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

Evolutionary psychologist Bill von Hippel joins me in this ep to pull back the curtain on how our minds got wired, why our ancient instincts still run the show in today's modern world, and what that means for connection, courage, happiness, and that frustrating tug-of-war between who we are and who we think we should be.

We talk about what resilience really is (and what it isn’t), how our desire to 'stand out' often leaves us disconnected, and the tricky balance between autonomy and belonging. I ask Bill why we keep doing the (often stupid) things that make us miserable even when we know better, how to outsmart our own brains, and how understanding the wiring beneath the behaviour can start to shift everything.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Role with the Punches and we're
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(00:29):
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reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Bill von Hippel, Welcome

(00:54):
to Roll with the Punches.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Thanks great to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Tell you what I'm pum. I'm pumped for this conversation.
Where have you been my whole life?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I've been just getting older.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I feel like when I landed upon the stuff you
do and started looking at everything that you talk about
and your research, and I'm like, these are the questions
that fascinate me. And I didn't know there was someone
out there giving the answers to this stuff trying. I'm
down for it. Do you want to explain to my

(01:30):
listeners what it is you do?

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Sure. So, I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and what that means
is that I'm particularly interested in how our attitudes, not
just our bodies, but our mind has been shaped over
evolutionary time. And my particular interest is the last six
million years. So that's the time span since we separated
from our chimpanzee cousins, and so I'm particularly interested in

(01:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
How did your interest land in this space in the
first place.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
That's a great question. So when I started grad school,
this is back in the nineteen eighties mid eighties, I
had no idea that there was even such a field.
Like I'd never heard of evolutionary psychology. Everybody knows evolutionary biology.
You know how our body gets shaped and whether we're
big or strong, have hands or hooves, you know, whatever.
But I didn't know that psychology was shaped the same way.

(02:32):
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

(02:53):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:35):
move for me. I'd rather wait tell him a little
farther down the pike.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Oh, how interesting? And so where were you? Where did
you think you were headed? Where did you want to
dive in?

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Well, but before I started doing that, and what I
actually did do for the first so, I've been in
the field for about little over thirty about thirty five
years almost, And so for the verse twenty, all I
did was try to understand social psychology, so attitudes and
memory and judge in decision making, things like that that
are sort of the basic, but not worrying about where
it all came from, just the way we are right now.

(04:06):
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?

Speaker 2 (04:24):
I know there was a period of time that only
got I don't even know when I started asking the questions,
but I know, especially since starting this show we're on
almost nine hundred episodes now, wow, And there was just
this really poignant time where everything just led me to Okay,
but what what was the purpose of that? There must
be because everything, because I started to learn that everything

(04:47):
had a purpose.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
So well, there's random garbage, but mostly I agree with
you completely that if it's important, it has a purpose.
If it's like trivial, do you prefer, you know, blue
cars or a green car? You know, there's probowly no
purpose to that for these kind of random little things.
But the big things in life have a purpose. And
then the questions what's safe to that purpose?

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Mmm?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
I work with a lot of people I do. One
of my last workshop I did last year was it's
called why the Fuck Are we Stuck? Or what the
Fuck Am I stuck? James?

Speaker 1 (05:19):
That's a good title.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
The idea that we we end up stuck and there's
so many things that influence our behaviors, in our minds
and our thinking, and we and we My first lesson
in the University of tiff was you are a great storyteller,
and you need to start learning when you're telling stories
and when those stories might be reality or just a

(05:41):
comfortable yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
And that's that's way harder than it seems like. There's
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

(06:05):
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,

(06:27):
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.

(06:48):
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

(07:11):
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

(07:33):
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,

(07:55):
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

(08:17):
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

(08:37):
are doing that all the time. Right.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
I always talk about the realization in boxing, and it
could very well. You might tell me right now that
it's still a story i'm telling. In fact, I'm almost convincedies.
But I realized when I stepped into the boxing ring
and I started sport of boxing. I always talk about
this moment in time where I realized I've been telling

(09:03):
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

(09:23):
God for that. Otherwise you've just deconstructed my entire philosophy.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
For no, I don't want to do that, and I
agree with you. It's you know, we once now when
you're when you don't know what you're doing, if you're
a novice and it's your first day in the ring,
it doesn't work that way. But once you actually know
what you're doing, once you become expert, all the decision
making processes that usually take place up here shift back
into our premotor motor cortext back here, and you don't

(09:48):
you don't think anymore in the way that you think
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,

(10:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, yeah, Oh I love that talk. Can you talk
about I guess there's a few pillars of what I'm
fascinated by, but that resilience, courage, and fear underpin and
kind of became an obsession for me. And I'll give
you context around the idea of resilience. I remember a
point in time where I was like, everyone's putting resilience

(10:47):
on this pedestal. But I think that a lot of
what is being framed as resilience is dissociation. Because when
I stepped in the boxing ring and was being in
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

(11:09):
that was a story that I was telling until I
realized it was a story I was telling so resilient.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
It's the funny thing because it's super hard to differentiate
resilience from dissociation, from just steparating yourself, or even from
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

(11:38):
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,

(12:00):
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.

