Throughout history, a cynical view of human nature has often been used by those in power to legitimise their power, right? Because if we cannot trust each other, then we need managers and CEOs and kings and monarchs and generals, right? Then we need to be kept in control. But if we can actually trust each other, if most people are pretty decent, that means that we maybe don't need them and that we can move to a very different kind of society that is much more egalitarian, genuinely democratic, with very different kind of organisations, different kind of schools, different kind of prisons, democracies, etc.
etc. So it has quite, yeah, big implications if you really think it through. You've been breaking the internet a lot over the last year. So last year at the Davos conference, when you called out a bunch of billionaires, broke the internet, then you rather took a Carlson and broke the internet again.
And then you've done it recently with this real life Lord of the Flies story that you've unearthed. Yeah, and it surprised me every time that it happens. I mean, I'm not doing it on purpose. Yeah, it's a very weird experience to go viral on a scale like that, right?
You sort of have your phone and your Twitter mentions and you pay a visit to the toilet and you come back and it's like 3000 new, right? It's really crazy. That's so cool, man. So why don't you tell us about, before we even get into your new book, Humankind, which is great.
Why don't you tell us this real life Lord of the Flies story? That might be quite a cool way to start. Sure. So my new book is really about a sort of silent revolution that has taken place in science, right?
So there are a lot of scientists now from very diverse disciplines in anthropology and sociology and psychology and you name it, who used to have a more cynical view of human beings, of who we are as a species, and are now actually more hopeful. They're not saying that people are angels or anything, we're clearly not, but they argue that our true superpower as a species is actually our ability to cooperate and to be friendly to one another and to work together. So when I started writing this book, I realized that I had to take it up against, you know, so many giants in science, in Western culture, in our literature, you name it. I mean, Western culture is just permeated with the idea that people are selfish.
You know, this goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks, the notion that our civilization is only a thin veneer and that, you know, especially during a time of crisis, during a pandemic, for example, people become very nasty and they start stealing and hoarding and plundering and you name it. So this idea goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks. You find it with the Christian church fathers, you know, Orthodox Christianity and the idea that we're born as sinners. You also find it with the Enlightenment philosophers.
You would expect some break there, you know, between Orthodox Christianity and the Enlightenment philosophers, but if you actually look at the view of human nature, it's pretty similar. You know, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, you know, the famous British philosopher, all having quite a cynical view of human nature. And then again, if you look at our current capitalist system, right, the central dogma seems to be people are just selfish and deal with it. That's just the way things are.
Now, one of the most famous manifestations of this idea in the 20th century was this novel, Lord of the Flies, that, you know, especially people in the Anglo-Saxon world in the US and the UK, you know, so many people have read it or were forced to read it for school, right? This story about a couple of kids who are in a crash of an airplane and end up on an uninhabited island. And at first they think like, oh, this is wonderful. This is lovely.
We're going to have a good time here. And they try to set up a democracy of sorts, but it quickly breaks down. And at the end of the novel, like most of the kids become animals, beasts, savages, and three of the kids are dead. And the message is really, here you have these civilized, nice kids from a good British boarding school, but you give them freedom and this is what you get, right?
Civilization is just a thin veneer. Now, for my book, I realized that I had to do something with Lord of the Flies, right? I had to write something about it. Even though it's fiction, it's often sort of used as nonfiction, right?
So many people interpret it novel and say, oh, yeah, that's what kids are like in India. So I asked myself the question, has it ever happened? You know, has there ever been one instance of real kids shipwrecking on a real island? And what would happen?
So yeah, that's what I tried to find out. Where do you start when you think, I wonder if there's been a real world Lord of the Flies? Because you're a historian by training and trade, right? And I always, as a non-historian, Robert Greene's been on this show.
Ryan Holiday just arrived in my inbox a later this year. And I'm fascinated by the process of finding history. It's not like it's happening. You can't go out and find some history.
You've got to go back somehow. Well, you know, there's this fantastic website that I can really recommend and that's been very useful during my research. And it's called Google. So that's basically where everyone got excited there.
My eyes widened. And now you've just shattered it to pieces. I'm sorry, you know. I mean, that's really where I started as a proper investigative journalist.
I basically started Googling. So real Lord of the Flies, kids to shipwreck on an island. And I just try to find out whether it ever happened. And the first results you get are all from like horrible reality television shows, right?
