The Evolutionary Tug-of-War: Today’s World, Yesterday’s Psychological Software | Bill von Hippel - 898

and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so reach out to Mark and the team at www dot test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Bill von Hippel, Welcome to Roll with the Punches.

million years. So that's the time span since we separated from our chimpanzee cousins, and so I'm particularly interested in what happened during that time period to the best of our knowledge, and how the things that happen and let our psychology be different from theirs.

I've never thought about it, and I was I was starting grad school, and we always had this picnic at the beginning of the year. This is at the University of Michigan, and so the beginning of the year, it's still summer, and it's still nice, and there's this big picnic and all the grad students come and all the faculty, all the academics come, and we had this new professor who had just joined us. He had been a professor at Harvard, but he was switching over to be a

Michigan and I was a brand new Chrestien. So he and I were both arriving at the same time. But of course he's eminent and I'm and nobody, And I asked him, what do you do when he starts telling me, and he's an evolutionary psychologist. His name is David Buss, by the way. He's now at Denier, City of Texas. Super lovely guy, super productive and smart, and he's telling me what he does. And I'm like, that's wild, that's

totally cool. I've never heard of such thing. And so they said, well, look, you're welcome to work for me. And I said, that's a great idea. Let's put it on hold for a decade or two because it doesn't sound very politically correct. And my colleagues are all these squishy lefties, which I'm a little bit of a squishy left too, but they don't like that stuff, and so it's not going to It wouldn't be a good career move for me. I'd rather wait tell him a little farther down the pike.

And then I started. Then I was a professor, and so I felt like, all right, it won't do any harm that I can start. I can come out of the closet, so to speak. And so I did, and I started asking the same questions, but well, where did it come from? Why is it that way? And when we ask why, what does it help us understand? It might be different?

this wonderful research. I don't know if you've ever heard of Matekauzanaga, but he's this early split brain researcher where he would do research on people who had such bad epilepsy then it was threatening to kill them, and so in order to control it with the surgeons would do is literally your brain in half, because your two lobes are basically independent things, but they talk to each other on this dense network of fibers called the corpus colosum.

And so what Gazanaga does is he cuts people's corpus. Well, he doesn't do it. He works with people with the surgeon has cut their corpus closum right through, and so now they've got two sides of the brain that can't even talk to each other. Now, the wild thing about that is that, you know, if you've ever had internal conflict where you can't decide if you want to do something, imagine what that conflict's like like if there's actually two

of you inside there. And so for example, if you wanted to have a donut, but you kind of think you shouldn't, right, maybe you're training or watching your diet or whatever. You might start to reach for it and you say, oh, if you really shouldn't meet that now, and you stop, and he say, but I'm kind of like getting you start and with these guys, but all that happens inside you, you know, back and forth in there.

What these guys do after their surgery is one hand will reach for the doughnut, the other hand will reach out and grab it. And now the fight takes place kind of in a real time. And then what's so interesting is that over time that stops, like one hand starts to reach, the other hand starts to stop it, and they can see the conflict and so then they just kind of work it out by deciding. Right. But here's the key. So now, the way your brain works

is really weird. It crosses, and so like my left hemisphere actually goes to my right eyeball and my right hemisphere goes to my left eyeball. So with that annoying feature aside, what you can do when somebody has their brain sliced in half is you can present different images to both sides of their brain. Now, we know that only one half of your brain can talk. That's where language sits. That We don't feel that because it just goes back and forth. But if your brain's cut half,

you feel that. And so what they what gazannagain his colleagues would do is he'd show them these photographs and in one picture they'd see a snowy scene. And then he'd say, Okay, what are you looking at? And he'd give them a bunch of options. What's the closest to the snowy scene? And they'd pointed a shovel. Now he'd ask, the side of the brain that's pointing at the shovel is the side they can't talk. So now I'd say

to them, why are you pointing the shovel? Now, the tricky thing is that the side the brand that can talk is looking at a chicken coop. And so you'd think it will go I don't know, because it doesn't though right, It has no idea. But instead of what it does immediately, it goes, oh, well, chickens make a lot of poop. And so I thought the shovel was the closest match to the chicken poop because they got to shovel it out. It's just making it up. But

the amazing thing is they have no idea. They're making it up. They're telling stories just like you're saying, and they're doing it in within seconds, and they have no idea because the brain can't talk to itself. But what Gazannager pointed out is we probably do that all the time. He just set up this really exotic situation where he could catch you at it. But the rest of us are doing that all the time. Right.

and I started sport of boxing. I always talk about this moment in time where I realized I've been telling stories and I didn't know myself so and the boxing ring became this place or as close to it as I've ever felt where that can't happen because whatever I am innately hardwired for will play out before my conscious mind can think, choose and tell stories. Yeah. Great, thank God for that. Otherwise you've just deconstructed my entire philosophy.

about should I have a burger tomato? Or should I have pizza? You know what movie do I want to see?

