Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Morality, Aggression, and Human Nature with Dr. Richard Wrangham

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Violence and virtue. The Goodness Paradox. Why are humans capable of being the nicest, but also the nastiest, of all species?Join host Dr. Michael Gervais as he sits down with Richard Wrangham, biological anthropologist and author of "The Goodness Paradox," to discuss the intricate relationship between violence and virtues, and how understanding this connection can lead to a more compassionate and just society. Dr. Wrangham shares his research on the evolution of human behavior, challenging common assumptions about our species and shedding light on the complex interplay between our inherent tendencies towards aggression and our capacity for empathy and altruism.Richard’s research has fundamentally changed our understanding of human evolution & behavior, and it was great to learn from him in this conversation.You might wonder how a talk about humanity’s virtue and violence is relevant to thinking about human performance. Understanding humanity’s roots is fundamental to better understanding how we can reach our potential. There are major forces that guide our daily decisions and actions. Some of them come from our culture, our families, or our friends. Some of them are biological or for the purposes of this conversation – evolutionary.Understanding the stuff that makes us is key to better understanding our own potential, the potential of those around us, and perhaps even the potential for humankind. This was a really interesting conversation that took us places I didn’t think we’d go. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Richard is a research professor at Harvard. As a biological anthropologist, he is best known for his pioneering work on the evolution of human behavior. Since 1987, Richard has studied the behaviors of wild chimpanzees and other primates, which he has eloquently linked to the roles of warfare, social behavior, and nutrition in human evolution. I wanted to have Richard on after reading his latest book, The Goodness Paradox, which explores the relationship between virtue and violence and why humans can be both the nicest and the nastiest of species.

It's a fascinating phenomenon. Richard's research has fundamentally changed our understanding of human evolution and behavior, and I loved learning from him in this conversation. Now, you might wonder how a talk about humanity's virtue and violence is relevant to thinking about human performance and specifically your performance. Now, understanding humanity's roots is fundamental to better understanding how we can reach our potential individually and collectively.

There are major forces that guide our daily decisions and actions, and some of them come from our culture, some from our families and our friends. Some of them are biological or, for the purpose of this conversation, evolutionary. Understanding the stuff that makes us is key to better understanding our potential, the potential of those around us and perhaps even the potential for all humankind. This was a really interesting conversation that took us to places I didn't think we'd go. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And if you're enjoying this podcast and haven't already, just a quick reminder to hit the subscribe or follow button and to drop us a review wherever you're listening. It is the

easiest and zero cost way to support the show. And with that, let's get right into the conversation with Dr. Richard Rangham. Richard, how are you doing? I'm doing just great. Thank you so much. And you? Yeah, I'm loving life. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Your work is foundational. And, um, when it comes to human nature, like getting at that bedrock type of thinking is really important to me personally and to our community. And so when I read the goodness paradox, I was like, Oh, I, I got to find a way to get Richard on. As you have eloquently shared, humans are a mixture of aggression and kindness, and society is not to blame for any of this. It's just what our species are. Is there anything that we can do to lean toward kindness,

or is violence inevitable? Do we just give up and accept it? Well, violence is not inevitable because our violence is mostly proactive and proactive violence in animals and humans always depends on the perceived ability to carry it out safely. So if we have safe conditions, people will not be violent. Wow, look at that. I love that take. So if we have safe conditions, people will not be violent. Wow.

Look at that. I love that take. Can you take a moment to maybe give a flyover about how you think about virtue and violence? And then I have a follow-on question about the types of violence, which is insightful as well for us to think about. But can you do a flyover of what you mean by virtue and what you mean by violence? My flyover starts in the 17th century. There's been this debate going on for two or three hundred years or more about the essential nature of human nature.

Are we an essentially competitive, conflict-ridden, violent tendency species that needs to be civilized by growing up in an appropriate educational environment? Or are we an inherently tolerant, cooperative, gentle species that is made worse, corrupted by life? And so you go back to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, living in the chaos of the English Civil War in the 17th century. And he said, we are a competitive violent species that needs to be controlled by, he called it a leviathan, a state, a monarch, some system for keeping people behaving properly or sending them to prison. And then in the second half of the 18th century, you've got Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

who has become the icon representing humans as a noble savage, a delightful, peace-loving species that is unfortunately occasionally corrupted, and rather more than occasionally, by ideology, patriarchy, all sorts of bad things. So you've got the Hobbesian perspective were nasty, the Rousseauian perspective were nice, And they have been in conflict with each other. And when you say that I'm representing a new voice, the new voice is saying, you know what? Hobbes and Rousseau are not opposites because both of these tendencies are in us from our biology. We have competitive urges brought to us from our biology. We have an astonishing degree of tolerance that has been given to us by evolution by natural selection in a way that is quite unusual compared to other primates, other mammals.