There was one in the UK where they did this with children. Like really horrible. They tried to set these kids up against each other, etc. etc.
You don't want to know what kind of bizarre and nasty ideas these television makers have had in the past and still have. But then after a while, I stumbled upon some obscure blog with an anecdote about, yeah, six kids that had supposedly shipwrecked on an island in 1977 near Tonga. So I was like, God, is this true? Has this really happened?
Tonga is an island group in the Pacific Ocean. And yeah, that's basically when I started to try and fact check this story, whether it really happened. It was quite a difficult process, actually, because I sort of kept finding the same sort of paragraph, short paragraph about what had supposedly happened in 1977. But I couldn't find any article about it in the newspapers, in Australian newspapers, for example.
And you would really expect that. It's something like that would really have happened then. There must be some articles somewhere, right? I couldn't find it.
But then I was just really lucky. This is also important if you want to have some success in your research. By accident, I had sort of typed in the 1960s while I was looking in an archive of Australian newspapers. It was pure accident.
I thought I was looking in the 70s because supposedly it happened in 1977. But I was looking in the 60s. And then I saw it, an article from the Australian newspaper The Age that said that in 1966, six Tongan kids had shipwrecked on the island of Ata, which is a bit of the south of Tonga. And they had been rescued by an Australian captain named Peter Warner.
So the 1977, that was a typo. It was in reality, it was 1966. And then I realized I can maybe find these people because if this really happened in 1966, then they might still be alive, right? They must be.
The kids themselves were 13 to 15 years old at the time. So they might still be alive. And the captain, if I'm really, really lucky, he must be almost 90 now, but maybe I can find him as well. So that's sort of how that started.
And again, I was really lucky because I was about to promote my new book, sort of my previous book, Utopia for Realists. And I was about to go in a book tour in Australia. So I said to my publisher, I said, you know what? I need a couple of days off because I think I've got something interesting.
You've got a detour to make there. That's so cool, man. And so serendipitous as well that you just happened to put the typo in that came up with the story that you needed at the time before you were about to fly there. Isn't it cool how the world sort of delivers stuff to us like that sometimes?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the kind of story that if it would be a fictional thing, right, if it would be a novel or a Hollywood movie, people would say, oh, that's so unrealistic. That is so sentimental. That is so naive.
This is not how kids in real life would really behave. But, you know, as I started researching this story more and more, at some point I was like, I couldn't believe it. I thought people are not going to believe me if I report this to them. Right.
So I got to make sure that I collect the evidence in the right way because what did I find out is that actually the real Lord of the Flies is a story of hope and cooperation and resilience and friendship. These six kids lived for And then he made the argument that in order to overcome this, we sort of appointed what he called a Leviathan, sort of an all-powerful ruler, so that we gave away our freedom, but we got security back, right? And yeah, that was basically his argument. Now, there was another guy a bit later, the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who basically made the opposite argument.
He said, no, no, no, nomadic and gatherers, they were awesome, you know, they lived these fantastic lives, egalitarian, healthy, 20-30 hour work week, pretty relaxed, no wars, peaceful, you know, pretty good. But then they came up with civilization. They settled down, they became sedentary, and they started to become farmers and live in cities and villages, etc. And it was a total disaster, right?
So they got infection diseases, they got wars, they got hierarchy, they got patriarchy, they got. And that was basically Rousseau's argument, that civilization is the disease. That is actually the problem and we should go, or at least try to go back to the state of nature, if at all possible. Now, usually Hobbes has been described as the realist, right, as the smart, rational guy.
And Rousseau has been described as the crazy revolutionary, as the romantic idealist. But what really struck me while I was researching this book is that if you go deep into the latest evidence we have from anthropology and archaeology, you sort of get the feeling that actually, at most points, Rousseau was right and Hobbes was wrong. So that indeed, civilization can be described, the biggest part actually of what we call civilization, you know, over the last 10,000 years, in many ways it was actually a big disaster for most people. Tell us about the evolutionary basis that you've discovered that supports Rousseau's findings.
Yeah, so one of the most interesting new theories from evolutionary biology is called the self-domestication theory. So we all know, I think, what domestication is, right? You've got pigs, you've got cows and goats and whatever, right, that have all been domesticated, which means that compared to their wild ancestors, they've become tamer, right, more friendly, and they can sort of work with people or be enslaved by people. That's practically what it means.