That kind of thinking doesn't really take place anymore once you're physically an expert in the boxing ring or a golfer or anything you want, right, it's all happening in a different part of your brain, and so the storytelling has just gone, especially something like boxing, where you know, I could tell you how cool I am on a golf course, and I can tell you all about how I usually play better than today, but you haven't punched

my face, and there's no there's no the rubber. It never meets the road right in quite the same way that it does in a boxing ring.

inverted verted commas courageous, I was actually avoiding vulnerability. I was dissociating. So I was doing what scared others people, and I was framing that is my own courage And that was a story that I was telling until I realized it was a story I was telling so resilient.

vulnerability but refusing to admit it. And so as for example, one of my close colleagues, works with the police and ambulance drivers, to people who are first responders who come upon a scene where somebody's got multiple gunshot wounds or there's drowned children, and how horrible things happen, right, And if you ask, you know, lots of people think they want to do that job in they last forty five minutes and they go the first job, this is horrible. I can't do it, but lots of people just keep

doing it. And the tricky question, though, is are you doing it but you really are ptsding out the wazoo, like you are really suffering, but you do it anyway? Or are you just fine? Are you dissociating, are you just separating yourself and you compartmentalize that stuff, or have you found a way to really allow what's happening to watch over you but to be strong and robust to it anyway? And I think when we think about resilience, it's that last thing I know for what was happening.

It's not nice, but I can handle it. That's what I think people mean when they say resilience. They don't mean I force myself not to think about it, and I somehow become a different person, and they don't mean I can't sleep at night, but I keep doing my job right. And so the kind of resilience where you don't suffer from it and you're able to keep doing it. What the data suggest is that where that comes from.

First of all, it's a bit of luck, like if you've got genes that are resilient, you've got a better shot at getting there right. But where it also comes from is not having too much bad things happen to you, because especially if you're really young, when they happened, it disrupts what we call your HPA axis, your hypodermic pituitary adrenal axis in your brain, and you you no longer get a proper fight or flight response. So if you're

overwhelmed as a child, that doesn't happen anymore. On the other hand, if you live this super lithful existence and you've lived life in this little silver spoon, the little gold cage for nothing bad's ever happened to you, you also never developed the skills, and so there seems to

be this happy middle ground. The resilience comes from this place where you get a little bit of bad things happening to you and not at such a furious pace that you can't deal with it, and then you just slowly learn to handle it.

and piecing that together and starting to connect dots. And one of the questions that came up with that reminded me of was so learning some of these personality traits from biological sense through the epigenetic platform of pH three sixty. And I remember thinking, I realized this sense of comfort slash familiarity that I felt in the boxing ring, which eventually we have to go that's weird, that's not typical TIF, So what's the deal with that? That's a funny place

to feel at home and familiar? And then and I went, is it a specific personality type or trait that is going into these roles as first responders? We're also having

a lot of mental health conversations. Is there a biological trait personality trait that gets people susceptible to mental health struggles or is there a relationship with that a little bit like my relationship with the boxing ring, where I was drawn into a space maybe because of experiences that it happened to me and a feeling of unconscious safety or familiarity.

I can't remember anymore where you use these swords and you yeah, I thought, God, that looks like so much fun, and so I went, I signed up for it to give it a try, and you were Look, you're like a hockey goalie, ice hockey goalie. You're covered in pads except for the very top of your head. It's just like a little cap on it. And the whole goals to hit you on the top of the head with the stick as our as you can. And I lasted one class. I was like, oh my god, that is

the most horrible experience and this terrible headache. Right, And so that you can be drawn to things because you don't know what is involved, and so you think this is going to be fun, but it turns out it doesn't suit you at all. And I suspect a lot of the people who go into those kinds of fields, boxing or first responding or anything any of those types of things where they're not for everybody. A lot of the people are making a mistake. They don't know themselves,

so they don't know what they're getting themselves into. But a lot of people know exactly what they get themselves into and they do it really well, and they are super important, especially first responders. You need someone in ambulances, you need police officers going to the crime scenes, right, And so the question is is what enables that? And we don't know. I mean, that's why this colleague mind

is working on this problem. But what I suspect is it's going to be people who are just the kind of right middle ground amount of trauma and are genetically just pretty robust to that and maybe had the good luck that their childhood taught them it's okay. Every time they were challenged, they were equal to the challenge. You didn't overwhelm them, and they slowly built up the skills rather than having it all come crashing down on them.