And we can get into the specifics of what it means to say that they're not opposites, but that's the really core insight that I've been pulling together from the work of a number of people to say that natural selection has favored the brute in human nature at the same time as it has favored the lamb. And the really fun story now is working out why those two things happen. How did it happen and what does it mean? We talk about one kind of aggression being relatively elevated in the human species

and another kind of aggression being relatively down-regulated in the human species. How can these two things live alongside each other? What sense does it make that we have this bifurcation in our tendencies, our social tendencies, between on the one hand being given to quite exceptional nastiness. I mean, Hobbes is right. We have that inherent tendency.

But at the same time, quite exceptional niceness. Rousseau was right too. They were both right. They were both wrong. Okay, so let's double-click on the violence and the nastiness. Rousseau was right too. They were both right. They were both wrong. reactive proactive and so it is acceptable to be to murder an outsider and i'm thinking about war in a warring country and it is like many of our military establishments are establishments of violence and um i don't know if i'm saying something provocative or not but like the idea that you're you are suggesting is that there's an acceptable, um,

position to kill others that are outsiders. It is unacceptable to kill insiders, meaning a fellow countryman, a fellow country person. And so we have crimes of corporal punishment. If you move, if you act in a certain way, uh, to a fellow country person versus if you act in a certain way to a fellow country person versus if you were to act in that same way versus somebody outside of the country. And so am I oversimplifying your position about insiders, outsiders, and the tolerance for particular behaviors? And then wherever you take that, I also want to make sure that we talk about reactive aggression and proactive aggression. Yeah, no, I mean, that's exactly right.

Of course, it's oversimplifying the situation as a whole, but that's what science does. It's the way to be able to carve the nature at its joints. And so, you know, it's very much the way I think about it. That, you know, what's so fascinating is that almost all killing is done with a moral justification. And that's a particularly strong example of it. It's morally right for Ukrainians now to go and kill Russians, just as it's morally right from a Russian point of view, at least those ones who are buying into Putin, to go and kill Ukrainians. But it remains morally reprehensible for Ukrainians to kill

Ukrainians or Russians to kill Russians. And this runs all the way through human society. Every human society is the same on this. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people.

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towards members of a neighboring group. What you don't have in other primates is a morality of fairness, a morality of justice. So it's just normally doesn't make sense for them to kill each other within groups. So I guess it becomes a complicated thing to summarize there. But the first point I would just make is that aggression, like war, is very broadly found in primates. But there's only one species of primate in which the aggression is so like humans that it involves actual killing. And that, astonishingly, is chimpanzees. And I say astonishingly because they are

one of our two closest relatives, and they are the one that is clearly least changed from a common ancestor with humans. So, you know, it was just amazing when in the 1960s, the first behavioral studies of chimpanzees in the wild were being done in sufficient detail, and it was by Jane Goodall, to be able to get a real sense of how they behaved and what their relationships were like. And first of all, she starts seeing these human-like features of not just using tools, but making tools, and then hunting meat, and then sharing the prey among mostly the males.

All of these things, you know, incredible echoes of what we see in humans in small-scale societies. But then, and I happened to be in the field with Jane Goodall and her colleagues at the time, so it made a huge impression. Then the growing evidence that chimpanzees went further than these similarities and included coalitional attacks on members of neighboring groups that led to deaths. They were raiding and ambushing males primarily in neighboring groups in a way that was astonishingly similar to what you read about in Hunters and Gatherers of the last couple of hundred years before they were pacified and brought into a more modern system. If we walk that back to humans, statistically, some of the most watched shows and events

like heavyweight boxing or Game of Thrones, historically gladiators in the Coliseum, what do you think makes our society so enthralled with violence? Well, I suspect that it's kind of an extended version of play, where what play does is to help you rehearse real-life situations in a safe way. And so just as the play of juvenile primates and juvenile humans is a practice for real life, you know, in both primates and humans, the females tend to play with younger infants, play mothering. We even have evidence of them playing with dolls in the case of chimpanzees. Females do it more than males. They pick up sticks and carry them the way they might be infants. And the males, as juveniles,

are playing more rough housing, rough and tumble play, play that is aggressive, and even coalitional. So the males more often get together in teams and fight against each other. And nowadays, you know, we carry this through all the way into adulthood, and that's a lot of what sports is about, of course. Teams playing against each other in the same way that you can see a little bit of in juvenile life spontaneously without anyone organizing it. And when we go to movies and read Shakespeare and have other sources of being inspired to think about the complexities of warfare.

