46:26 I’m terrible at biology. She’s going to ask me a question. I’m going to look like a fool. All right, kibosh that plan. And I can go over and start making these elaborate 47-step plan, right?

1:46:34 That served us incredibly well. It’s a super valuable ability, but it has a consequence. It means that we spend a huge amount of time living in the future. And so when good things happen in the moment, we don’t even necessarily notice. And my favorite example of that is when the Washington Post hired Joshua Bell to busk in a metro station.

1:46:50 So here you have one of the world’s finest violinists, and he’s playing on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. And they’re really worried that this huge crowd is going to gather around him and that it’s going to be a crush and his incredible violin might be damaged. So they’ve got these elaborate security plans. Well, on the video camera, you can watch over 1,000 people walk right by him, only seven stop for more than one minute. Now, why were they not listening to the world’s finest violinists when he’s right there in front of him, playing this incredibly beautiful music?

1:47:16 Because their mind is on they’re going to work. Their mind is on dealing with their boss. They’re living in the future. And so he’s got no social proof. Exactly.

1:47:25 There’s that problem as well. But they’re literally living in the future and not even hearing what he’s playing. Because if they did, he’s such a talented musician that you don’t know that’s Joshua Bell, but you’re thinking, boy, I’ve never heard a busker who could do that, right? And so I think what happens is that it just sneaks by us. And actually the same can hold not only when we would benefit, but when we could benefit others.

1:47:43 When someone’s in need of help, we can literally step over them because we’re so busy thinking about what we’re going to do next. And our problems. And so our happiness suffers when we don’t enjoy the moment. In my own case, little kids are a pain in the butt. They’re difficult to raise.

1:47:56 When you look at the data, they’re actually on average a little bit less fun than doing the laundry, right? They’re not a good thing on average because there’s a lot of tediousness. But they can be stunningly wonderful at brief moments in time. And so I’ll be working on a paper or something like that at home on my laptop and my kids suddenly start to do something wonderful. But because I’m planning and my mind is somewhere else, I don’t even notice it.

1:48:17 And so I’ve learned, boy, if my kids come up and something starts to happen, it doesn’t matter. Just close it and refocus on the present. It’s not easy to do. But when you do that, you find all sorts of wonderful things are going on that you could otherwise ignore. Okay, which is why we meditate too, just to kind of…

1:48:31 Which is exactly why we meditate. That’s right. Be present and not be in the future somewhere. Yeah, exactly. We have to learn to undo this incredible gift that evolution gave us that does make us successful as a species but can make us unhappy as a whole, right?

1:48:42 And being hyper-connected too and with all of this information, it makes that even worse sometimes. Yeah, because there’s all the more ramifications of all this stuff. And don’t forget, we don’t just shift our mind forward. We also shift it backward to the bad things in our life. The only reason that evolution gave us memory is so we could do better next time, which means that our mind spends all this time going back and forward from past to future.

1:49:03 And if the past hasn’t been such a good place, we could miss out on all sorts of great things now because we get ourselves upset by thinking about what happened, which could well be upsetting, but it’s gone, right? So you want to be able to focus on the present and try to move forward from wherever you are. Yeah, all right. I got to ask you about prioritized food, friends, and sexual relationships. Sure.

1:49:21 Everyone’s going to ask that. Why is that important? Well, that’s what we evolved to do, right? Friends are critically important because one of us on our own is a pretty, you know, measly individual. You drop one human alone in the forest.

1:49:32 You’re feeding the local animals. You drop 100 humans into a forest. There’s a new top predator in that place. Even if they started out naked with no tools, you can work together and solve amazing things. So friends are so important for us to be a success.

1:49:43 Food, of course, is exactly what we evolved to seek out, right? That we’re successful animals. So food friends and what was the… Oh, sexual relations, of course. Oh, sexual relations, yeah.

1:49:52 And so in that case, that’s what makes reproductions the currency of evolution. It’s super important. And so if you can prioritize those three things, right, especially getting together with your friends over food, doing things like that, that’s what we evolved to find really, really satisfying. And so you can’t become permanently happy. That’s an unfortunate truth because evolution uses happiness as a motivator.

1:50:11 And so anyone who’s capable of becoming permanently happy and staying there, evolution can never motivate them again. They’re fine. I’ve done one good thing. I don’t ever need to do anything else. And so they’re going to be left behind.