look like by people to make that much money. And so I go visit him and his life is over the top. I mean, you've never seen such a fancy apartment in your life, and you know, the maid's off there cleaning, and the cook is in there making dinner and asking us what we want and stuff like that. And so I turned him and I'm like, Steve Man, your life is over the top. And he goes, you know, it seems that way, but it's I'm not any happier, It's not really any better, And I'm like why, and

he's just like listing all these problems he have. You know, Well, we can't decide which where to go on holiday. My wife wants to do this fancy trip. I wanted to do that fancy trip, and we're arguing about it. My daughter's trying to get into this fancy kindergarten and hasn't doesn't know what to get accepted. The cook and the maid don't get along, and is this constant sous to come I was just like, I look at it, like, are you not saving? Like I felt sort of superior

to him in that moment. How could you not appreciate that the amazing life you have, right? And I just felt like I was done at his inability to appreciate the amazing things that he had. So then about a year or so later, I'm reading Frank Marlow's amazing book on the Hods of hunter gatherers who are hunt gathers live in Tanzania, and they still live very traditional lifestyle, and they live right where humanity originated, and so Homo

sapiens started there. And so they're really an interesting group because it's possible that they're living the lifestyle that our ancestors lived when we first started out right. Nobody knows, but we think there's a good chance because it's the same environment, same pressures, etc. And so I'm reading about these people and I'm realizing, you know, compared to them, I'm a multi millionaire. Two. They bury forty percent of their kids before they ever reach adulthood. They don't have

a single thing set aside for tomorrow. They own almost no possessions because everything they own they have to put on their back and carry when they move from one camp to another, which they do every few months, and the list goes on. They're posed to the elements all the time, and so compared to them, I'm azillionaire. It's just like Steve is azillionaire compared to me, and I don't go through my life appreciating it. Don't go God,

I'm so happy. And in fact, when I started looking into it, I realized they're actually probably happier than we are. When you ask the Hudsa how happy they've been, they give you much higher numbers than when you ask. You know, Europeans are Americans and other day they collected with un togethers show the same thing. If anything, they're happier than we are despite really hard lives.

many years ago, is our need for connection. Because once we got forced out of the rainforest, we suddenly had to rely on each other in order to not get eaten by all these predators that we didn't even care about when we're basically chimps when we were living in the trees because they couldn't catch us. We're up there doing our thing, and we're kings of the canopy, just

like chimps are today. But once we are on the ground, even a chimp on the ground is easy dinner for any big cat, and they're easy dinner for hyenas and stuff like that. So what the data suggests the way we solved that problem is by bonding together and connecting tightly to one another in a way that chimps just don't. And so my favorite example of how we connect and our fundamentally cooperative nature can be seen in our eyeballs. If you look at the eyeballs and a chimpanzee, they're

all brown. And so when a chimp diverts its gaze and looks over, let's say, down to the left, other chimps can't tell because it's disguising the direction of its gaze. And what that tells you is that a chimp doesn't want other chimps to know what's caught its attention because they're fundamentally competitive with one another. That the other chimps knew what it was looking at, they might try to get it first. Whereas humans have a white sclare to

our eyes. We're advertising the directions of our gaze. So when I look down like that, you can see that at thirty paces away, and you instantly know Bill's looking something over there, which means Bill wants you to know that he's advertising that because he thinks you're going to help him solve whatever the problem is, the opportunity or the threat that he's discovered, right, and so shifting that fundamentally cooperative orientation is what allowed us to survive on

the savannah. When suddenly we're basically everyone's dinner. The second thing that we need, so that's connection. The second thing that we evolve though, is a strong desire for autonomy, to do our own thing, to self governed, to choose our own path. And the reason that autonomy is so important is that you need to also stand out a little bit so others will choose you to be on their team, in their coalition, so the partners will choose

you as a mate. You have to have something about you that's a little bit better in some ways than other people that are available. And so autonomy allows us to decide, well, here's what I want to do, Here's what I think I could be the best at, and here's where I'm going to dedicate my energy and efforts so that I can really develop competence in the domain

that matters to me. Because of course, no one knows better than you do that you might enjoy boxing, or that you might enjoy stamp collecting or whatever it is you know that people like to do. And so the problem is, though, that those two needs are directly in competition with one another. So to the degree that I'm connection oriented, I get together with you and you say, hey, I really want to see a rom com and I'm like, oh,