Now, what's interesting is that all these domesticated species have a list of specific traits. So, for example, they've got thinner bones, smaller brains, and most importantly, they just look a bit more childish, right? We even know sort of which genes are associated with the domestication syndrome, as they call it. And now it gets really interesting.
If you look at us, if you look at human beings, and if you compare us to our ancestors, like other hominid species who lived 50,000 years ago, we look really domesticated. So we have thinner bones, we have smaller brains, and we look childish compared to our ancestors. Compared to Neanderthals, we're sort of, I like to call it Homo puppy. We're sort of puppyish.
And then the question becomes really bigger, right? How did we ever manage to conquer the globe while the Neanderthals are gone? If we're this domesticated, infantile, I think you mentioned in the book as well that you actually have more feminine traits that go across the board as well. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah. Don't tell this to all the Jordan Peterson fans, but what evolutionary biology now has proven, basically, is that over the past thousands of years, men have become more feminine, right? So men have started to look more like women. And this is, I guess, sorry, that's comparative to how we either did look or would have looked had that not happened.
Because obviously men are looking at men now and going, I look like a man, that looks like a woman. But the difference used to be bigger. So, and you can look at other primates. If you look, for example, at chimpanzees or gorillas, gorillas, I think, are a good example.
You see these really striking differences between men and women. But actually, those differences have become smaller in the human evolution. Now, there's another term for this in biology. Biologists call it survival of the friendliest, which means that for thousands of years, it was actually the friendliest among us who got the most kids.
So imagine Donald Trump in prehistory. Well, he wouldn't have done very well because people wouldn't have liked him, probably. They didn't like narcissists or people who were a bit too arrogant. And so he would have quickly been expelled from the group and he wouldn't have been able to survive on his own.
Because in our deep history, in the Stone Age, having friends was much more important than having possessions. You know, you needed friends to survive. And how do you get friends? Well, not by being a jerk, right?
You have to be a bit friendly. That's only logical. So the theory from biologists now is that what makes human beings special is not so much that we're very smart. I mean, we're clearly not.
As I said, we've got smaller brains compared to our ancestors. So on an individual level, we're not very smart. And if you do an intelligence test and let a human toddler compete with a pig, then often the pig wins. People should keep that in mind when they eat bacon.
But it's another piece of evidence that we're not that smart. We're also not very strong. I mean, I know some people are and they put a lot of effort in that at the gym. But on average, you know, compared to a gorilla or a chimpanzee, you know, you really don't want to do a boxing match with one of those.
I think, yeah, you'll regret that. So the true superpower of human beings is not, you don't see it on an individual level, but on a group level. We're just really good at learning from each other, at cooperating with each other, with each other. And that is what scientists now believe is the reason why we conquered the globe and we managed to come up with all these inventions and build pyramids and built spaceships, etc., etc.
Very different theory than sort of the more cynical ideas we had about our evolution a couple of decades ago. Our adaptability to different climates, our ability to use tools and things like that, does that map onto this somehow? Is that enhanced by the cooperation? Because, you know, a pig versus an infant makes sense, but a pig versus an adult human slightly looks a little bit different.
And you don't need to be perhaps as strong as a gorilla if the tasks you're doing don't require that level of strength. They just require the minimum viable level of strength in order to complete those tasks. And rather than being a freak savage in the strength department or in the speed department or in the endurance department, by having a broad cross-section, like the all-rounder player on your team, you can actually be quite still a very, very effective and overly competitive up against those. But yeah, is there something that maps onto that with regards to our skills and sort of how we work together?
Well, I've got a really great example from the anthropologist Joseph Henry. So he sort of asks us to imagine a planet where there are two sort of hominid species. And the one are called the geniuses. They're really smart on an individual level, but they're not very social, right?
They don't have many friends. And the others are called the copycats. They're not very smart. In fact, they're a bit dumb, but they just can't stop talking.
And they talk about everything, you know, with everyone. And they have a lot of friends. Now, imagine that they want to come up with a new invention, say, like fishing or something like that. They want to learn how to fish.
