So there's a there's a question looming in the back of my mind
around leadership, and it is, is leadership.
Are you born or made right? And I guess this gets us back to
the whole nature nurture debate. And I yeah, I mean, what's your
take on that? Basically for every trait that
you look at, behavioral, cognitive, whatever, it's like
5050, I mean, give a like, right.
So it's like 50% genetic, what you're endowed with from your
parents, the random shuffle of genes that you got from your
parents and then your experiences and you're growing
up and, and then, you know, the context basically, which then
shapes, you know, that biological endowment.
We see that in monkeys where it's, you know, easier to
measure and you know, that that seems to be true in people as
well. And, you know, that's really
apparent when you look at, you know, extreme cases.
So, so in, you know, in the autism spectrum, for example,
genetic, you know, genetic factors, very powerful genetic
factors. And, you know, the two of the
key kind of defining characteristics of the autism
spectrum is, you know, differences in social
interaction, right? So more difficulty reading
social cues, maybe not as motivated to be with other
people, maybe. Yeah.
So so that part and then language and then repetitive
behavior. So it so we, we know, we know
that even across just the typically developing spectrum
that there are genetic factors, right, that shape and shape the
hallow circuits about now in monkeys, we've been able to
study this much more directly. And we do that in two ways. 1 is
like in the lab here where we can study in a really fine
degree of detail what's happening from molecules on up
to circuits to networks in the brain and understand how how
social information is processed. But we also have been, and this
is a really, you know, this is a different part of my life and
work that's unusual for a neuroscientist is that we've
been studying as population of monkeys on an island off the
coast of Puerto Rico, in Puerto Rico, 18 years.
They live on an island. There's about 2000 monkeys
there, give or take at any time. And we know everything about
every monkey going back to the founding of the population, the
founding population of 400 in 1938.
And so we have people there who are research teams who track
every single monkey, do, you know, complete behavioral
profiles. So they know what they're like,
they know who they hang out with, who they don't, who they
fight with, their status. There's something Myers Briggs.
They're sort of like a Myers Briggs for monkeys.
It's but it's not self report, which is the key because
otherwise, you know, that's the problem with Myers Briggs.
It's like how you want to what you think you will be or what
the other person has more biases.
But monkeys vary in their tendencies to be, you know,
really skilled and deft social, you know, players and others who
are more aloof on solitary or or awkward.
A lot of the genes are involved. We've we've demonstrated that
down on Kyo similar to the genes that are, you know, associated
with with differences amongst humans in terms of their social
tendencies, etcetera. And what what's really been a
focus of our work over the last decade is understanding how that
biological endowment, any monkeys born with interacts with
their experience to shape ultimately success and what's
the kind of biological foundation of that.
So just like people, monkeys who and this is true in humans, you
know, monkeys and people who have more friends, more social
support, live longer, healthier and in humans, happier lives for
humans, they make more money for all the business reasons we just
talked about. Monkeys make more babies when
they have more. As their KPI.
As their KPI exactly, I love to say that and and the underlying
hardware in their brain that they're using is the same that
we see in people. Now what's really interesting is
just like in humans, but it's more evident in monkeys, is that
monkeys who have more friends, the social brain network is
bigger. Like the more friends you got,
the bigger the social. Brain.
Literally. Physically.
Bigger in part of it, it's just like large, larger, it's larger.
And, and then, you know, that that's reflects both their
endowment that they got from their parents, but also their
experience growing up, because we see that those changes don't
really emerge until adolescence. You know, so it's not like not
so evident when a monkey's a like an infant when they're a
baby monkey. So it, it, you know, it emerges
through interactions with, with others.
And I know we got to wrap, but I'm going to kind of tell this
story, but the story which I, you know, I, I know, you know,
but you know, we had, we started working there, what, in 2008 or
something like that. And we're merrily going along
and we're, we're cataloging the behavior monkeys.
We're identifying certain genes that affect whether a monkey's
like really like the at the center of the network, they got
lots of friends and their friends have lots of friends or
they're kind of on the outskirts.
Same genes that are involved in humans.
You know, it's heritable. And then, and then in 2017,
Hurricane Maria hits Monkey Island while hits, you know, so
we know about it hitting Puerto Rico, the mainland, 3000 people
lost their lives. Other devastation.
People still have PTSD about it. When I, you know, when I go down
there, I was down there in January and it was really
devastating, worst natural disaster in, in the history of
Puerto Rico. And in a lot of people, you
know, suicides went way up, you know, anxiety, depression, PTSD,
etcetera. And so that hurricane hit Monkey
Island first. It was an even stronger storm
when it hit Kyo, and remarkably, all the monkeys survived.
All the monkeys survived the hurricane.
Yeah, as far as we could tell, maybe a few infants, you know,
which we didn't, you know, catalog.