I wanted to see a schwarzeneggerflick. And then we have like, if I do my autonomy thing, I just say see you later and I go off of my own. But if I do my connection thing, we have to compromise, and so I have to sacrifice my autonomy. Then of course the same holds whenever I if I do the opposite, if i decide to go do my own thing, then I'm not forming connections. I'm just so satisfying myself. And so those two needs. Evolution kind of played a dirty

trick on us. Those two needs are in a direct tension with one another, and we have to find a balance in order to be happy. Now, what I believe is that our ancestors found a very different balance than we found. And it comes right back to the way you started your question with loneliness and technology and all that. And I believe that the reason that this has happened

is we called it an evolutionary mismatch. And so think about fat salt and sugar on the savannah, where you know, millions of years ago, or even hundreds of thousands years ago, fat salt and sugar were crazy rare, really hard to find. So whenever you found a source of any of those three things, you hubered up as much of it as you possibly could, because even if you're not hungry, who knows is the be any more tomorrow, best to eat

as much of it as you can. Well, now, we live in a world where fat, salt, and sugar are everywhere, and we still have this tendency to need more of it than we really need because we're trying to stockpile when we don't live in a world where stockpiling is necessary anymore. And so we've got this evolved tendency to do something that's very old and changes very slowly, and then we've got this modern cultural pro situation where we

don't need to do it anymore. And that's the mismatch that our old evolved self hasn't caught up with our new cultural self of what the way our rich world opportunities exist. I think the same thing has happened with

the autonomy and connection. I think basically the story here is that because we're so tightly connected to each other, even though our ancestors led these egalitarian lives where everybody got to make their own decision, nobody's in charge nobody can tell you, Tiff, you're coming with us and we're going north. You could say I'd rather go south. But here's the thing. We all go north and you go south.

You're lying food and we're all fine because you can't strike out on your own as a human, and so you if you really want to go south, you have to talk us into it. And if you can't, well then you've got to go north. And so I think that opportunities for autonomy were actually really rare in our ancestral past that we principle they're always there. In reality they never were. So we need connection more than autonomy. But we've all to want autonomy more than connection so

that we would grab it whenever we actually could. And the problem is now autonomy is like fat, salt and sugar. It's everywhere, And so cities give you endless autonomy. Education, wealth, all these things give you autonomy and opportunities. Technology is probably the biggest source of autonomy because you and I can do We can live in the same household, We could do whatever we want, never even see each other. I could drone in my latte when you go to

the shops. You know, we could do anything. We want without without needing each other at all anymore. And the problem is that what that means is that our psychology hasn't cut up to our reality. We need to connect with each other, but we want autonomy, and so we keep making their own choices.

one day we do. So I remember sitting in a therapist's office ten years after moving from Tazzy to Melbourne and having a conversation, and at some point that conversation, I realized I'd moved to Melbourne in my late teens to be brave, be special, be independent and show everyone at home fucking how amazing I am so that they would love me. And I'd spend ten years becoming a version of myself that no one could relate to and cutting myself, being disconnected, and then building a facade, so

I'd essentially ran the opposite direction. I was so disconnected from what I and I was like, how have I done this? For a decade? As I was in teens I was like, how the fuck have I done this for a decade? This is and not known that this is what was going on.

because remember, we've evolved to want the autonomy. We want to do our own thing, but we need the connection. And the problem is that what we don't realize is that every time we choose autonomy, we're actually we were buying necessity, sacrificing connection unless we somehow got really lucky and we surrounded ourselves by people who want to do

exactly what we want to do. And so the day you come home and say, hey man, I'm moving to Melbourne, and all your best friends go, that's what I was secret. Let's go right. That would be perfect, but life rarely works that way. Sometimes you get lucky and it does, more often than not, it doesn't, and so you keep breaking connections or slowly wakening them because you're making the right choice in the moment each time. But the collective of all those choices is very much the wrong one.