Now, obviously, the geniuses have a much bigger chance of coming up with the invention, right? But they only share it with a couple of others, right? So that's the problem there, because they're very smart, but they only have like two or three friends. Now, if you have a copycat species where most people are really stupid, but one of them comes up with something brilliant, you can be sure that very quickly everyone knows how to fish.
And that's how you should look at human evolution and what makes us so special. It's not that we're on an individual level so special, but we just can't resist sharing everything we know with everyone all the time. That's what happens. That's cool.
That's cool. I like that example. So there is some evolutionary basis for the fact that we are cooperative rather than adversarial, that we are good rather than bad. Then we see civilization and we start to have all of these examples.
So first off, what about when we go to war? We see people warring. We have these terrible crimes. We have things like the Holocaust and truly evil people.
How does that map? Yeah. The big question, obviously, that hangs over a book like this, how can we ever explain all the great atrocities of our history? Because we're clearly not only the friendliest species, we're also the cruelest species in the animal kingdom.
We do things that other animals just, they wouldn't have the nerve, they wouldn't have the imagination to be so horrible, right? Like ethnic cleansing and genocides and the Holocaust and you name it. It's like singularly human to do these kinds of things. So the interesting thing here is that if you again look at the sort of the whole curve of our history, what you see is that for thousands of years, people hardly waged any wars.
So it didn't really happen. The archaeological evidence, for example, for war before we became sedentary is very thin. Anthrop Like if he takes it to the degree that his innermost logos says that you should do, you know, that might push you a little bit hard, but it's a compelling case so far. Let's move on.
So you looked at some fascinating stuff to do with war, the way the soldiers behave and stuff to do with that. Talk to us about that. Can I say one thing, though, about sort of the point you just made? Because it's really interesting.
Frans de Waal, you know, he's my fellow Dutchman. He's a primatologist and he's been studying chimpanzees and bonobos now for decades. And in the 80s, I believe, he wrote a book called Chimpanzee Politics in which he describes sort of, well, the politics of a zoo in the Netherlands. And he compared it to U.S.
Congress. And he made a very compelling case that, you know, we see more or less the same dynamic. Actually, Newt Gingrich, how do you pronounce that? Anyway, you know what I mean.
The American politician, he gave like a lot of copies to his colleagues in Congress because he was like, yeah, yeah, this is what we do. You know, that's the playbook. That's the playbook there, fellas. That's what we're doing next.
And there's quite some evidence that indeed sort of the standard sort of patriarchal leaders behave a little bit like a chimpanzee or that we often trust leaders who have deeper voices or are longer, etc. that we tend to think are better leaders or something like that. I don't think this is inevitable, though. I think there's also a real alternative or a different model of leadership if you look at the extraordinary popularity right now of someone like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand.
She's clearly, she's like the nomadic and together kind of leader. She constantly makes self-depreciating jokes, right? She makes fun of herself. She sort of has this more egalitarian leadership model, I think.
Which also has its risks, right? Because, as I said, power corrupts. So it's often hard to keep it going like that. You need to have this egalitarian culture.
It was interesting, by the way. I also think that there's a big difference between American culture and Dutch culture, you know, where I'm from, is because American culture, if you're successful, then it's like, oh, cool. Wow, how have you become successful? You must be great.
In the Netherlands, if you're successful, we consider that a crime, right? That's not, you have to apologize for being successful. I'm so sorry. I did a thing.
You must be apologizing. I totally forgot. You're number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Yeah, yeah, that's a joke.
Congratulations, and at the same time, you're a terrible person. You should be a terrible person. Yeah, exactly. You beat me to it.
And I think that actually, I mean, it's a really, it may sound a bit ridiculous, but it's actually really healthy because, yeah, as I said, you know, power corrupts. So there needs to be some kind of control mechanisms. And this is one of them. Now, to get back to your question, how people behave during wars, because again, this is, this is a question that I have to come back again and again in my book.
How can people do all these kind of horrible things, right? If we've really evolved to be friendly, then why can we be so violent? Now, the interesting thing here is that we obviously like things like sex, right? You don't have to explain that to anyone, why sex is fun or nice.
At least most of us like it. And food is the same thing, right? Our body immediately rewards us for eating something when we're hungry. And it just feels good.