1:50:21 So we evolved to get happy and then go right back to our own individual baseline. So what that means is that prioritizing those three things won’t make you permanently happier, but they will give you lots of really great moments that you use to build a great life. Okay. People, I had Jordan Peterson in here and he said, you know, we shouldn’t search for happiness. We should search for meaning.

1:50:41 And a lot of people have said that, you know, this pursuit of happiness is just overblown because like you just said, it’s impermanent. Right. What do you think of that? I think that’s a very good point because if you search for meaning, you’re going to try to make the kinds of changes that actually could have long-term benefits. So there’s one single exception to the rule that our happiness goes up and comes back down.

1:51:00 And that’s if you get yourself into really, really good relationships. And so again, from that same panel study I mentioned earlier unhappy people are more likely to eventually get divorced. We also know that when you track people over time. So I track you before you even met your partner and now you meet her and you have the good luck that you two made a great choice for each other. Literally 10 years later you’re still happier than you were the day you were married.

1:51:20 Every year gets better. And I’m not even asking you how happy is your marriage. I’m literally saying how happy are you? And so really good relationships, well that’s what made us a success in our ancestral past. So people who form really good relationships are not focusing on their happiness.

1:51:34 They’re focusing on each other. Right? They’re focusing on the meaning of their relationships, the things they can accomplish together. And so focusing on something other than happiness is far more likely to yield a meaningful and happy life than trying to constantly seek out moments of happiness. Yeah.

1:51:49 So that means I think focus on risk taking and not the and no omissions. Yeah, that’s right. That will help to get you there as well. Well you probably need a few omissions. You don’t want to chase everything.

1:52:00 I agree. But you definitely need some commissions. You need to make some big mistakes. You probably need to do 90 percent more stuff. I suspect.

1:52:08 You know? Yeah. Let’s talk about you. If I was to ask five of your friends and say what is what is Bill’s superpower? How is this man able to write books and put great ideas out there and travel the world and all that?

1:52:20 What would they say is your superpower? How are you able to do this? Superpower may be a little strong. Okay. We all have a little bit of a superpower.

1:52:27 Right. But I would say that my gift is that I’m persuasive, right? Because I’m not going to be able to pick you up and shake you and make you go along. If you’re a great storyteller, that means that I can convince you of the things that I want you to believe. Right?

1:52:41 Now, my job as a scientist is to try to make those things as true as possible. But that doesn’t change the point. The point is that you’ve got two scientists who are both trying to find the truth, and one person is going to be more persuasive. Well, their ideas are going to carry the day, even if they’re less accurate than the other scientists. Right?

1:52:57 And so, for me, I’m blessed with I’m good at thinking about, well, what persuaded me? And how can I bottle that and then use that to persuade others? How can people be better storytellers? Because you are really good at it. Well, thank you.

1:53:09 And I’ve had a lot of people in the chair, and I’m telling you, communicators trump IP always. Yeah. You can have the greatest intellectual property and ideas. But if you can’t communicate it, forget about it. Agreed.

1:53:20 So, how can people be better at that? Look, it’s super hard. In our own lab, we’re working on that problem. And we found that there’s a couple key things. One is your ability to detect when the world has changed.

1:53:29 So, I call this contingency sensitivity. My ability to say, oh, the usual rules aren’t applying here. My shtick usually works with other people, but Brian doesn’t look too impressed, right? I’ve got to try a different approach. Comedians are good at this.

1:53:41 Very good. That’s step one. Step two is you’ve got to be good at then inhibiting the old approach, because there’s a tendency to just roll off the old way anyway. And that’s kind of a frontal lobe task. Some people are better than others at pushing down what they don’t want to do so that they can try something else.

1:53:56 The third step is what we call divergent thinking. All right, so now I’ve got a problem. The old shtick that I use with everybody else isn’t working here. So, I’ve successfully inhibited that old shtick, but I’ve got to replace it with something. I can’t sit here staring blankly at you.

1:54:09 And so, now I need to think about a million different possible directions that might do the job. And that’s divergent thinking, thinking in parallel ways out into different opportunities. But then I’ve got to be good about picking the right one, because some of those are going to be really lame. Some of them are going to not fit this certain circumstance or the time or the place or whatever. And so, and then the final thing, and this is unfortunate because it seems to be a big fix, is mental speed turns out to be really important.

