Roy Collette and Larry Kunkel – Raw Insights Between Being Selfless and Selfish

If you have a prankster in your family, you know that the holidays are their time to shine. Over decorated trees, a fake Santa Claus with reindeer tracks in the snow, ice down the back of your shirt, and surprise snowballs in the house. These are the stock and trade of the playful dad come December. But if hearing sleigh bells turns you into a merry prankster, then you know there's only one true test of your mischievous skills when Christmas is approaching – the gift wrapping. 

Some families have stories about in-laws who did too much tape on a present to make it impossible to open without scissors. If the prankster is really spiteful, they might mummify a gift and duct tape it just to watch you squirm. But nobody will ever outdo Roy Collette and Larry Kunkel, the in-laws who became superheroes by trolling each other with their gift-wrapping jobs. How devious were their gift-wrapping skills? Imagine this if you can: A Minnesota Christmas is cold to the bone, and in 1981, there was no Amazon Prime. So, when a truck pulls up with a crushed car on a frozen flatbed trailer, you’d be confused just like Roy Colette was. Then he found a letter wishing him a Merry Christmas. 

The note inside explained that the Twisted Metal 3x3 Cube used to be a sedan, a 1974 Gremlin. And inside the 2,000-pound scrunch car was his Christmas gift. It was in the glove compartment if you want to get technical. All Roy had to do to get his gift was grab a cutting torch and a jaw of life to unwrap his present. And, of course, that's exactly what Roy did. He very slowly, very meticulously unwrapped a crushed car. Inside he found a pair of moleskin pants, the same pair that the two have been given each other year by year in more elaborate wrappings. Because for a prankster, Christmas is a competitive holiday. 

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Corporate greed, lies, money, selfishness, suits, and gluttony. These are the things we've been taught to make us rich. But in today's episode, these concepts we ditch. To get us into the spirit of things, we're proving that selflessness can make us kings and that monetary success is even more attainable if we practice giving away sustainably. And being selfish and rich is a temporary plan until the public mistrusts you and you're forced to rebrand. So here are some myths to help us along, to prove that the selfish have got it all wrong. 

Myth One: Looking out for number one is our natural state. Humans are designed to hoard wealth and procreate. No more. No less. 

Joe: I’ve got to ask. Where did this all start? Because that can't possibly be the first gift exchange. 

Todd: It started when Larry’s mom gave him a pair of moleskin pants. He wore them, but in Minnesota, it is freezing cold in the winter, and moleskin pants could freeze. It's not very comfortable. Now, I think that these brother-in-law’s had the exact same sense of humor. So, he thought it'd be hilarious to gift it to his brother-in-law and annoy him for a day or two. Roy ended up wearing them one day, got annoyed, and then sent them back. But then Larry sent it back again, this time in a 1 inch wide 3 feet long pipe. Then it was game on.

Joe: So, I know that what they're doing is inherently prankster and isn't necessarily selflessness. But would you consider what they're doing to be an act of giving? 

Todd:  Yeah, I think this is a creative competition based on love. 

Joe: Now, would it surprise you to know that giving things and being selfless is, first off, sexy? 

Todd: It does a little bit. I've heard that one of the love languages is gift-giving, and I wanted to study some more of that. 

Joe: Is it fair to say that them having humor in their gift-giving is telling about their personality? Don't you feel like you really know them because they're willing to crush a gremlin around a pair of pants?

Getting into the first myth, what is selflessness good for? Why would this trait be in us as primitive men? Why would we start out with selflessness as sort of a default? Part of it is attractiveness, and part is how selflessness helps us survive by keeping the tribe around us healthy. And, of course, being selfless in a way that is humorous offers double points. That makes you a tribal leader, basically. So, we're going to talk about a Scientific American study. This comes from an article called, It Takes Effort To Be Selfish, and that's where many of our points will come from today. First off, being selfless is actually sexy. It's not just your teacher telling you that people are attracted to selfless people or your mom telling you that being a giving person gets you liked more. This is actually true. 

They did a study where they looked at 32 heterosexual women and 35 heterosexual men and had them rate the attractiveness of the opposite sex in the presence and the absence of information about healthful behaviors. They found that helping behavior was associated with increases in attractiveness for both men and women as potential long-term sexual partners. Likewise, altruism also increases the attractiveness for men as potential partners for short-term flings. 

We had an episode-long ago about attractiveness, and we talked about how altruism was looked at as attractive and selflessness was looked at as more attractive. But the whole nice guys finishing last thing is sort of like an internet sticking point. When they say that they're being nice and they're finishing last, what they mean is they are doing things that are nice for an individual. They're like pulling out a chair and paying for dinner and ordering a taxi. They're doing nice things for one person. We're talking about actual altruism. Selflessness, in the larger scope of things. 