Now, what's interesting with violence is that it's actually different. We know from a huge amount of evidence that soldiers who've killed in wars often come back with PTSD. You know, they're traumatized, which is strange. You know, if it would really be our evolutionary destiny to be killing other people, then why doesn't our nature reward us for killing other people?
That's not what happens. In reality, violence is really, really difficult for most of us, especially when people are very close. So if you have to shove a bayonet or sword down someone, most of us just can't do it. If you look at the evidence that we have from big battles like the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, almost none of the wounds were caused by bayonets.
You know, there's one historian who writes that as soon as two armies approach each other and they become too close and it becomes clear that they have to fight with these bayonets, then most of the time one of them remembers an urgent appointment somewhere else and just goes away, right? Because they just can't do it. Wow. Now, it becomes already easier if you can actually shoot at the enemy, right?
So if you have some distance, this is a really important innovation in warfare. But then still, most people can't do it. We know from evidence from the Second World War, there's been this historian, American historian, who went with the troops in Europe and the Pacific and interviewed them afterwards. His name was Leslie Marshall.
He wrote a book about this, Men Against Fire. And he discovered that the majority of the soldiers didn't shoot. They couldn't do it. Or they sort of shot over the enemy and they didn't actually aim for them.
His estimate was that only 15 to 25 percent of the soldiers actually shot. There's been quite some controversy around that figure. It seems as it was sort of more intuitive guess instead of like hard statistics. But we now have a lot of other evidence from, you know, modern sociologists who back up this finding.
So most experts now also believe that actually, like a regularly standard drafted soldier, you know, just finds it really hard to be violent. And this finding was taken very seriously by the U.S. military because after the Second World War, they were like very worried, like, oh, our soldiers are not doing their job, right? They have to shoot at the enemy and they're not doing it.
So what they did is they started this whole program of brainwashing and conditioning their soldiers so that sort of shooting becomes a standard reaction, sort of a Pavlov reaction. You do it immediately once you see a target that looks a little bit like a human being. And so then the firing rate went up in the Korean War and also in the Vietnam War. But obviously, because more soldiers started killing other people, there were also many more cases of PTSD.
So many of them came back and they have not only killed someone else, but also killed something inside themselves. Now, obviously, the most simple reason to overcome this is to use tools like artillery. If you just push a button and have an explosion far away, that's doable. Or just drop an atomic bomb on a city.
The person who did this on, I think, Hiroshima or Nagasaki was once interviewed and asked, you know, do you have any more remorse for killing tens of thousands of people, you know, by pushing that button? He said, no, I don't feel that. Was it the guy in the plane? Yeah, exactly.
But imagine having to slaughter 50,000 people with a knife by hand. Most people can't do it. It's just the same with, I mean, most people would become vegetarian very quickly if they would have to kill their own cow before they could have a steak, right? Most people couldn't do it.
But we've enabled this huge meat industry where billions of animals are killed every year. I don't know, it's like 60 billion animals every year on the planet. And we've been able to do that by increasing the distance, right? We don't see it anymore.
It's become where, you know, it's not, it's not real anymore in that way. And this is really the history of military technology, increasing the distance, increasing the distance. So that's sort of like the physical distance, but you can also increase the psychological distance. And that's a very important part in ethnic cleansing and genocides is what happens is that human beings have the ability to dehumanize others, right?
And to look at them and not see people, but see things. This is a process that takes quite a lot of time, right? It needs a lot of propaganda and a lot of horrible and nasty stuff. But we've seen it happening quite a few times in history.
And then also things are possible that are just really, really horrible and are really the dark side of our nature. It's interesting how all of these advances, all of these tactics are shortcutting a compassion set point or an empathy set point, I suppose. It is, you know, you think the people that are listening, imagine a conscription happened in whatever country you're in tomorrow and you got called up. You could have all the training in the world.
I know how to clean the rifle. I know how to run and I know how to pack my bag. I can dig a foxhole. I can send up a flare.
I can do all this sort of stuff. At no point during that did you get around the fact like, I don't want to kill someone. I have no desire to kill someone. And just because they're on what is essentially like the other team, like we're a red team and they're a blue team.
That's kind of what it is. Yeah. There is a, it doesn't surprise me, although it's shocking, it's also not surprising. It's logical in a way.