I think that it's all part of the effort to understand, you know, subconsciously, but we're just driven to be fascinated by things that are likely to be important in our own lives. And does that mean we're fascinated with combative, rugged, violent sport because that might show up in our lives at some point? And it's a way to passively observe as a mistake for readiness? Yeah, I think so. I'm not going to say that there are studies I can cite to back this up, but it sure seems like the intuitively obvious feature that in movie after movie you see the same trope repeated of male coalitions

fighting against each other and very often of course it comes down to an individual fight the hero against the leader of the bad guys and our hearts are in our mouths and eventually the hero wins and even when people produce movies with

women given more of a place in the movie in deference to the fact that men have, as it were, unfairly dominated the cultural scene for so long. Very often it turns out the women end up doing the same thing as the men. You know, Wonder Woman gets her Marvel picture

and it's just a repetition of the same old trope of coalitions fighting against each other. So it's an astonishingly popular form of engagement. Okay, so let's create a couple scenarios and see where you would take this organization. So the scenario is that you're consulting or working with a high-performing, elite-performing sporting organization.

And knowing what you know and knowing the objective of the team, would you help them be more competitive? Would you help them be more cooperative? Would you help them move towards like a threshold of violence, but not cross over it? Would you help them, like, how would you guide them, knowing what you know about human nature? Well, the thing that I'm always impressed by with sports is that the goal very often is to get everybody working together and sinking their own individual ego into the team's benefit. Because if you are too keen on showing off or promoting your own statistics or whatever it is, then that tends to undermine team success.

And what evolutionary theory now tells us very clearly is that the tendency for individuals to be selfish is very strong. That's the core basis of the evolution of behavior, looking after your own interests. And it takes something special to get to the point where you are willing to sink your own ego to the point of really putting the team interest first. And it's with that dynamic in mind that, you know, my gut reaction to your question is that it seems to me that the best coaches are the ones who find ways to motivate people

to think of the team first. And I would, therefore, you know, I'd go after, I mean, use experience, go after those coaches who are good at that and focus on what they've learned and the techniques that they've found constantly remind people or develop, I suppose, a subconscious approach that puts the team first. If I pull on this thread a little bit further, would you approach that there's a collaboration with our competitors? Or would you suggest that, no, we want to create an insider outsider approach we want to create an othering that we need to be great and strong together because we need to go be dominant on that other team against that other team so it's more of a zen approach the first one which is like we're collaborating with our adversary, with our competitors?

Or is it more, oh, I don't know, more primal in the respect that, no, listen, our tribe has got to be tight because they're trying to take our resources, whatever those might be, fictitiously in sport, of course. Yeah, I mean, my gut reaction is to go for the second. I can see ways in which because you have long seasons and are repeatedly playing the same team, there might be some sort of complicated ways in which it benefits you to promote some higher level of cooperation among teams. But the essential dynamic is that you want to bring your team together at the expense of the other one. And so just as I was saying, as a successful coach, I would expect that one of the most important things you can do is to give everybody the sense that they are part of the

same team and should not be trying to show off individually. Equally, what they should be trying to do is to get in the other team's mind to the point where they are promoting the idea that some individuals should out-compete the others within the other team. That's clever. Yeah. So, yeah. That's really good. Because you know the chaos that would ensue when a person pops up and pops out to make it about that person as opposed to the team mission. Yes. If there is envy, if there's

jealousy and competitiveness within the other team, that so easily slides into non-cooperation or reduced cooperation. That's where teams will falter. Let me go back up one level really quickly. As humans, we are the nicest of species and we are the nastiest, as the insight that you've shared. What occurred that we have this paradox? And I'm hoping that you illuminate this idea that we have tolerance for behavior, and at the same time, we are quick to violence. So what happened in our history to account for both of the virtue and violence? I think in order to get to that question, we have to grapple with a couple of different concepts of aggression. So we often think that aggression is a single thing, and it's why it makes it hard to understand the simultaneous notion that we are inherently aggressive in some ways and inherently unaggressive in others.