And we find ourselves suddenly down the road having talked to the people who matter to us in a really long time, have let our marriages get weak, have let our friendships leapt, have not been in contact with their family, and we're just not happy anymore. And we may have been a huge success. I call these people sad success stories because they may have done great things, they may be head turner running the CNN, are all sorts of important people, but they in getting there, they kept paying

a price that they didn't realize they were paying. Because really, the whole reason we evolved to autonomy, to become confidence, to actually become more valuable to our friends, it's not to disconnect ourselves from them. It's to make them want us even more. But if we lose sight of that fact, if all we want is to be a success and be better at things, then we've lost out of the whole point of being better in the first place, which is to tighten our connections.

in the Bible. You know, Noah's great grandson or something was the king of a Rock or that kind of thing. So it's a very important early city. So city has been around for five thousand years up until about two hundred years ago, only one in ten humans on the entire planet lived in cities. Ninety percent of us lived

in the countryside in rural areas. Starting about eighteen forty United States and the closer to nineteen hundred elsewhere in the world, people started moving to cities in mass And so now by two thousand and seven, fifty percent of all humanity lives in cities. And so we now to pass that more than fifty percent of humans are in cities right in the country. Now you think, all right, if all humans all of the world are voting with their feet to live in cities, they must make you happier.

Lo and behold the opposite. People are happier in the countryside than they're in the city. And so we just keep making the wrong decision over and over again. And why do we do that, Because in the moment, the autonomy choice go to Melbourne is the right choice, develop myself, become the person I want to be, and stick around and connect with family and friends seems like the wrong choice. So what I try to tell people is, well, can

you find ways to do both? And you have your cake and eat it too, And one way to do that is say, all right, well where am I disconnected? Who are the people that matter to me? And how can I reconnect them with them in a way that doesn't sacrifice my autonomy. Because once you have to sacrifice your autonomy, we'll stop doing it. You have to know yourself. You're just not going to do that, but you will when you're quite old, but when you're younger, you just

won't do it. And so what I tell people is, think about all the activities you do throughout the course of the day, and think about the ones that you're doing alone. Do those with somebody else, and don't sacrifice your autonomy. Do the activity you want to do, but there was somebody else who wants to do the same thing. Now that hopefully what that means is do it in person.

So like, if you love to box and none of your old friends do, well, that's a bummer, but maybe it's time to make some new friends who also love to box. But if you love to do some things that you can do boxing you can't do online with folks. But like, for example, I love to do the crossword and my little sister loves to do the crossword. She lives in London and so we don't chat that often previously, but once COVID hit, we got in this habit of

doing the crossword together. So she wakes up in the morning, it's laid afternoon here, she makes some morning coffee, and then we just do the Crossford together and kind of chit chat while we do it. And so we're satisfying our autonomy needs. We're both doing the Crossford anyway, but now we're simultaneously satisfying our connection needs. And that for me, it's the best answer I can give in our modern lives is find a way to do the things you

really love to do with other people. Sometimes that means you have to buy new people because you don't know anyone who does what you do, or it has to be in person and your folks, you know who you do it with them aren't there. But sometimes that means finding a way to do it online where you can just be on the phone or zoom or whatever and connect with old friends at the same time.

and we just both go into our separate theaters. Now principle, that's not a bad thing to do, right in reality that we come back out and we haven't had the same experience. We can't really talk about it because we saw different movies, and so were slowly just sort of separating our lives. We're becoming disconnected. And so each one of those choices might be defensible, but the long term

consequence of repeatedly doing that is indefensible. And then the second reason for that is that sometimes the things that are best for us aren't fun in the moment, and so we get in the fight between our now self and our future self. And the self that we want to be wants to do, you know, wants to train harder or eat better or study more. But the self that we are right now, wants to put their feet up,

watch Stevie and have a beer. And those fights are as old as humanity itself, because it's always a struggle between what you know will be good for you in the long term and what you think will be fun in the immediate term.

waste of time. I could just go to the beach and just get it done. And it was like, okay, that's old TIF talking. And the minute I got down there, I could just film my whole nervous system just dissipate into bliss.

that too. He's a kid, right, and so he says, I'm going to sleep at night with no blanket and no pajamas, just a mind to wear, and I'll toughen myself up. So he gets in bed and he's got no blanket on, and in two seconds he's breathing and he pulls it on. So the next night he says, okay, I'll hide my blanket, and so I don't do that. So of course he knows where his blanket was. He's

breathing for whatever, he goes and gets it. You keep setting yourself up, and so the struggle that you're having is you know what will actually make you happy once you pull it off, but it's not easy to pull it off in the moment. The lazy, comfortable thing is to do nothing. And so the best way to force yourself to do these things is to try to make them a habit. And the best way to make things a habit is to do what we call surrendering control

of your decisions to the environment. Now that sounds weird, but it actually means something really simple. You don't want to have to decide is today the day I'll go down to the mountains and go for a hike. You want to have that decision or to made for you, and so you make yourself a deal. Every Thursday morning, after breakfast, I get if that suits you, I get

my car and go. And then when Thursday comes around, you've already made the decision to go, and so it's a whole Even though you still might feel some resistance, it's easier to go than it is to let yourself

down and not follow through on your commitment. Whereas if you say I'll decide each every day whether today's today, you could just saying no, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow for weeks, right, And so the key is to make something habit, you have to find a regular time and set of occurrences in which you state yourself, that's what I will do. And it works incredibly well.