(12:22):
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.

(12:44):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
I worked with the ambulance Victoria when we went into
lockdown in Melbourne online with them, and was at the
same time as I studied epigenetics through a health platform
here PhDa sixty and the same time that I started
the podcast, I was having come a SETAs I was
working through some of my own story of childhood trauma

(14:04):
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

(14:25):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, we don't know
what brings people into those fields. Often it's just a
strong desire to help. Often people don't know themselves very well.
They think, oh, I'd love to be a doctor, and
then the first time they see blood and gore everywhere,
they pass out and they go, oh, de friends that
I wouldn't love to be a doctor. You know, I'd
love to buy I remember thinking, do you know the

(15:42):
martial art? I think it's called kendo or ken po.
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

(16:02):
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

(16:25):
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

(16:46):
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

(17:07):
rather than having it all come crashing down on them.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
What year did you write your book about.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
The Social Paradox, the one that just happened? Yeah, So
my early book, The Social Leap, came out in twenty eighteen,
and then I just finished The Social Paradox. So let's see,
I finished writing it in early twenty twenty four, and
then it probably I was done by June or so,
and then it came out about a month ago now.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
And what were what were the questions in that that
you came upon after finishing the other book, Like what
was the new angle?

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah? What drove it? Yeah? So I was visiting this
friend of mine in New York City and he I've
known him since her little kids, and you know, he
was particularly well to do as a child, but fine,
and then he made a gazillion dollars, like crazy rich,
and so he invited me over to dinner at his house.
He invited me over to dinner at his house in

(18:09):
New York, and I was just super excited to see it,
because like, he's so wealthy. I've never seen what homes
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,

(18:31):
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

(18:53):
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

(19:13):
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

(19:34):
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

(19:55):
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.

(20:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
This love is so much war like life is going
in one direction real fast, and it feels like our
results is as humans are going in the opposite direction.
It's like we are learning a lot. We know disconnection
and loneliness and all of the things that are really bad,

(20:53):
and our mental health is suffering. Yet technology and and
advancement is pushing us the other way. What is going
on and how can we as individuals combat that? What
do we need to know.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
Those are great questions. So to start with the first one,
what's going on? I don't know, but I can tell
you what I think is going on, and that is
that our most fundamental need that we evolved when we
left the trees, so when we stopped being basically chimps
and slowly evolved into humans around six starting around six
many years ago, is our need for connection. Because once

(21:28):
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

(21:50):
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

(22:12):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:16):
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

(23:37):
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

(23:59):
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

(24:19):
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,

(24:43):
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

(25:04):
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

(25:27):
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.

(25:49):
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.

(26:10):
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

(26:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
How is it with these behavioral drivers like you just said,
I'm thinking about examples, and they're so strong that they
make us take action sometimes and in the case something
of four years, and consciously we don't recognize it until
one day we do. So I remember sitting in a

(27:16):
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

(27:41):
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

(28:01):
is what was going on.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, And the problem is that every one of those
individual decisions would have made sense, but the collective made
no sense at all. And so if each step along
the way, imagine that I'm standing right next to you
going piff, do you really want to do this? And
you're explain to me, yes, I do, and here's why.
Here's how much fun this will be, you know if
I stay in Tassy, And then here's how much fun
it'll be if I do if I go to Melbourne,
And every step of the way you could do that,

(28:25):
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,

(28:46):
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

(29:10):
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

(29:34):
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

(29:55):
is to tighten our connections.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Drive to want to be special or stand out or
you know, be successful, which is at odds with the
need for belonging and to fit in. So we all
want to fit in. It's like I don't I don't
fit in. I don't fit in. I don't fit in.
But also I want to feed in, but I want
to be special. How do we remedy that? What's the

(30:20):
solution to managing those two things?

Speaker 1 (30:24):
Yeah, I see at an individual level this is really
hard because everybody has their own balance point. But what
I believe is that on average we're all overweting autonomy
and underweighting connection. And the best example I can give
you that shows that, well, there's many examples, but here's
a real clear one. So the first city started about
five thousand years ago. It was in Mesopotamia and what's

(30:44):
now eastern Iraq. I'm a town called Rock Steven mentioned
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

(31:05):
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,

(31:26):
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

(31:49):
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.

(32:11):
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.