And I think this is having read Humankind, this is kind of my key insight regarding my own life. And I think a lot of people that are listening will have this as well, which is that my own experience of the world Realistic and easy enough to understand from a personal experience perspective view of human nature. But if that's the case, like, let's say that we are kind. What's the implications for this?
Okay, so what I think we've got to start doing is to implement this theory of human nature in our society, because what you assume is what you get. If you assume that most people are selfish, then you'll design all your schools and your democracies and your workplaces around that idea. And I think you'll bring out the worst in other people. So imagine Well, I imagine you have sort of a workplace.
I think the financial sector is a bit of an example of that sort of the city of London, that's like this war of all against all, right. And most relations there are nasty, brutish and short. It's very competitive. And everyone expects that from everyone.
So that's sort of what you get out of people. Now, if you turn it around, and in my book, I give a couple of examples that do that, of organizations that do that, you can have a very different kind of organization. So one example is an organization called Bursorg in the Netherlands. It translates as neighborhood care.
Now, what they did, they started in 2006 with a seemingly crazy idea. They dissed all the managers. They were only in self-directed teams of 12 to 13 nurses, and they only deliver one product, which is called care. That's what they do.
They deliver care. Now, at first, this was almost illegal in the healthcare system of the Netherlands at the time, because they just introduced so-called market forces and everything has become more competitive and cheaper, et cetera. And the idea was then that that would improve healthcare, but it really didn't. So this company started and initially insurance insurers didn't want to finance it, et cetera, but they went ahead anyway.
And now it's one of the biggest organizations in the Netherlands in healthcare with 15,000 employees. And the really interesting thing is that they deliver healthcare now, according to independent observers, at a cheaper cost and of higher quality for clients. And they also pay higher salaries to their employees. So it's like win, win, win, win.
And how do they do this? Well, it's all about trusting people to do their job on their own. Right? Because nurses can really have this powerful intrinsic motivation, right?
They don't do this kind of work because they want to become rich or, you know, are looking for the status or anything, but they really want to help other people. So if you trust them to do that, and if you say, OK, you work in a team where you can decide for yourself who you want to hire, what kind of additional education you need, what times you're going to work this week and next week, et cetera. it's actually incredibly powerful and empowering. That is sort of an example of the direction we can move in if we actually start trusting other people.
That, I'm going to guess, is enabled by the small groups. If you push into a particularly large business, you're not going to be able to coordinate activity sufficiently well. You're going to have scheduling conflicts and all this sort of stuff. So the Malthusian trap, this kind of race to the bottom and the diluting down of all of this sort of stuff, how would you, it sounds great.
You know, intellectually, it makes sense, but there'll be a lot of people listening that are like, well, yeah, that's all well and nice in this ideal utopia, which doesn't exist. And the people that try and do the good version of humanity are just going to get outcompeted by the people that are prepared to play the game more effectively and sacrifice virtue for value. Well, the examples that I'm talking about are not small, right? As I said, the company I just talked about has 15,000 employees.
If you look at other models, for example, the idea of having a participatory democracy where citizens are not just these people who sit on a couch, watch television and vote every three or four years or something like that and become really angry. But you can actually also have a model where every citizen are involved and are randomly selected to become a politician themselves every now and then. And this doesn't get a lot of attention in the press, but we've had huge experiments in Latin America, for example, there's a city called Porto Alegre where they've been doing this ever since the 1980s on a very, very big scale with tens of thousands of people involved. I think it is entirely possible, but yeah, you need to change a lot of your assumptions there before you can make it work.
I think the problem is not so much scale, but it's more hierarchy. That's really the problem, because if you have those at the top, then what they want to do is they want to be in control. And what do you need if you want to be in control? Well, you need to start measuring things, right?
You want to have in education, for example, you want to have standardized tests so that you can know how the kids are doing, if they're learning anything. Well, you're using a very narrow definition of learning, obviously, because, I mean, there's so many things that you can't measure, right? If someone is becoming more creative, how are you ever going to measure that? So obviously, if you have a hierarchical school system with standardized tests, then, you know, you're not going to educate your kids to be creative.
I mean, this is all the kind of effects that you have if you have a traditional way of thinking. If you move to a different kind of thinking, I think you can rely more on what psychologists call intrinsic motivation, right? So this, they always make this distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is you do something because you have to, or because you want the money or you want the status or the prestige or you do it for your LinkedIn profile or because your boss says you got to do it.