because there's no better alternatives. But if you live in the city and there's lots of alternatives, your relationships don't tend to last because you're constantly tempted by this other person who might be a better master for you. And so what the web does always that they don't have to be in your face. You don't have to get on tender once you have a relationship, but you can when you're trying to set one up, and then you've got just an enormous scope of possible people. So I

think that's the cause, but we don't know. But here's the thing. When you get on the web and you start this process, the world is a very different one for men and women, and in a way that doesn't match well. So men on tender live in Peru or South Africa, by which I mean they live in a

very unequal economy. About twenty percent of the men get about eighty percent of the interest, and so they're getting swiped right, and then the other eighty percent of the men get hardly anybody showing any interest in them at all. So for a very small percentage of men, they live in the living large, And of course, when you live in that large, you tend not to commit. You want to keep dating forever because there's lots of people who are interested in you. For women, it's more like living

in Denmark or Sweden. They live in a very equal society where basically all women get some interest on tender gre or than others, but basically all of them get a fair bit of interest. The problem is that even though they get a fair bit of interest, they're not reciprocally interested in the guys who are necessarily interested in them. They're still chasing the twenty percent that all the women are chasing, and so it doesn't that the front end

of the process doesn't match up very well. What I suspect but don't know, is that both men and women age out of that, like that's a real fun state of affairs, maybe when you're means in early twenties, But then you kind of learn your lesson if you still if you're swiping the same guys that all the other women are and they're not committing to you, they just

date forever. And you also start to realize these guys who you've been overlooking have lots of positive qualities that would make them a really wonderful partner, and maybe you shouldn't just be latching on to those features that show well on Tinder. And so I think we live in this kind of weird world where on the front end it's a bad thing, it sets men and women up for disappointment, but on the back end, the relationships that do start that way tend to last.

If you could look at what they do, they don't read right there's no books in on together's societies, and so they're only exposed to the ideas of their immediate group and their immediate group's ancestors and the stories that are told around the fire. We have, every good idea every human's ever had is available to us in a book form, or in a movie or instagram, you know, tiny reels. There's all sorts of ways that you can

absorb information in today's world really really rapidly. And so one way to look at the change over time is to go back and watch a movie that has made the fifties or early sixties, and you're like, nothing's happening. It's just crazy slow compared to a movie that we would watch now, it's all happened in bambam bam bam. And so the weird thing about it, though, is that

the word boring doesn't emerge in languages until relatively recently. Now, that doesn't mean that our ancestors weren't bored some of the time. I suspect that they were. But boring became a problem when stimulation was are readily available that we could escape it easily. Whereas you know, none of you don't have to say gee, I mean so annoying that I can't fly. That'd be really nice if you could fly. We'd all love, probably love to be able to do it,

but it's just so irrelevant to our lives. Of Course, I can't fly across the valley. Of course I've got to get into my car and sit through traffic or walk through the you know, across the stream, or whatever it is I don't want to do, And so we don't think about absurd counterfactuals that aren't possible, like life could just fly or bean myself over or something. I think our ancestors, even though a lot of what they do is probably boring, it just didn't occur to them

that it could be otherwise. And now, because this world that we live in is so over stimulating, it always occurs to us and within seconds on board, I want to do something else. And so because something else is still available, right, we can fly. Now, we can beam

ourselves up, so to speak. And so I think the problem arise is that this isn't We didn't evolve in a world like that, and so it has these weird consequences, one of which is, if anything, it might increase dissatisfaction because instead of being casually cool with the fact that we can't fly. Slash we get bored. We get really upset when we get bored. Slash can fly, and we want to fix the problem immediately.

We're all good about arranging a date, going with our friends to a movie, doing the connection things that we plan in advance. But what I've tried to become better at is doing the connection things that just suddenly emerge that I wasn't expected. And that's particularly important with small children, because you never know what they're going to do and they might be having this wonderful connection moment that I'm

in my past. I've been Give me a minute, I'm busy and now I just close the laptop and I tried to. I'm not perfect about it, but I try to reconnect the moment I see that opportunity.