And the solution to the paradox is that there are two types of aggression. One is called proactive, and the other is reactive. And proactive aggression is aggression when you are hunting. It's predatory aggression. You don't have to be emotionally aroused. You have to have a specific goal. And you go after that goal and you do not mind killing whoever it is you're going after. And predatory aggression is something that you see in predators, like wolves and lions and chimpanzees. And people have sometimes thought that it's limited to getting prey. But it turns out that in all these species, they also kill each other using the same techniques that they use for killing prey, hunting prey.

And we know that humans have been killing prey for hundreds of thousands of years. There are beautifully balanced spears from 400,000 years ago in Germany. There's lots of indications that humans were hunting long before then. So they've been really effective predators for a very long time.

And all the social predators that we know of sometimes kill each other, because once you've got the skills to be able to kill an animal, then you can kill rivals. And they always have rivals in the form of individuals and neighboring groups. So spotted hyenas or wolves or lions, they will readily kill members of neighbouring groups. And the way they do it is always the same, in the sense that it's always done safely. To do safely means you have an overwhelming imbalance of power. So five lions surround one lion. Wolves the same. So this is proactive aggression. And the proactive aggression has its form in contemporary humans

in the form of anything that is premeditated, where our side, and it's normally several people together, a coalition, it could be a whole army, decide to make a sneak attack on others. And the great majority of interactions in war take this form. We, I mean, nowadays it can be incredibly sophisticated. We drop a bomb on those guys. Well, I think that functionally it's pretty much exactly the same as eight chimpanzees sneaking out to the neighboring territory and looking for someone to attack and kill.

And then, of course, they drop a bomb on us. And that's the tragedy. But it just escalates. So that's proactive aggression. Okay. No one does it alone. And I want to share a couple sponsors that's proactive aggression. Okay. No one does it alone. And I want to share a couple of sponsors that are making this show possible.

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Well, I think the huge story about human society that is different from animal society is the evolution of morality. And when I think of morality, what I mean is the evolution of a sense of what's right and what's wrong. Animals don't have that. Animals just do what suits them. And humans do what suits them. But then they also have this sense of morality which says, wait a minute. Some things are right and some things are wrong. And we now have a story of the evolution of morality that means and being instructed by one's parents and teachers. That we're all born ready to absorb and implement a system of morality. And we have a very good

reason for it. And the reason is, I think, extremely scary. And that is that in our evolutionary past, and we can actually say how long this has been going on, which is about 12,000 generations, to be immoral was to court danger. It was to court physical danger in the form of being excluded from the society and very often being deliberately executed, which is an astonishing claim because nowadays we don't think of execution as being anything more than something rather odd that happens rather rarely and a few countries do annoyingly often. But the claim is that execution was really a very, very important part of the human evolutionary journey. And the reason it was, was that it, I mean, several

things, but what it began by doing was it got rid of a feature that happens in every other primate society, but not in ordinary human societies. And that is an alpha male who can tyrannize everybody else in the group through his sheer physical strength. You know, we jokingly talk about alpha males nowadays. You know, Donald Trump is an alpha male, and you certainly get individuals who try and bully others.

But you don't get individuals who try and bully others through their own personal physical strength. They do it by coalitions. But what happened about 300,000 years ago was that humans developed the ability, and I'm sure it was because their language became sufficiently sophisticated at this time, to be able to get together in small groups and say, you know, if you and I just work together with Bert and Joe and Bill and Phil, we can take out that bastard who's been taking our women and taking our food and kicking sand in our faces. That bastard being the alpha male who, you know,

this totally resonates for me because you see it in chimpanzees all the time. I mean, every community of chimpanzees always has an alpha male. And that alpha male is a sociopath. He is just totally selfish, just out for himself. He sometimes uses a little bit of coalitionary expertise with a pal. But nobody in the chimpanzee world can do anything about him. And the same is true for all the other primates.

But in humans, we don't allow that. And how is it we stop anyone being an alpha male? They get killed. And we can point to small-scale society and say that when individual men have succumbed to the temptation to kick sand in the metaphorical face of his colleagues, fighting them for access to their women, taking their food just at will.