1:54:32 And so, we find in our lab that if you can do all that quickly, well, then it comes across as genuine. You may not be any more genuine than anybody else’s, but there’s some really smart people who are slow thinkers. And the problem is that when it takes too long to respond to somebody else’s comment, well, it looks disingenuous. It looks like, well, that’s kind of a made-up politically correct or whatever not really believed answer. And the reality is, when you answer quickly, people trust it.

1:54:56 They believe it. A sign of lying is slowing down, because when you need to lie, you’ve got a truth in your mind and a lie, and you’ve got to navigate between them. If all you’ve got is a truth, boom, you can just say what you know. And so, it’s unfortunate that if you happen to be mentally slower, it’s harder to do all this. Okay.

1:55:11 Best day of your life and the worst day of your life. Oh, those are great questions. I’ve had such a blessed life that the worst day doesn’t come easily to mind. Okay. What was blessed about your life?

1:55:23 How? I was very, I grew up in Alaska, which is a little, and in a kind of Lord of the Flies type of environment, but we all did in those days. And somehow, I survived through it, right? I didn’t, all the stupid things I’ve done, I mean, I’m sure you can think back on these crazy things you’ve done. It’s hard life up there, right?

1:55:39 It’s rough. It is a bit rough, and I was a little tiny, weak guy, but I got lucky, right? When I did really, really stupid things, they didn’t go terribly pear-shaped. I remember trying to learn to ride a motorcycle, and I’m not a very good athlete, and I bent my handlebars with my face, but I had the good fortune of wearing my full face helmet. So I didn’t knock all my teeth out.

1:55:57 And I love to ski, but I’m not a great skier. Many, many times, I could have hurt myself or somebody else, and just the grace of God, I didn’t, right? And so a lot of luck gets you to where you are in the world, and it’s easy to forget. Also, a lot of hard work. I didn’t start out being as good of a storyteller.

1:56:11 I didn’t start out being as good of a teacher or scientist or any of those things. I worked really hard to develop those skills. So anyway, the good news is, I don’t have a worst day in my life. I dodged them all. I could have had millions.

1:56:22 I nearly killed a bunch of people when I was driving, and the snow was really heavy, and I’m a dumbass 16-year-old, and I’m going right at them even though the road’s icy, and I miss them by that much. Otherwise, I could easily answer your question. I’d say the day I killed that kid on my hometown who was doing nothing wrong, but he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gotcha. What about the best day of your life?

1:56:42 One of the best days. I tell you what the best day is. It’s not a day. It’s the days that happened since I made the really good fortune of marrying the right person. And so my wife is really awesome, and we’re a great combination.

1:56:51 And so I happen to be on that little list where every year gets better than the one before. And I’m getting older, and my hair’s falling out, and I’m getting weaker, but every year’s better than the one before. That’s powerful. It’s luck. And maybe a little bit of something that helped.

1:57:04 Yeah, I don’t know. What scares you? I’m concerned about pessimism about our world. I totally agree with Pinker. In his book, Enlightenment Now, he shows really convincingly how great the world is getting, and I’m scared people don’t know that, and they’re willing to just turn it over and try something radically new because they think it’s not going in the right direction.

1:57:24 And so if you wanted to vote for somebody like Trump because you agree with his policies, well, that’s great, because that’s how voting works. But if you wanted to vote for Trump because you think America is going to hell in a handbasket, and you want to try something radically different, and he is radically different, that’s actually a really bad idea. Because the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket, and you should know that. You should know that America’s going great.

1:57:46 And then if you decide to vote for anybody you want, that’s fine. But I’m concerned about all over the world right now. Populist leaders are gaining a big advantage because the local people think things aren’t going well when they’re going great. And so I worry about that a lot. Yeah, we’re making incredible incremental changes.

1:58:01 I mean, if you look at Enlightenment Now and some of these books and Better Angels, I mean, it’s amazing, actually. And yet if you go on Twitter, everything’s horrible, and it’s bad, and the immigrants are taking our jobs. Wait a second. It’s like we’re wealthier, healthier, more opportunities than ever in our society. And the downside is it is disruptive when things change.