But it fascinates me, and I guess there was the beginning of that was confronting, because it's like, well, first, the first thing is why I uncovered this Some information here, some intel that was fascinating has the potential to keep me stark or make me miserable, make me angry about it. But now I guess I've selled into it and I

love it. I love facilitating conversations where like I don't like to say coaching, I just like to say, yeah, that facilitating conversations because I'm learning too, and this.

love relationships. I love people. When I started going when I've uncovered that, oh there's some stuff when I in childhood I need to deal with, and the stuff I wanted to deal with was connection and relationships. It was like I struggle to let people get close. I struggle to actually connect. And I was like your my story was oh look, little salesperson, and you're oh, yeah, because you love people and connection it's like, no, yeah, you love it, but that's not doing it. That's you telling

yourself a story. You're doing it when really you're fascinated by your inability to do it, which made me laugh. It was like, oh, huh, story, Well, I'll.

a lot. They'd metter a lot in one way. They give you a happy childhood or they don't, and they can really mess you up if they give you a very unhappy childhood, that we know. But if you have the sort of typical childhood where they treat you reasonably while and all that kind of stuff, they don't have much influence on who you become as an adult. About

seven percent is what the data show. Wow, though, about fifty percent is your genes, About seven percent is what your parents did, and then about forty three percent is just the random stuff that you experience in life with your peers and the things that happen to you and the things that you do. We don't know what those things are yet, but we know that statistically that's what's going on. And so what that means a bunch of things.

One of the things that it means is that, you know, cut yourself a break if you're not getting to where you want to be because you may be fighting your genes that make it harder for you to get there than it is for other people, and so you might think, you know what, I'm working on this just as hard as Bob over there, but he's getting you know, he's he's losing way faster, becoming fitter faster, or getting better at holding computers, whatever it is you want to do

faster than I am. Well, maybe you know Bob's genes just take them in that direction, in yours don't. But whether your genes take you there or not mean you can't get there on your own anyway. And so my favorite data to show that point is there's obesity is more genetic than most things, at least in our modern environment. It didn't used to be, and we don't quite know why that is, but the data show that obesity now

is about seventy percent genetic. Nonetheless, if you look at people who have genes to be thin, moderately overweight, or obese, and then you look at what they actually are, you see that most people are in the category where the genes would put them. But if you're not in the category where e genes would put them, you're almost always in the healthier direction. So people who have overweight genes are more likely to be thin than they are to be obese. People who have obese genes are more it

can be just overweight or maybe even thin. Then they are to go into the morbidly obese direction. And so that's determination. That's like I'm going to be fit. I'm going to do what it takes. Now, if you're lucky, you've got genes that just make that easy for you. You get up in the morning, you eat it, you have a chucolate milkshake, You walk to your car, and that's all it takes. You've now exercised for the day, so to speak, and your body's metabolism is so fast

you're off to the races. If you're not lucky, it's hard work. But people put that hard work in they get there anyway. And so agency really matters. Deciding what you want to be is important. And what I suspect but don't know, is that what underlies those data is that the more your genes push you in the wrong direction, the more you find shortcuts half ways around what your

genes are trying to get you to do. So, for example, if you look at self control, what it means to have good self control, it turns out it doesn't mean I can stare at that bag of potato chips and not eat it. What it does mean is that when I'm in the grocery store and I see the bag of potato chips, I just don't buy them because I know full well that when I get home, if they're

in the cupboard, I'm eating them, right. And so people of good self control have way better life outcomes than people who don't, and the reason is because they structure their environment in ways so their genetic weaknesses don't stymy them. You know, in my own case, if you make brownies, especially proper American brownies that are really chuclated and delicious, I'm going to eat them, whether I'm hungry or not.

So I just don't buy those suckers. And less there's some special occasion where I say to myself, you know what, I could hoover up that whole pan, No big deal, because I'm not going to have them around for a long time again. And so that's the kind of key to happiness and to all these things is you want

to find the path of least resistance for yourself. And usually what that means is doing your best to structure your environment in such a way that will make success more likely for whatever it is your goals.