(32:34):
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,

(32:54):
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

(33:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
And was it so hard in all different contexts to
do the thing we know we should do, but we
keep doing the thing that is shipped for us? What
do we keep choosing the ship thing?

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, there's two reasons for that. The reason one is that, remember,
if I'm right, we've evolved to want autonomy more than connection,
but we need connection more than autonomy, and so actually
we keep making the right choice. So if you and
I are hanging out and you say, man, I really
want to see around common ask I really want to
see Schwerzenker film, I say, okay, I'll see after the movie,
and we just both go into our separate theaters. Now principle,

(34:11):
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

(34:32):
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

(34:54):
between what you know will be good for you in
the long term and what you think will be fun
in the immediate term.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
So true. I came back from the Himalayas late last
year and just absolutely adored being in that space. And
I live in Elwood and so nice little beach. I
love it. I love it, but it is suburbia. And
I made the deal that once a week I would
take it a half day drive down to the dan
Nongs and hike with no no audiobooks, no podcast, no music,

(35:26):
just me and the wherever the hell the trail wherever
I landed. And it was a battle every time. It
was a battle, like in the moment, this is a
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

(35:46):
into bliss.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, and that's it's super hard. Thomas Shelling. I won
the Nobel Prize in economics had these great stories. When
he was a little kid, he was reading about this
Holler Explorers. I don't remember which one, we'll say admiralble Bird,
and the guy would go out in the snow with
no shirt on, just so that he could toughen himself up.
And so Shelling was like, okay, I'm going to do
that too. He's a kid, right, and so he says,

(36:08):
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

(36:29):
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,

(36:51):
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,

(37:13):
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

(37:33):
in which you state yourself, that's what I will do.
And it works incredibly well.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Thursdays was my day. Incidentally, there you go, you must
have known what about relationships and dating in today's world
and environment, because that has changed a lot.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
So relationships, Yeah, then they have changed a lot. It's
really interesting. There's a number of pluses in mind, since
on the plus side, relationships that start online, long term
relationships that start online have a better chance of lasting
than long term relationships that start almost anywhere where you
meet in person. And so at least that's the most

(38:13):
recent data I've seen. I can't promise you that'll prove
to be truice because it is changing fast.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
What do you think that's based on?

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Better questioning on I suspect it's a needle in a
haystack problem that if there's a really perfect person out
there for you, your chance of finding them online is
better than in real life.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Because you could meet infinite number of people online, and
in real life you can only meet the folks that
happen to shop at the store, go to the bar,
or go to the gym. You know, it's a much
smaller collection. And so it's a complicated one though, because
if you live in the country and there's not many
people available to you, your relationships tend to last just
because there's no better alternatives. But if you live in

(38:49):
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

(39:10):
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

(39:31):
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

(39:52):
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

(40:15):
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

(40:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Our environment I was talking a lot about our environment
and how our environment influences us, and I guess our
environments changed so much over the years, especially now that
people know that we can control people by dopamine and

(41:23):
addiction and stimulation. So how what do we need to
know about the stimulation of the environment around us these days?

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. If you look at
the way we respond to our world, our world would
be almost overwhelmingly over stimulating for people, even though if
we I machine a few just one hundred years ago,
much less one thousand or ten thousand years ago. If
you look at hunter gatherers societies, they sit around a

(41:53):
lot chatting the same small group of people that they
always chat with. And if you look at the act
what they can do for leisure, there's only a few choice.
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

(42:15):
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.

(42:38):
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

(43:01):
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

(43:22):
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

(43:44):
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

(44:05):
upset when we get bored. Slash can fly, and we
want to fix the problem immediately.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Hell, how have you changed living your life as a
result of being in this world of research and interest.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, that's a good question too. I've started to realize
that connection is just much more important than I was
ever giving it credit for, and so I try to
be really conscious about all, Right, my autonomy things matter
to me. I love my work, that's autonomy stuff. I
want to write my book, I want to do the
research that I'm doing. But I when the opportunites for

(44:44):
connection come along, if they're expected, we're all good at it.
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

(45:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Oh yeah, I am. I think the thing I love
about coaching and being interested in this space is it
forces me to always be self aware. And you know,
every time you think you opened the door on self awareness,
there's another there's a fucking door there. You're like, oh,

(45:37):
you know, like, oh, six months ago, I thought I'd arrived,
and here I am standing in the door, keep rhyving.
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