And intrinsic motivation is because you, because you want to, right? Because you're just curious, because you're just creative. You want to learn something. And one of the most important findings of psychology in the past couple of decades has been that these two forms of motivation are both powerful, but they don't add up, right?
They actually detract from each other. You can't, if you rely more on extrinsic motivation, right, more on hierarchy and on money and those kinds of things, then people lose intrinsic motivation. At some point, they don't really know why they're doing what they're doing anymore. Now, if you focus more on intrinsic motivation, then people sort of lose interest in the other thing.
And I think that's actually the direction we should be going as a society. Because one of the great tragedies of our time is that there are so many people stuck in jobs that they hate, right? So many smart people wasting their talent. I always, I sometimes give, this happens very rarely, but I sometimes give talks to bankers and I always say to bankers, look guys, you're way too smart to be a banker, right?
It's just a big tragedy that you're doing this. You're creating these destructive financial products that don't add anything to society and you know it. And you could be thinking about the cure for cancer. You could be, you know, helping us get to Mars or whatever, right?
Build a flying car and look what you're doing. It's such a tragedy. Was it an interview that I heard with you where you said, it's a tragedy that some of the greatest minds of our time have been spent working out how to get people to click on ads? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's actually a former Facebook employee who said that. I'm going to put on the light by the way. Yeah, hit the light, man. You're in the pitch black now.
It's just wondering over there. I'm just gonna keep on talking. This is gonna be a monologue podcast now. Is that better?
Oh, it looks lovely, man. Full, full beam. But yeah, that thing, there's a lot of my buddies working PPC, cost per click, Facebook ads, funnels, retargeting market and stuff like that. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying that it's all useless.
I'm just saying that we should listen to those people who talk about their own jobs and say, you know what? My job is not very valuable. I'm writing reports that no one's ever going to read. I am coming up with these stupid products.
And it's, it's just sad. It's really sad. It's, I mean, it's also, I think a reason why we need to rethink sort of the value of the public sector versus the private sector. So what has happened two years ago is that a really big and important study came out from two Dutch economists who looked at a huge poll that had been done among like 30,000 people in 40 countries.
And they discovered that around 25% of the modern workforce thinks his or her own job is socially meaningless, doesn't add anything of value to society. They also discovered that these jobs are often, you know, they have high salaries. So you have people with beautiful LinkedIn profiles, good salaries, but still at the end of the day, they think their job is useless. And most interestingly, there are four times as many socially meaningless jobs in the private sector as in the public sector, which is sort of counterintuitive, right?
People often think that, oh, the government is so wasteful and they come up with all these jobs that don't need to exist. Come on, only entrepreneurs create real jobs. But if you think about for a bit longer, it starts to make sense because a lot of jobs in education and healthcare, they're government jobs, right? And they're clearly useful.
If you look at all these lists from the so-called vital professions, right Yeah, it's going to be really effective. And so that's what they did. And they did drop 10 times as many bombs on Germany. And then later, after the war, British scientists went to Germany to study the effects of the bombing and they found the exact same thing, that the cities who had suffered the most also had increased wartime production compared to the cities who were not bombed as heavy.
So there are even historians now who believe that if there had been no bombing war or if the airplanes had been used to bomb strategic targets like railroads and industry and factories, that the war, you know, would have been shorter, like six months shorter or something like that. So it's pretty incredible. Come on. What a story, man.
So I want to finish off. You give 10 rules to live by at the end of the book. Do you have a favorite? Oh, that's a good question.
You know, I should first say that I didn't want to write a self-help book, you know, I'm not really into self-help, maybe because I'm not really good at it either. But I really believe that sort of a different world starts with building different kinds of institutions. People are shaped by institutions, by the schools we go to, by the workplaces where we work, right, by our prisons, by the way our democracy is organized. So I think it really starts there.
We shouldn't expect too much of individuals. But then again, I couldn't resist. I thought, you know, there are probably some rules for life that I can come up with if we take this view of human nature seriously. So the rule that I start with is quite simple.
It's when in doubt, assume the best. Very often we do the opposite, you know, if you're communicating with someone else and especially when there's some distance in the communication, let's say you're on WhatsApp and you get all these emojis and you're like, what does that emoji mean? And you start interpreting and then often we quickly have our doubts about other people's intentions, even though we don't have solid evidence that they really mean something in a nasty way, we quickly start to do this. And then we adjust our behavior, we become a little bit less friendly.