And we've evolved to want that because our ancestors, who cost more calories than they brought in typically got a thwack in the back of the skull one day when they're walking along, or they woke up and everybody's gone. They get abandoned, and then they became hyena food. And so we've evolved a strong desire to contribute. So that's natural and normal and one way that manifest and the modern role is be ambitious, to want to achieve. But what you also want to do is you want to

say all right, Well, how ambitious am I? And can I set my sites in such a way that I set them in advance and then I reward myself by doing the social things that that trait actually evolved for. And the problem is that you need to make those decisions in advance. If you say, are at all I'll stop working as hard when I've been promoted to the level I want to be, it's a guarantee you'll never stop because once you get to be a manager, you want to be general manager and you just keep resetting

your site. That's human nature. But if you say to yourself, okay, I can have a very happy life if I'm general manager. That's my goal, And all you need to do is track where am I now, where do I need to be to get there? And am I making the right progress? And every day you've made that step in the right direction. That's enough. Now it's time to take time off and enjoy the progress by connecting, spending time with friends. And if people do that, they're ambitious and thoughtful about it.

They can be happy and ambitious at the same time. Now, with that said, you can also be happy in ambitions the same time. If you give yourself a timeline. All right, I'm just going to be a work machine. But I'm going to do this for ten years because I'm twenty years old and I can really hammer it to on thirty, i can put my connections aside. They'll still be there. They'll forgive me in ten years. But I'm going to do everything I can to be that entrepreneur or boxer

or whatever it is you're trying to be. But don't let that then go to your forty and then to your fifty, or you're going to look back and go, shit, I've wasted my life.

you've got happier and stayed happier. Pretty soon you'd run out of space and you would have no motivation left, and then you get passed up by those people who happiness went right back to baseline, so they're more motivated to achieve. So the end results is whatever your baseline happiness is, that's where you're going to spend most of your life, with the exception of if you get lucky to form just the right relationships with just the right people. But for most of us, that's kind of where we're

going to be. And so whenever things go really well, we get this bump, but it goes away, and so you need to expect that and understand that and not just pursue the bumps all the time and try to be happy with the baseline level of happiness that you're endowed with. It's unfortunate some of us are endowed with higher baseline happiness than others, and that's to get genetic where some of us kind of goes through life totally content and from the outside you're like, why is that

person so happy? They got nothing or they're a schmuck or whatever, But they've got it right, and some of us have gone through life. You know, we've been in that with only very little. But if you can come to terms with that and say that's where IM going to spend most of my time, I'll get some wonderful short term things. But let's not overdo the short term things. Let's enjoy the process as we go.

So genetics is maybe just the remnants of a story that once happened and then an adaptation to that, Whereas I feel like perhaps some of us are looking at it as just some just this purposeless medical anomaly.

something like that. When it's happening read large to large numbers, it's sort of happens largely separate from genetics, because genetics change super slowly, you know, over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, and culture changes super fast, and so suddenly people can decide, let's take these kids away and raise them in different families or you know, whatever. They can say, they can just do it. And those are

terrible events. But at the same time, all human groups have gone through terrible events and have been resilient to them, have found a way to survive anyway. The downside is that the ones who actually directly experienced them sometimes don't ever, they never get back to where they were, and so if you're the person who got taken away, your life may never be as happy as it could have been

with a little luck. You don't pass that on to your children and to their children, and so there's a pretty big research literature that examines this question by looking at things like what if you're the child of somebody who went through a terrible famine, especially when they were pregnant with you, did that change your epigenetics? What if you're somebody who's like the child of a Holocaust survivor who was in the camps and things like that, And

we can see clear signs in the next generation. They're not nearly as bad as the generation that suffered, but like if they if they're the ones are the bad thing have to do, they're worst off. But even the next generation is not as good as they as everybody else. But then by two generations, we don't see effects anymore, at least not in the humans. I know of no good evidence that that's still there, with some exceptions that

may be evidence of that that we don't know. And so for example, when there's dominant groups in society and those dominance hierarchies don't change, the next generation still doesn't look as good. And the question is, well, is that because of what happened before or is that because of actually what's happening right now? And we don't know.

want to I'm going to do that again. I'm going to just let it happen because I'm so busy on my day to day job of doing research anyway that I'm contentedly worrying along. But I'm thinking about leadership and the evolution of leadership and how, you know, because we live in a world where good and bad leaders have such an enormous impact on all of our lives that I'm curious if there's if I can contribute to that problem.

I don't have any killer ideas yet, so I've got nothing to offer, but it's a problem that interests me.

I've even started now I've got Instagram my publicist of the publishers, like you need Instagram accounts, I've done that and I'm trying to be good about it and it's fun and so people can follow me that way and see what's going on, and they can of course get a touch with you directly, because you can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me in various places like that.