1:58:20 And so remember, I mentioned that 200 years ago, 70% of the world were farmers. Well, you know that as the world industrialized, a lot of those people’s lives were basically ruined, right? But the world became a much better place as a consequence. So we can’t forget that change, immigration, whatever those issues are, can be super threatening to the people who are dislocated by them. And that’s important.

1:58:39 We need to keep our eye on that and say, well, what can we do to ameliorate that? But we shouldn’t try to stop it because every time it makes the world a better place. Yeah. What do you do for fun? What’s your break?

1:58:48 I love to rock climb. It’s totally engrossing, right? You can’t think about anything else. And there is, of course, a risk of falling and hurting yourself, but I’m very careful about it. And I love to alpine ski.

1:58:59 Those are my two favorites. Okay. You do any free climbing when you’re rock climbing? No, I’m just bouldering, like when you’re over the mat, right? Because I want a very stout rope if I get at any height.

1:59:09 Okay. We had Jimmy Chin in here. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

1:59:14 I met Alex at the premiere. Oh, wow. It was pretty intense. Yeah. That movie.

1:59:19 But even though I know it’s going to be okay, my heart is going like this all the time. Yeah, and we’re talking about the movie Free Solo, which won the Academy Award for Documentary. And it’s funny. I was there and I knew he was speaking afterwards and I’m watching it. And it’s still, again, it’s a basic human condition.

1:59:32 Yeah. When you see someone hanging off a rock at 2,000 feet with no ropes. No ropes. It just gets your adrenaline going up. Yeah.

1:59:39 Again, great storytelling. Yeah. What keeps you awake at night? I sleep like a rock. Yeah, nothing does.

1:59:45 I mean, the thing is that, look, I’m not a heart surgeon or a brain surgeon. I’m not an emergency medical technician. My job doesn’t really matter. And so for me, there’s no stress at work that I just don’t put out of mind immediately when I get into bed. And I think that’s actually super costly for most people because we evolved to have these very important short-term stressors.

2:00:03 Sabertooth is chasing me across the savannah. All sorts of physiological changes help me get away from the sabertooth, but they’re really bad for me in the long run. And so if you’re not good at putting that stuff out of your mind, and when you go to bed at night, boom, it’s gone. That’s a problem. It’s not good for your health.

2:00:17 And I happen to be blessed by this mind where not only do I forget stuff, but I can just put it out of my mind instantly. If I’m not working, I’m not thinking about it. If things go the way you want them to go 10 years from now, what are you doing? What is it? Exactly what I’m doing right now.

2:00:30 Hopefully back on your show. All right, that sounds good. What, new books? New books. That’s right.

2:00:35 I got another book I want to write. It’s going to sound boring, but I want to write a book about how to understand data because I worry that in today’s world, people have to rely on the scientists. They can’t look at the data themselves and say, what does this really mean? And it’s actually not that hard. I teach my class on that at University of Queensland, and I want to turn that into a book because it’s fun.

2:00:50 I want to call the book Food, Sex, Data. By which I mean you can learn all these funky things about things like food and sex. If you just take a moment and take a look at the data and try to decide what they mean. And if you read the book, if I write it, if I can talk my editor and publisher into it, I think people will naturally just learn how to do it along the way. And it’ll all be fun.

2:01:10 There’ll be no pain. It’s all the interesting tidbits that somehow by the end of it you’ve been, you’ve realized, oh, I’ve gained this ability that’s actually super important. I like it. I’m an MIT engineer. I love data.

2:01:21 Excellent. And data’s everything. You can get your head around it, but most people, they don’t even want to look at any data because it’s overwhelming. And that’s right. And that’s fair enough.

2:01:29 And so I want to tell a story and I want the data to be in the background. But if the data are always there by the end of the story, you go, oh, I know what those data mean. Okay. I like it. Push that on the editor.

2:01:38 What’s Australia like? I love Australia. It’s, you know, it’s a beautiful country. I grew up in Alaska. I was cold.

2:01:44 I went to college in the East Coast. I was cold. I went to grad school in the Midwest. I was cold. I taught in the Midwest.

2:01:49 I was cold. And then I get this email out of the blue. Hey, would you guys, we got two jobs in Sydney. Would you guys like to move down under? And we’d gone there on sabbatical.