And then the other person also starts thinking, oh, that's weird, now I'm getting also weird emojis, right? And this is how relationships sometimes break down, right? How people end up in fights because of this kind of miscommunication where people are assuming the worst in each other. Now I think we should turn it around.
When in doubt, always assume the best. Why do you need to do that? In the first place, because most people are pretty decent. So most of the time you'll be right.
It's just a good guess. In the second place, because your behavior can have non-complementary effects. This is a psychological term. So if someone is like really being nasty and you act in a nice way to that person, then you can sort of break the circle, right?
It's very hard to stay nasty to someone who's like being nice, who's turning the other cheek. I've got one example in my book, which is, I mean, this is a very sentimental example, but I'm going to tell it anyway. This happened like, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago in New York. It was a guy who was being robbed in the subway and by a young guy with a knife.
And he said, like, your money or your life. And he said, okay, here you have my money. And the guy was about to go away. The robber was about to go away.
And then the man who'd been attacked said, wait a minute, don't you want my coat as well? You know, it's quite cold. And the robber was like, that's weird, that's weird. And then the guy said, you know what?
My favorite restaurant is around the corner here. So we just go there together and just talk about it. So they went there and they had a lovely night and a good discussion about life. And then it was the end of the night and the bill came for the food they had.
And so the man who had just been robbed said, you know, you've got my wallet, so maybe you can pay. And, you know, they became friends. And it's this very sentimental example of just the power of non-complementarity, non-complementary behavior. Now you can say, yeah, but there are still nasty people out there, right?
There are still professional con men who will just try to rip you off. There are sociopaths, there are psychopaths. What about them? Well, I came to realize that we should accept some amount of collateral damage in our lives.
Right. Because if you really want to never want to be ripped off, never in your life, then you have to distrust other people all the time. You can only trust those close to you. And then you have to distrust all those strangers.
That price is way too high to pay. So what I think the rational thing to do is to have a very trusting attitude to other people in general and just accept that you'll be ripped off a couple of times in your life. You know, it's a reasonable, rational price to pay. And so if you are, I don't know, 30, 40 years old, 50 years old, and you've still never been ripped off, you've never been conned, you should really ask yourself, what's wrong with me?
You know, you should maybe visit a therapist because your basic attitude to life is not trusting enough. Right. It should be something that you're, I mean, you can be proud of being ripped off a couple of times and being conned a couple of times. It's an interesting way to look at it, man.
I think it's a little bit like putting a trade on, or being a trader, and consistently making small positive wins throughout your life, conceding the fact that your current trading strategy will mean that you have a few fairly medium-sized losses here and there. But hopefully they won't be too frequent. Hopefully they won't be too catastrophic and you just keep on going. Man, I think the main challenge people are going to have in swallowing the ideas in Humankind is going to be getting past, first, the societal programming, but also, as you mentioned, the sort of negativity default that we have is fitness-enhancing.
There's a lot of anxiety at the moment. People are cautious about opening up. They don't want to feel silly when they try and do something nice to someone, you know, someone's like being mean to you and you, it's seen as a little bit wimpy, you turn the cheek. So there's more societal stuff coming in.
But we're memetic creatures, man. You know, like, the more nice that we can be, the more nice those around us can be. And this is why, particularly, I love this project. I love the podcast that I have because it connects me with people who think the things that I think about the world, which is that they want to understand themselves, they want to understand the world around them, and that's awesome.
I'm like, look, rising tide, all ships. Let's keep going. You know, like tsunami time. Man, I really think the fact that it's number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list as well is something that you should be incredibly proud of and embarrassed by all at the same time.
Dude, I'm super, super happy for you. I think it's got a beautiful message. So people want to check it out. Check out the book.
Find you online. Where do they go? Oh, they can just Google it, I guess. That secret website from the start.
Well, Humankind, hopefully history will be linked in the show notes below on Amazon. Ruster's Twitter, which is disproportionately massive after going viral like five times in the last year. It's got this huge, this huge, like Twitter influencer sized following online after completely smashing the Internet for the last 12 months. All of that will be linked in the show notes below.
Rutger, man, it's been awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.