What happens is that everyone else gets together, actually other men, and they end up killing him. And so chimpanzees can't do that. It's just too difficult. If you're in a group where you don't have language, you don't know if you try and sort of indicate through your eyes or your pointing, you know, let's go and kill that guy

individually can intimidate all of us. You don't know if you're going to be joined. There is no sufficient trust. But language can build the trust that enables a group to execute. And that ability of a group of males to take down a tyrant lies at the heart, I think, of human society, of what makes human society different from animal

society. And it means that much goes beyond just the question of removing the alpha. And the big point is this. When you get a group of males who can take out the alpha, the personally terrifying tyrant, if they can kill him, they can kill anybody. And now that group of males has the power of life and death over everybody in their community. And that means that they can impose their collective will on everybody else. And that means that now you have a moral system because they can say, you know what, it's right for males always to get the first go at the best

eating the best bits of the prey. And it's wrong for females to have sex with someone who isn't married to them. I mean, what an argument to make. And I think I'm drawing a parallel here that corporal punishment is a socially moral thing to do. Am I tracking correctly? Yeah. It's the basis of human society. Look at that. You know where I fall? It gets confusing for me on that. Well, in two fronts, really. One is that I get the logic of it. I totally follow the logic. Where it falls down is this idea that, okay, I want to go kill somebody, or I want to go bully, or I want to dominate somebody in a way that is unbecoming to the social morals, right? I'm going to do that alpha thing. I will have the awareness that if I do in a way that is unbecoming to the social models.

I'm going to do that alpha thing. I will have the awareness that if I do this later, they could all kill me. I'm not sure that we have that type of discernment when we are emotionally lit up, even considering the behaviors that we're talking about. So there's like a time or temperance thing that I'm confused on. I'm sure you've thought this through.

So can you help me understand that piece? I'd like you to give me an example of what you're thinking about. Okay, so let's say I'm going to go steal some stuff. And if somebody gets in the way of me, I mean, any means necessary, I've justified that I need that stuff, that food or that medicine, and I'm going to kill them if they get in my way. That the counter argument to the position that you've eloquently outlined is that, uh, you know, I could be in harm's way because that coalition of, uh, other, other, uh, alphas

or whatever, they're going to kill me if this thing goes sideways. If, uh, if I in fact do kill the person for the medicine. So that's where I'm saying that it gets really foggy for me. I don't see that happening. Are you saying that you don't think that people articulate to themselves the sense that it's so dangerous to do such and such that they might actually be killed? Yeah. I think it's like a passionate rage, like they're not thinking about the consequences later. Well, okay. I think we need to talk about reactive aggression because that's what you're talking about there. So reactive aggression is emotional aggression. It's where you are confronted by a

threat and you respond spontaneously. There's very little of cognitive processing that's going on. It's just when you're straight into your amygdala and boom, your aggressive circuit lights up as if you were a non-human primate or a rodent. So this is what happens when a man comes back early to his home and finds his wife in bed with another man. And he doesn't stop to think about the consequences. He just reacts emotionally. And that if you happen to live in a country with lots of guns, that's when the emotional reaction can be lethal.

If you don't have lots of guns around, then it's just more likely to get into a fight. Humans have astonishingly low propensity for reactive aggression compared to other animals. And people from the ancient Greeks have been aware of this. Now we can compare it with actual data. So if you look at the frequency with which male chimpanzees or male bonobos fight each other, then it's something like between two and three orders of magnitude more often than it occurs in humans. So somewhere between 500 and 1,000 times more frequent in those related apes. We are amazingly suppressed, but

there are times when we just can't resist, and it's all unconscious. We're just so upset by something that's happened. When the costs and benefits are really disproportionate,

or when the degree of the threat is really severe, is what I should say, then reactive aggression comes bubbling out. But the question that I'm fascinated by is, why is it that humans are so reduced in reactive aggression compared to other primates and other animals? Amazing. One of the things that keeps jumping out for me is, do males and females have the same propensity for violence? Or because we're speaking about alpha males, is it mostly a male characteristic that we're talking about

that is being selected against? Yeah, it's mostly male. That's right. Males really object to being dominated by other males. There's not that much domination of females by other females in biological terms. The reasons why some females are more successful than others has got less to do with being bullied by an alpha female than with other ways in which affect their ability to get resources and have children that survive well and happily. Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've

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as a whole and that means that any individual who does not have the interests of the group at heart or more accurately the interests of the male group that has the power of life

and death over everybody else at heart. Anybody who is showing signs of individual selfishness, self-centeredness, willingness to compete against the male group, any non-conformist tendencies, it puts them in a really dangerous position because the individuals that they are annoying have that power of life and death. So I think our need for social approval is built into us emotionally as a gut reaction that protects us

from the danger of being seen as a witch, as an outsider who is competing, as somebody who might try and set up some sort of independent power competition. And those are the people who will get killed. Do you buy the off-sited idea that in ancient times, getting kicked out of the tribe, equated to near certain death. And humans have carried that same fear of social disapproval into the modern world, even though our survival is no longer at stake. You know, I love these little experiments that were done by a guy called Kip Williams involving