2:01:55 And I was like, it took me a nanosecond. I was like, yes, I want to do this. I love my colleagues in America. I love my family and friends, but I want to live there. And we’ve been there almost 20 years now.

2:02:04 My kids grew up there. I totally love it. And after five years in Sydney, which I thought, you know, they’re going to take me out of this place and they’re going to take me out of the sandbox. Turns out it was a little bit too big of a city for me. I love it.

2:02:14 Love to visit it. But Brisbane is just a perfect size city for me. University of Queensland is a great university. They give us lots of opportunities. I have fantastic colleagues.

2:02:22 I love doing my work there. And so it’s just, that’s exactly where I want to be in 10 years, right where I am today. It’s nice. They have bugs down there. No, they, well, yes, they have bugs.

2:02:31 It’ll kill you. But with that said, they usually don’t. Right. Right. And so it’s, you know, it’s like everything else.

2:02:38 When you never live there, you never go, this would be really horrible. I was at this biology, I gave a talk to the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney a few weeks ago. And then they have this retreat where you go up to the research station. And as luck would have it, the world’s most dangerous spider got into the fruit box. Well, as luck would have it, it didn’t bite any of us.

2:02:56 And Aussies are totally non-fussed by things like this. So they literally put a cup over it, take it out and toss in the woods. I’m thinking stomp on the damn thing, right? Just get rid of it. But you think, boy, that’s super duper scary.

2:03:06 But in reality, how would you rather go being bitten, going, ooh, that hurt, or being literally eaten to death by a bear, or being shot, or any of the other ways you could go? The Aussie way it strikes me is okay. That’s an interesting way to frame that. But look, I know the Aussies are good. They just take it in stride.

2:03:23 Yeah, exactly right. They’re not too fussed. Very nice. Bill, I always ask a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if I could give you a magic phone and you could call up the 20-year-old version of yourself.

2:03:32 I guess that guy’s at Yale, right? In New Haven, loving things. And you could give us some advice, based on everything you know now. What would you tell that 20-year-old, Bill? Well, first of all, he was a shallow twit and he wouldn’t listen to me.

2:03:46 But if I could get him to… Shallow? Well, he wasn’t that shallow. He was just, you know, he’s like every other 20-year-old. He’s got his own agenda.

2:03:52 If I could get him to stop and listen to his older self, who you probably think is kind of uncool, I would say, look, you’re going to underestimate the importance of social relationships in your work. And so there’s been some really great people who were friends of mine who had an idea for a project they wanted to do that wasn’t what I wanted to work on and I just went my own way. And I regret it. Some of them are gone now. And I really wish I’d had the opportunity to learn from them, the good times of working with them, and that I’d put aside this agenda that was in my mind that really in retrospect isn’t that important and took more advantage of the social side of my job, which in my case is collaborating with other scientists on things that might be of interest to them.

2:04:28 Okay. So push him to be a little less individualistic and to just have fun, collaborate a little bit more. Okay, gotcha. On that same note, best advice you ever received could be from a professor or on writing or from over your parents, but what’s something that sticks out? So when I was a little kid, my family’s Jewish and we were, my parents made me go to Hebrew school and I didn’t like it because I didn’t know any of the Jewish kids in Alaska and I wasn’t religious.

2:04:53 But that was the rule I had to go. So I went and we’re memorizing this Hebrew script and I don’t really understand. I’m not good at languages and it’s always taught by some random person and one day the rabbi shows up and in Hebrew school, he’s the big cheese, right? And so rabbi says, okay, let me ask you guys some questions to see how you’re traveling. And he says, okay, who thinks the answer to this question?

2:05:13 And I’m like nine years old. He says, so here’s a question. Who thinks it’s A? I raise my hand. He goes, who thinks it’s B?

2:05:20 Everybody else raises their hand. And he says, well, what are you going to do, Billy? Are you going to change your mind? Everybody else says it’s B. And I said, well, I guess I better change my mind.

2:05:27 And he goes, well, you were right and they were wrong. And so you should not change your mind just because other people feel differently than you do. Now, usually it will go the other way, right? Usually nine people think in one and one think in the other. It’s going to go the other way.