(45:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Is what I there's no harm in that, right, I've
learned more from teaching than i've learned as a student, probably,
but the teaching and coaching is connecting, and so the
communities that you and I've landed at the same space,
which is these autonomy things that I do. I want
to make them more fun for me and more valuable
by now trying to transmit them to others.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
I remember laughing years ago when I realized, you know,
like my I look back at my resume and there
was I worked a lot in hospitality, loved it for
a lot of years. When I was younger. I worked
a lot in customer service, and then in sales roles,
and you know, you know, when you would write the
cover letters or you would write a little description on
your resus may have wanted, you know, and there was

(47:02):
this emphasis on people. I love people, you know, I
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

(47:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
Tell you what you know. The Socrates says, no, yourself,
and he'd be very proud of you, because most of
us score our whole lives and never admit that to ourselves.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
I'm sick. Give me myself, the Socrates give me a
deadline on when I might know myself fully.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
One always hopes that you get closer to that answer
right before you kick off.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
What else, I guess what are your biggest messages that
you like to open people's eyes to, just for for
living better, for being? Like happiness? What is happiness? What
do we think happiness is?

Speaker 1 (48:20):
What helps? I mean? The one thing I always try
to remind people because it's important, is that almost all
of our traits are about half genetic. And so the
day you're born, or actually the day sperm meats egg,
the photograph has been taken, about half that picture is done,
and the rest of the picture is going to get
filled out as you go through your life, and the

(48:42):
unfortunate truth about what the data show is that parents
don't matter very much. We like to think parents matter
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

(49:04):
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

(49:25):
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

(49:45):
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

(50:08):
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

(50:29):
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

(50:53):
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

(51:17):
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

(51:38):
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.

(51:59):
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

(52:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Are I think I've got two last questions, these market
last ones and less more pop up in my I've
written that many things down. I can't even read my
own note thing here because I keep doing Oh I
want to know about that happiness? Can we be both
happy and remain ambitious.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Absolutely, And so the main thing is that there's nothing
wrong with wanting to strive your whole life. In fact,
all of us kind of do in some way. Some
of us are more striving than others. But everybody wants
to be valued and wants to be seen by their
friends and family as contributing something important to the group.

(53:15):
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

(53:38):
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

(54:00):
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

(54:20):
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

(54:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Do you think we have generally people have us, all
of us enough self awareness to accurately understand what our
expectations so that when we get there we're actually happy.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
Well, here's the thing. We've evolved to get happier when
we achieve, but for that happiness to fade. And the
reason for that is that evolution uses happiness as a tool.
It motivates you to do what's in your gene's best interest,
to try to be a success, to try to gather
resources to achieve things. It uses happiness as a tool

(55:39):
to get you there. And if every time you achieve something,
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.

(56:02):
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

(56:24):
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.

(56:44):
Let's enjoy the process as we go.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
And what are your thoughts on if you have any
on generational trauma.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Of what sort? What do you mean by that question?

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Well, I guess the when it experiences happen, I think,
I guess I think about I think about the word genetics,
and we can understand genetics as this almost this medical term,
like oh I got this genetic disease or I've got
this genetic mental health condition. In fact, and sometimes I
wonder is genetics I mean, genetics is evolution. It's here,

(57:21):
is an experience, and biology goes well in the case
that experience happens again, will make a change to the biology.
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.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Yeah, So I guess what I would say is that
you know, when when really big bad things happen to
you and your group. That's what I think of when
I think of generational trauma, like the stolen generation or
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

(58:07):
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,

(58:28):
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

(58:50):
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

(59:12):
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

(59:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
What's got your attention for the next I mean, is
there another book, what's or what's a question in your mind?
What's the fascination.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Yeah, so I don't know where I'm going next. I
always like to take a little time off and see
what percolates. This book on that I just wrote. I
didn't even think about when I finished my last book,
and just it just percolated. And then it just popped
into my mind. And when it did, it had been
percolating for so long that it just in an hour,
I laid out the whole book of what I wanted

(01:00:16):
to be. Yeah, so just boom done. And so I
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

(01:00:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
I really love it. I will be eagerly awaiting because
I'm fascinated by the stuff that you're learning and teaching
and looking into. Thanks so much for today's conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
Totally. My pleasure is lots of fun.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
Would you like to direct the listeners to your books
or anything else that they can access.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Well if they want to read the books. The evenge
of my name, Bill von Hipple or William von Nipple
is I'm the only one so weird name that it is.
It only directs you to me, and you can see
both of my books that are all on the Social
Leap and the Social Paradox are available wherever people buy
books and audio or hard copy or ebook or whatever.
I've even started now I've got Instagram my publicist of

(01:01:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Brilliant. I'd love this. Thank you so much. I'll have
some links in the show notes for the listeners. So
thank you so.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Much, Bill, wonderful, Thank you it's been fun.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Thanks everyone, she said, it's now never I got fighting
in my blood.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
The state gardedry, called the Coast Garter gastricarded all the
coast chard tr