getting people to play frisbee with strangers. And within a few minutes of playing frisbee with strangers, if they were then excluded,

they would feel just desperately hurt. Totally unreasonable. Pretty out of proportion. I mean, they didn't know these people five minutes ago. They had not had any kind of collaboration with them. And yet to be excluded, even under these totally trivial circumstances,

caused deep social pain. And so, yes, I think that what the human emotional system is designed to do is to steer individuals away from the danger of ostracism. You know, ostracism is the beginning of a process that in prehistoric times,

and even in some ways more recently, leads to something, you know, super, super dangerous. You know, you were asking about exile from the group. Where do they go? If they try and go to another group, well, you know, good luck. In ancient times, probably quite difficult for men to get into other groups. Women, yeah. You know, in the cruel logic of reproductive competition, then a woman would normally, if she was in breeding age,

be welcomed by another group. But not a man. Have you come across some of the work of Dr. Jordan Peterson? A little bit. He and I had a conversation a few months ago. Yeah, it sounds like there's a thread in some of your thinking. I don't know his work, but I know that there's high controversy, and he certainly created a stir and a tribe around his ideas.

And it seems like there's some thread through here that you guys are picking up on. I mean, I tend more to think about his rules for life, which are definitely focused on young men who are having a hard time with it nowadays in many ways. But I read his book rather quickly. There are sort of ways in which it superficially promotes a rather crude kind of male togetherness, which, you know, it raises the question of how you do give advice to people nowadays who are feeling distant from society, uncertain of their own futures, worried about how they're going to fit in

and whether they even have goals that make sense. I mean, I understand that there's a lot of emotional malaise in young people. And I think it's absolutely right that becoming part of a group is a relatively easy way to tap into the social emotions that we are adapted to needing for our own well-being. So, I mean, there's all sorts of possible advice about, you know, you're depressed, well, go and join a tennis club, or whatever else is appropriate

for you as an individual. And that just makes every sense to me in terms of this kind of evolutionary analysis. Are human beings fundamentally social animals, or have we just learned to socialize and cooperate? Oh, no, we are totally fundamentally social animals. I mean, the story of the last 300,000 years is that we have become incredibly sensitive to all the nuances that mean that we are either well-embedded in our social group or in danger of being ostracized.

This is just absolutely huge for us. And when you're ostracized, it is incredibly depressing. Can you build a case for a non-violent society? Is that possible with our predisposition to act with violence? Well, I mean, it's obviously a really tough one because, in terms of what you mean by society, but if by society what you mean is a social world, the species that occupies the planet Earth, then obviously we have a history of inter-group aggression that has been pretty much unrelenting.

You have to really scratch to find a society that hasn't been involved in war for more than once every 100 years and typically a lot more than that. So then you say to yourself, okay, well, but what if the trend that has been followed by humans for the last centuries and millennia continues? So that trend is that the number of independent groups gets smaller and the size of the average group gets bigger. I mean, if you make some kind of crude analysis of the total number of hunter-gatherer groups that would have existed prior to agriculture

about 10,000 years ago, you would say it's in the tens of thousands. I think I calculated it somewhere less than 50,000 groups. Now, how many groups are there in the world? Well, 180 nations or something at the United Nations. So we've gone from some tens of thousands down to less than 200. And there seems no reason to think

why that trend should stop. So you would think that we would just carry on shrinking the number of independent societies in the world and get to a single society which is great because at that point you can't fight anyone there's no one else left to fight of course the process of getting there

is a very nerve-wracking thing to think about because it's most unlikely that everyone will just fuse in a friendly way. But nonetheless, it's conceivable. But then, you know, suppose you do have your world government, then all the people who are terrified of world governments are probably right to be

because there would be a need by that one society to use their monopoly on violence and it is hard to imagine that a peaceful society

would be totally peaceful if it was a single society governing the whole world there would be endless little flares of complaint and rebellion that would be put down brutally. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts

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quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. Okay, let's put our gaze on the future. What are you excited for? What are you afraid of? How about AI, artificial intelligence? With some of the propensities that we have for virtue and violence, where's your position about AI in the future? I don't really, I mean,

the position that I would take is that whatever happens, happens. It's not going to be stopped. So if you're thinking, is AI going to get to the point where they take over from humans? Humans somehow cede the power to them. They can't turn them off. That seems to me unlikely, but I recognize that it's possible. So I don't have much to say in that area.