2:05:39 But man, that wrangled inside me for years because I thought, here was this golden opportunity to impress this person and I blew it. The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe where you get exclusive access and insights from our high-performance guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health and well-being. To join our tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash tribe. Now, let’s continue with the show.

2:06:10 Powerful lesson. And it would have been hard to get back on the Savannah, probably, right? Very. Because you would have been beaten up or you couldn’t have said that. We evolved to go along with the gang.

2:06:19 Yeah, exactly. Except now, it’s within your interest to not go against the gang. And for me, don’t swim right against the tide. You’re going to die if a rip is pulling you out. You swim a little bit against the tide, right?

2:06:31 Try to be reasonable on what you’re trying to achieve because most of us are going to just dash ourselves against the cliffs if we really try to go hard against everybody else. Yeah, because ultimately, you have to build some type of coalition. That’s right. Some type. Absolutely.

2:06:43 Even if you have radical ideas. Last part is advice to that 20-year-old that’s out there watching us, listening to us, that’s trying to process seven million years of history, the current state of things, which is their reality. You know, they grew up not on the Savannah, but in this interconnected world where it’s what they know. Advice to them. So the advice I would give is that they live in this world that’s great but also rotten in a very particular way.

2:07:07 Remember, you’re always giving a gift with one hand but then causing a problem with another. Nothing’s free. And we live in a world now where you can do whatever you want. But the consequences, and that’s great. Our ancestors didn’t say, you know, 10,000 years ago, they didn’t go, what do I want to be when I grew up?

2:07:22 Everybody’s the same thing, right? You’re out together. So what’s the consequence of being able to be whatever you want? Well, we’re supposed to find our passion. How are you supposed to find your passion when you’re 18 or 20 or even 25?

2:07:31 You may not. And so people act like it’s this thing that just pops into your mind or that you just know. And some people do. Some people from the age of 14, they just know what they want. But lots of us have no idea.

2:07:41 And we kind of meander around. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And so what I would say is, yes, it’s important to find your passion, but don’t act like it’s easy. And don’t act like it might happen by the time you’re 10 or 20 or even necessarily 30. It might take a lot of work and experimenting and exploring where everybody else is wondering why aren’t you getting it together before you find what you’re best at and what really interests you.

2:08:03 And it’s not fair that we put so much pressure on people that they think that they’re supposed to find this and that’ll be the only way to be fulfilled. Because in the meantime, they’ve got to do something. And in my own case, if I look at my family, my sister is far and away the most important of us and she’d fast around for the longest time before she found out what she wanted to do. So there’s nothing wrong with taking your time. Okay, so don’t stress about it.

2:08:24 Don’t stress about it. Maybe keep doing some different things and take some risks to find out. That’s right. Keep looking for opportunities but be satisfied with whatever you’re doing in the meantime and don’t worry so much that the guy next to you seems to have found his passion because you know what? Eventually, you may never get there but with luck, you probably will.

2:08:41 There’s a great phrase that says stay in your lane. And a lot of times, with social media, it’s very easy to find someone who’s doing better than you. But also, as Steve Jobs said, you can connect the dots in reverse when you get to where you’re going to be. So with me, when I look at all my dots now, it all makes sense. But at the time, I was like, what am I doing?

2:09:00 You could never have predicted this. So much darkness, so much failure, but now it all kind of makes more sense. Absolutely. Go through it. Excellent.

2:09:08 The book is Social Leap. I’m sure they can grab it in any place where books are sold. There’s a lot of other stuff in here we didn’t cover as well but it’s really interesting to look at it. Plus, honestly, just the science is really interesting about these different animals, the concept of throwing, and just all of this evolution is really interesting to think about. And also to understand maybe why we do things as these human animals today.

2:09:28 And then check that behavior because we ultimately can choose different behaviors if we want, right? Absolutely. Again, you said half genetics, half kind of environment. And some of that environment’s in here. It’s the decisions that we make.

2:09:40 Yeah. And you can untrain and retrain that brain as well. Absolutely. Great stuff. All right, I’ll see you back here the next time when the book on data comes out.

2:09:48 We’d love to. Bill, it’s been great talking to you. You’re an amazing communicator. It’s been a ton of fun. And thanks for these ideas.

2:09:53 I really appreciate it. Thank you.