We don't know how, how we believe they hunkered down on
the Leeward side of the island. There's like a Cliff.
And so they'd be out of the, you know, the not taking the full
force of the wind. And they don't have houses or
things like that that could fall on them, you know.
So some ways better ways that helps.
But, you know, the, the, the, But it was utterly devastating.
It was like a bomb went off on the island.
All the research facilities were destroyed, the freshwater
cisterns were destroyed, and all the trees were destroyed,
basically, And they still haven't recovered.
OK, So the trees are a source of food, a source of shelter, and
probably most importantly, shade.
So if you ever been to Puerto Rico, it's really hot and humid
in the afternoon. It's right at the limits of
human tolerance. Monkeys can't sweat.
So in terms of thermoregulation, they're a real How do they?
Stay cool then. They have to use their behavior
and so they typically would go in the shade in the the heat of
the day. Now there's no more shade 8°C
hotter, 8°C hotter in the open compared to the shade in the
afternoon. Now, what's really interesting
is that, and we've been able to catalog this over the years that
at every level, this gist, I mean, talk about a stressor that
you can't replicate in the lab. So at the molecular level, what
we see is that it's basically they're they're we that
accelerated aging. So within one year, we look in
the stress. And yeah, so so running through.
I mean the the unleashed and so, but it's so many levels.
So just if you look at gene expression, going through the
hurricane is like getting old. So genes that turn on when you
get old, like inflammation, like my knees, you know, they get
turned way up. And genes that are turned off
like that are involved in, you know, repairing DNA and things
like that when you get old, right?
That's that. Starts, you start turn off.
Turn off when you go through this hurricane and then when you
see that in there, there the monkeys successively with each
cohort after the hurricane that we sample, like they're less
flexible like so teenage monkey looks like an elderly monkey,
but going through the hurricane one year in the aftermath.
So I think it's more the devastating environment.
It's like aging 2 years for them.
Accelerated the aging. Accelerated aging, and that has
continued. Now what's really important to
note though is that there's a lot of variation.
Some monkeys aged a lot and some monkeys were.
So they're vulnerable and some monkeys are really resilient.
And so that's a key question for us.
And This is why we come back to the social brain network,
because now when we look at how the monkeys responded to the
storm, the storm that the, you know, their world is turned
upside down. There's no more shade.
You know, it's a disaster area. And what did they do to this?
They fight over every little scrap.
No, they, they did the exact opposite.
They suddenly became super intensively social like monkeys.
The foundation of a social relationship in monkey society
is grooming. They go and they, you know,
you've seen them, kind of. Pictures.
That's the number one social behavior.
That's how they build and sustain a relationship.
Wow, another monkey. And every investment like that
pays off later. It might pay off in you know
it's going to pay off in some grooming now, but that's if you
groom an alpha male or alpha female.
They're going to come help you in a fight maybe 2 years from
now. So it it just like humans,
right? It's.
Like you buy me a coffee. It's.
Like going to get a beer or something.
You know, we go to Union League, you know, we had dinner.
That's that's the same thing, right?
It's building that relationship. And what we saw is that like
suddenly monkeys who didn't really groom with anybody else
are grooming everybody massively.
Everybody, entire groups, all the groups are like massively
so, so grooming way up. They're investing in social
relationships, friendliness way up, tolerance way up and
aggression way down. And we reported that like 2
years after the hurricane, but we've still been studying them
and it turns out they're still that way.
That's what's so shocking. And this is the killer app here.
When you ask like the why the So what?
The friendliest monkeys who had the most connections had a 50%
higher likelihood of surviving the seven years after the
hurricane than those who were the least friendly monkeys.
OK, so it's a survival advantage, right?
And it's interesting because you know, Julia Holt Lundstadt's
work in epidemiology public health has shown over A7 year
period, humans who have more social support and are exposed
to trauma have a 50% higher likelihood of.
That's absolutely brilliant. So it's and at the.
Core of all of that would be the social brain, yeah.
And in fact, this is very preliminary data, but when we've
done brain scans on these monkeys, monkeys who survived
the hurricane, their social brain networks are larger.
So we don't know if it's actually, we still have to do
the Histology and you know, etcetera, gene expression.
But those monkeys who you know, all the monkeys after the
hurricane are really social and their social brain networks are
bigger, right? And so this is really cool too,
because it tells us that, and this is a lesson for
neuroscience is it's generally practiced.
There is a huge capacity or flexibility in the brain right
to adapt to the environment. So before the hurricane, you
know, having a few friends was useful but otherwise not worth
my, you know, time and effort. After the hurricane, wow,
suddenly. This is my this.
Is my whole life, this is how I'm going to survive this
competitive advantage. And so I'm going to put
everything into that, right? And yet in laboratory studies,
we typically don't. Yeah.
We, we just assume everything's always the same, right?