There is one area about the science fiction aspects of human future which seems to me to be worth thinking about even though it seems fantastical and that is the future of the Y chromosome so there's no doubt the future of the Y chromosome. So, there's no doubt that even though women

can sometimes be thoroughly aggressive, they can use proactive aggression to design wars and press buttons with appalling consequences.

Nevertheless, on average, women are safer than men in a world of dangerous weapons. And it seems to me that the propensities for violence that are found in males are always going to be a very risky feature of a future human species. I don't see that any kind of degree of educational change is going to change the fact that even though humans are capable of living incredibly tolerantly, circumstances will arise when proactive aggression is used.

In other words, I think that if we were really going to be positive about the human future, we'd have to think about eliminating males. And eliminating sounds a bit harsh. But, you know, the prospect for a human future, a stable human future, seems to me to be greatest, if somehow the world could agree that the breeding would be carried on only by females and they would have no sons. So this does not involve the prospect of killing males,

just consigning the Y chromosome to test tubes rather like the smallpox virus. It runs into an obvious dilemma. How would you imagine procreation to continue or the species to evolve if there's only the Y chromosome and there's not the obvious ways that we procreate as an option. Cloning would be part of it probably. There are various mammals now that are cloned. And then the advances in reproductive technology are considerable. And I would think it wouldn't be too long

before people could arrange for some kind of fusion between over of different women. Maybe it'll take another century, but I would have thought it wouldn't be too long before men are actually not needed to allow a system of reproduction I would have thought it wouldn't be too long before men are actually not needed to provide, to allow a system of reproduction in which there was still maybe some sexual reproduction, just not between men and women, between women instead.

What a fascinating idea, you know, and it follows your logic. And I'll butcher the eloquence of how you've done it. You've said, listen, we have virtue and violence. Yes, both of them. Violence is a bit of a problem. And so we've got a solution to that, which is more violence. We'll kill the alpha males. That seems like a lot of work.

And I'm not so sure that the assets that males bring into, that once served them well, you know, thousands of years ago, being able to operate well in rugged, hostile environments. I'm not so sure that those work anymore. And so if we wanted a virtuous society, we should probably get rid of those that are aggressive. Yes, it would accelerate the move towards domesticity considerably. And that's what we really want to do. That's amazing. I've never had this thought before. I knew we were going to go somewhere new like this. Okay. I mean, the problem is…

Are you an optimist? I wouldn't say exactly I'm an optimist, but I feel like a realist who envisages some optimistic possibilities. So a realist, you could be a realist as a pessimist and a realist as an optimist, right? Like realism is that I'm grounded in reality. And the way that I tend to see things or think about the future is that that's going to work. We're going to figure it out. Something good is going to take place. Pessimism is like a reality or realist that is grounded in a pessimistic approach says, listen, I'm seeing all the facts that you're seeing. I just don't think it's going to work out.

Hope is a hugely important human emotion. And it seems to me that unless you have hope, then it's a bit like Pascal's wager. I mean, you'd better have hope because that's the way to make things hopeful. Jane Goodall's work. Yeah, that's true. It's right in there, squarely. That's right. You know, and I know that you spent deep time with her. I mean, what an amazing human. Yes, indeed.

Ah, yeah. I mean, she is on Mount Rushmore for me, you know, like for amazing humans that have contributed so much to humanity. So that must have been a thrill for you. Well, that's right. I mean, she's been a kind of a guide and a beacon of sanity for, what, 50 years, more than 50 years. So I started working with her in 1970. What did you learn from your work with her about humanity? Not necessarily the insights, you know, from primates, but but your relationship and interactions with her specifically. be completely honest about the findings that she came up with and the ones that have carried on since her time, while still presenting sort of really positive and informative messages.

So, you know, the big example is the fact that chimpanzees do have these very nasty sides to them, you know, that we've spoken about. They kill members of neighboring groups. And the novelist William Boyd fantasized in a book called Brazzaville Beach that whoever discovered this would want to hide it. But Jane, of course, didn't want to hide it at all because she's a really good

scientist. What she wanted to do then was convey it in the most meaningful way. And the meaningful way was to say, look, you know, just like humans have got our problems, chimpanzees have got their problems too. And what this does is just remind us how close we are to nature in the form of chimpanzees. And I think that's a really important message, the notion that for all of our weird modern life in relationship to what was going on 10,000 years ago, we are a product of nature. We are a place to see in mind in a modern world. And we'd better learn to live with that because there is no alternative.

