Do you believe the robot's gonna raise our kids? Because it feels like a slippery slope. Well, it's not too far away from us, and we never evolved to want children. But look, if fertility rates are going way down, a lot of countries are gonna be literally half their size by the year 2100, because they're shrinking so fast.
And the list is really long about how hard it is to raise the child into his world. So, if you want to make having kids to be as much of a plus as it possibly can be, and with the perfect robot, Annie, you would never worry at all. Interesting. Dr.
William von Hippel is the world-renowned evolutionary psychologist, who has spent decades studying and finding the answers to how these things that once helped their ancestors survive still drive us today. Often in ways we don't even realize. As a species. What are we getting wrong?
Well, young people, having less sex than they were 20 years ago. Marriage is steadily going down. And our lives are so much better, but we're not any happier. And part of the problem is that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than connect.
So here's the data. In 1850, one in a hundred Americans lived in love. Now it's one in seven. In the 1970s, one in three people spent time with their neighbors.
Now that's completely reversed. Now let's dive a little deeper. Fifty percent of humanity now lives in the city. Then they're about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country.
And yet the data shows, people in the country, are happier. Because the cities are all about, I want to do what I want. And the problem is that we can't introduce such a connection into our life, willy-nilly, or we won't keep it up. So what do we do about that?
Two things. One. And then what does the pollution tell us about how much we're tracking up as sex? What honest signals are quality.
And bizarrely, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is... I have been forced into a bet with my team. We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever, thanks to all of you. And we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on the show for years behind the scenes.
So they said to me, Steve, for every new subscriber, we get in the next 30 days, can one dollar be given to our celebration fund for the entire team. And I've agreed to the bet. So if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at Bireb's here, all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button. So actually, this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe, because it might end up costing me an awful lot.
Dr. William von Hippel. What have you spent the last four decades of your life doing? Mostly in the lab, trying to figure out why humans do what they do.
What do you mean why we do what we do? Well, I'm super interested in not just what we do, but what the underlying cause might be. You know, why does having a nice dinner with your friends make you happy? It just seems inherently obvious.
Of course it does. But there's got to be a reason for that. And there's got to be a reason that it's very different if it's not with your friends, or if it's different kinds of foods, or if it goes on, it could be anything. And so what I try to do is I look into revolution on history.
I say, how do we get here? What were the factors that made us success? And the things that made us successful are likely to, as a species, are likely to be the things that make us happy, because happiness is one of the tools that evolution uses to guide us in the direction that it wants us to go. You know, evolution has no foresight.
But evolution shapes us the way we are, and the things that make us successful, those ancestors who enjoy doing those things are going to be the ancestors who have more kids. Then the ancestors who enjoy doing things that were bad for them. What is evolution? So evolution is this mindless process.
And all it is is, if it's the case that not everybody is the exact same number of kids. And if it's the case that not everybody is the kid's survived, the exact same rights, now we have the room for evolution. Because there's variability. Something about me calls me to have lots of children that survive in the next generation.
And something about this other guy caused him not to have any maybe. And so whatever there is about me that's heritable will be well represented in the next generation. And about him, poor guy, even if he's wonderful, those traits are gone. And so evolution just works with whatever's there, and the things that make you a success, either because they're just useful in an environment or they're a new mutation that turns out to have great value, they become overrepresented in the gene pool.
And so evolution can create things that are species typical. All of our species have that. We all have two eyes. That's just part and parcel of being human.
And then it can make variability within humans. And there's tons of variability in our size, our stature, all sorts of things about us. And why should we look at evolution for answers on human happiness and success? And as a sort of guiding compass for what we should be doing with our lives, why is evolution a place to look?
There's lots of tiny answers to that question, but they don't necessarily link together very well. So people say, you probably heard, oh, express gratitude. That'll make you happy if you express gratitude. Why?
Why should that make you happy? If there's a good reason for it, then it makes sense that we should do it, and it should have some kind of a lasting effect. And so every single thing that people tell you, this will make you happy. There has to be a reason it must have done something for ancestors.
Or it's what my colleague Robert Chivers calls a phenotypic indulgence, which means it mimics something that was good for ancestors. So for example, video games are pretty novel, right? They mimic things that were super important for ancestors and give us the same indoor and restaurant, whatever, even though they're not actually necessarily good for us anymore. Junk food is the same.
It's loaded with fat, salt, sugar. Those are the kinds of things our ancestors saw all the time. We don't need them anymore, but they were super important back then. And so it makes us happy when we eat those things.
As an evolutionary psychologist and someone who understands where we've come from and therefore are sort of behaviors and needs and desires and so on, what are the things that we're getting wrong as a species at the moment from your view? So the big thing that I think we're getting wrong is the balance that we maintain between autonomy and connection. And we can talk about why this is. But the big thing that we've got wrong right now is doing what I want to do right now rather than connecting.
Autonomy is all about self-governance. What do I feel like doing right now? And everybody's going off in their own direction. And this is not good for us.
It's not good for happiness. It's not good for us in a host of different ways. That mistake is particularly problematic if you live in the West, if you're well-educated, and if you live in cities, and if you're wealthy. So if you're Western, wealthy, urbanite, well-educated, you've got that problem in space.
And by autonomy, you mean the sort of individualism where I don't need anybody anymore. It's about me. It's about my gratification, what I want now, versus others and a community of tribe. That's right.
And it doesn't even need to feel like a big thing. It's just, let's say you and I are buddies, and we're going to go to a movie, and you say, I really want to hit a rom-com. I'm like, I really want to see an action movie. We'll go and see other movies over.
We just go our own ways. And so it can be trivial little things. But it's cross our lives. We're continually setting aside our connections to do what we want.
And what are the sort of stats that illuminate this problem? That make it clear that this is actually happening in your view. So there's a number of them. You can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone.
We've got good data in the States. The picture's the same in every industrialized country. In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone. Now it's a 1 in 100.
Now it's 1 in 7. So here we are, 170 years later. And it used to be crazy rare. And now it's 1 in 7.
It's pretty darn common. If you look in the 1970s, when I was a kid, about 30% of people got together with their neighbors. Not just visually seen them, but got together with their neighbors at least a few times a week. And only one in five pretty much never saw their neighbors at all.
Now that's completely reversed. Not only one in five are seeing their neighbors regularly. It used to be one in three. And now one in three never get together with their neighbors at all.
So we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways. Even married couples are spending less time together. They're weird. We don't understand what they're doing.
But what I suspect is happening is that, let's say that you both want to exercise. And she kind of likes to jog. And you kind of like them.