And so, and I think that that's also the reason why we see so
much variation in human social tendencies, because what's
adaptive, what's favorable, you know what, what can depends a
lot on the circumstances, right? And we also saw this in monkeys
in a, in a study, a paper we published.
It was basically an anecdote, but we got to publish.
But this was about 10 years ago. It was interesting because we,
we, we'd been studying this, the, the dominant group and it's
very big and it had the best territory on the top of this
mountain, basically. And they kick all the other
groups out of there. Wow.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this, just
this spasm of violence, and monkeys were fighting each
other. Within the within the dominant.
Group yeah, within that within that group but in the center of
the social network that's what's really important like the most
dominant families and monkeys who are in the middle of
everybody took. Some really.
Well, it was so so the spasm of violence monkeys died.
The group broke up into like four or five daughter groups
that got kicked out of the good territory because they couldn't
hold the territory anymore. And so we went back in the
records to see what in the world was going on.
Somebody takes somebody's bet. What what happened was monkeys
were losing the capacity to service all those relationships
with each other with through grooming.
So they're getting more cliquish, spending too much time
with just their few besties and not distributing, you know,
making sure that they're keeping their alliances and friendships
with everybody, you know, warm. You got to keep that network
warm. And they weren't doing it.
And then we don't know what actually triggered.
It was all his violence. That was interesting.
Is that so those animals, when, you know, the crap hit the fan,
It was really bad to be in the center of everything.
But if you're a wallflower on the outskirts, those monkeys,
they didn't get hurt and they just kind of melted away and
attached themselves to, you know, other groups loosely
affiliated. So it.
I feel like you just described the history of human
civilization. Like you think about like, you
know, different empires rising and falling, you know, You know,
maybe, you know, right before the rise there was some kind of
traumatic experience or a war that was one that brought
everybody together. You know, analogous to say like
this phase of grooming, high, high grooming, but then you get
comfortable and then you start to maybe engage in, I don't
know, depending on on on your theorist or philosopher, like,
you know, hedonistic or selfish pleasure seeking behavior that
ultimately. You turn inward.
Starts to create like a caste system of of and then and then
create. You just need something to some
spark or something that that you know, creates that heightens the
schism. And then you have conflict and
and yeah, unity is is. Yeah.
And when an empire is so far-flung and you've got so
many, you know, different cultures, and I think that it
could become Britain, like the Roman Empire, it'd be very
difficult to keep it all connected.
And like we're all one, you know, we are all on the same
team. That's a harder proposition
because you're just not having those contacts, you know, and
connections. And so, you know, in some sense,
maybe there's a like with our digital age, yeah, maybe there's
a way to leverage that. I don't know because the
technology doesn't really work with our brains in the way that
IRL works. I don't know.
I'm just throwing this out there that maybe there is because of
the way to because it's a, it's a medium that allows for maybe
there's. A way to.
Massive scaling through our. Phones or.
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying.
So hard hasn't happened. But I would argue that this is
where leadership comes in, right?
It's it, it very much at those moments, you know, where, where,
where we've won and we're now comfortable.
You need something or somebody or some people to keep the group
focused on, on a, on a purpose, on an aligned purpose, or else
you can sort of degenerate or devolve into you know, you know
a range of different. Yeah, I mean that sense of
meaning and purpose and connection and engagement is
critical. I've, you know, I have had the
opportunities to advise, for example, in Microsoft work Lab,
you know, and they do these reports every year.
And, and one from a couple of years ago was really telling
because what they did is they they looked at several million
employees and this was over the year 2022.
So it was like during, yeah, huge sample size coming out of
pandemic. And they looked at firm value as
a function of time, as a function of engagement.
And this was using their Viva glint engagement index, which is
a combination of like, how connected do you feel to the
company, to your Co workers and your sense of meaning and
purpose? You know that that's like,
because a lot of what we derive, the value we derive out of work
is not just a paycheck. It's like what we, you know, the
intangibles that we get from our relationships at work and
feeling sense of connection. Are we working together on
something bigger than ourselves, right.
That's what you want in a job, not just.
Kind of. That's why somebody will take a
job where they're making less. Correct, absolutely right.
And what was interesting is that the companies with the highest
engagement index not only outperform just their value and
it got bigger over the course of that year, the ones with the
least engaged employees, but outperformed the S&P 500
significantly. So that's the slide that I
always show to like CE OS what I was saying, like, why do you
need to invest in social connection and, you know,
amongst your employees and for them with you and with the
company. This is the reason why
presumably because they're more productive, they're more
creative. They're, you know, they're more
effective at what they do. They're, you know, they're
they're going to be mentally, you know, healthier, physically
healthier, miss less work because of all those.
So there's just a whole bunch of different levers that end up
getting, you know, pulled on when you create a culture of
connection. Workplace.
That's beautiful.