You know, I think about domestication. I have such a response to it. Like, I do not want to be domesticated. You are domesticated. All in all. That's what I was going to say. All in all, like, I'm way more manicured than I'd like to admit. I've got shoes on.

I've got a nice sweater because it's a little cold outside. I've got a roof. You know, I've got a refrigerator. Like I totally get it. But there's a part of me that's like, I don't want that. You want to be a cat? And so I feel like I'm an outdoor cat. I don't feel like I'm an indoor cat.

And I know the ridiculousness of that because, you know, the context of let's call it 100,000 years ago. I'm the most domesticated person on the planet 100,000 years ago. So do you have any of that in you or are you like, no, no, no, no. Domestication is it is a really important thing. And I'm happy to be on the path of domestication because violence is part and parcel of being an outdoor cat. And I don't want to live in a violent society. And I don't want to be part of a society that has to kill alpha males that are overly aggressive. I think it's a problem for all of us.

The answer is I do have some of that feeling of wildness in me. And the perspective I have is that as a species, we have grown up to need to be in a social cage. We need to be because there's no alternative. We have to accept it. That social cage is what means that we are a part of society. If we don't accept the limits of morality, of the norms that are given to us in our society, then what happens? We end up going to prison, we're labeled as psychopaths. Maybe,

you know, if we live in some countries, we'll actually be executed. But nowadays, mostly, we'll just go to prison. Every individual born lives in a social cage in a way that is not true of other animals. Because all of our lives, our behavior is subject to scrutiny by others in a way that means that if you start behaving in a way contravening the local mores, you become an outsider. And to become an outsider is ultimately incredibly risky so you know

you have I mean in America there's a lot of people you know saying we want to be free you know don't step on us we want to be free it's a fantasy no one is free no one is free in the same way that a

squirrel is or a chimpanzee or an elephant. We are all subject to our local rules. The real question is, which local rules are we willing to live by? So, you know, for me, I don't like the social cage any more than anybody else does particularly. And the way I solved it, that problem, was my just incredible enjoyment of natural history, of going off and living with chimpanzees and dawn till dusk, staying with chimpanzees and following them. Of course, it's a fantasy. I mean, I'm still part of the social cage,

still subject to all the rules. But nevertheless, for days on end, you can be indulging a sense of freedom that is temporary, but wonderful. Can I give you a couple quick hits where it's like one or two word responses, like a forcing function for, well, I don't know, some sort of clarity. Let's go. Living the good life is marked by? Following your passion, I suppose. You know, I mean, I'm having just a great, I'm retired right now. And I'm having a great time doing research, you know,

because it's just so wonderful to be able to push on these sorts of questions. Successes. A sense of satisfaction at getting an answer you like. It all comes down to? Well, I've been selfish in my answers so far, you know, and of course, in the end, it all comes down to family. When you think of a person that has, that is a, was or is a living emblem of success, who comes to mind? You see, everyone I think of, there's some sort of wrinkle that's not quite there. How about... Is that more about your critical nature? Yeah, exactly. that's not quite there.

Is that more about your critical nature? Yeah, exactly. I think so. I'll be absurd and say Queen Elizabeth II because You've got to explain that one. Well, as a young girl, she became queen.

And she devoted herself to her job. Absolutely. Of course, you know, it's not a good answer from the point of view of family, because family relationships were in many ways a disaster. Not necessarily her fault. But I just love the extraordinary degree to which she devoted herself to her duties. And

that's what made her so tremendously popular in Britain. But she does have flaws like everybody else. But I think that there this balance between individual purpose and group purpose is the thing that is, for me, where I want to go when I think about success

and a good life. You know the phrase, nice guys finish last? Do nice people finish last? Well, yeah. I mean, there's certainly a sense in which the old competition continues to rear its ugly head. And so, you know, after this conversation ends, I'll start thinking about all the people who were nice guys who didn't finish last. And those are the ones I should have said I think

of as iconic of success. Okay. What a great, deep, rich, insightful take you have on humans. And I just wanna note the thoughtfulness in how you've approached your life efforts and the discernment you have in working through in a logical way, like how humans work. And I just wanna say thank you for sharing your time here today.

There's food for thought, I think, for all of us that are listening to this conversation. I'm just saying me right now. The idea that maybe we're better without males. I can't wait to have this conversation with my wife. So I just want to say again, thank you. And I really appreciate it. Well, thank you. It's my privilege. And I know I'm thinking how I would define success being Michael Gervais.

Oh my goodness. Too kind. Too kind. All right. Again, thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Again, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches

of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.