Want to hear something funny? In the same study, they found that altruism did not affect the attractiveness of women as partners for short-term flings. Guys don't care if you've given to the March of Dimes if they want you as a one-night stand. But for long-term partners, altruism still mattered. Overall, in this episode, we're going to find that selflessness and giving are still very much alive at an individual level. I'm not going to spoil it, but later in this episode, we will put the public and the individual head-to-head against corporations on who gives more. And I kind of want to hear your guesses on who you think is going to be the bigger giver.

Myth Two: Sure, selflessness for the individual might be normal, but for business and the economy, it's rare and informal.

Do you want to hear the other half of this Scientific American study? The ‘why’ it takes effort to be selfish? Overall, we learn at a young age to share with others, even if we don’t want to. There’s also a flip side to this of people being suckers. I see it as a status thing. People who donate millions of dollars to the Portland Ballet get more status in that culture. This study hit me upside the head. It was more like having a newspaper rolled up and slapped in my nose for assuming that everybody was selfish or frugal as I am. They did transcranial magnetic stimulation. 

This is a fancy way of saying they used magnets to throw an electrical current into part of the brain, which means they could put a charge in somebody's brain without drilling into them and putting wires into their head. It gives you magnetic stimulation and disrupts your prefrontal cortex. Historically, if you disrupt my higher functions, my higher planning, you're just reverting me to a child who wants to feed the ducks or give to the poor. You're not thinking about what I'm going to eat tomorrow or if that is the last ten dollars you have. Along with this, Stockholm University did a study once where they looked at altruism. And this was also sort of backed up by a British study where they found out that people who were the most altruistic had both the most children and the highest income of all respondents. 

Multiple studies have backed this up for years. So, this is something that the scientific community has accepted. The idea is that if you're generous and you are altruistic, you generally have more kids, and you have a higher income. Now, one of the things that the scientists think is that if you are altruistic and generous, you are more likely to just be looking for quality relationships and more selfish people have lower quality relationships. I think all these studies are backing up an idea I had: if you are genuinely altruistic and you are a genuinely selfless person, you probably have that throughout life, and it helps you keep connections. 

I want to talk a little bit about The Game Theory of selflessness. If altruism is so sexy, selflessness, and a good evolutionary trait, why does this not bear out in large groups? Why is it that we have global warming? Why can't we just come together and be altruistic or selfless on the bigger scale? This American Life did an episode once about incorporated neighborhoods where the neighbors themselves have to pay for the streetlights etc. The idea is if you're if you have 12 neighbors who pay to keep the street lights on, if you don't all come together and form a committee, and you don't come up with a payment system, how does that streetlamp even stay on, or do you let it go out? This is something a lot of Americans are facing right now. We are entering a phase of ‘not my problem’ as far as housing and neighborhood associations go. So, we're having a lot more neighborhoods decide to go with letting things go if it means you don't pay more money in individual taxes.

I started looking this up online, and the best example I could come up with comes from Max Planck Institute in Jena. They had a study where they looked into when members of a group collaborate and when they decide to act selfless, and this is mostly about sports. I'll just read directly from the study. They said, 'we know that groups whose members cooperate or are more successful, but what are the circumstances that lead them to become active?' Egoistic behavior is standing in the way of the group's success. If you are going to be good as an individual, you're not going to be a good team player. You must play with your team and be selfless to make a good team player. 

So, these researchers formed groups whose members were put into 30 rounds of play, and they had a complex system where they would divide the amounts of money back to the groups. And if people hoarded money and acted egotistically, they would benefit. But if everyone does that, everyone loses simultaneously. As soon as the group competes with other groups, the group members no longer waited to see whether someone else imposes the sanction to make people who are hoarding their money stop. 

They found that the status or the win was worth them not having enough financial game. In summary, if you want to talk about the real value of altruism and selflessness, it's that you want to be good at golf with not a great golfer. That is the nature of how altruism and selflessness work in business in sports and everything. And if you want to talk about how this can be applied to America, as a whole, if we treat it like a competition, we're already losing. So, we need to change our approach because, yes, we can do whatever we want, but we're not winning. 

Looking at homelessness, we are in the middle. We have 17.7 homeless per 10,000, and the worst is Syria, with about one-third of their population being homeless. But guess who's ahead of us in the homeless rating? Russia is beating us. If you want to talk competition, they only have 4 homeless people per 10,000. Lichtenstein is my favorite because homelessness does not even exist there. In the Wiki, it says the homeless shelter in Liechtenstein was closed because of lack of use. So yeah, altruism and selflessness on a global and company scale can work. You just have to be competitive.

Myth Three: Is there anywhere selflessness doesn't win out? What about greedy businesses that get a bailout? 

I want to ask our original big question - who gives more money to charities: companies or individuals? When we started this episode, I guessed it was companies. I guessed that these charitable foundations named after people are technically a corporate entity, and companies every year pick donations and organizations to give money into. So, there's a lot of arguments online about whether or not a company should give to charities. Harvard Business Review had an entire article that talked about the Milton Friedman philosophy, which is the idea that the only social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits and that charitable contributions should just be made to the individual stockholder. 

Well, this is the part where we start making the waters pretty muddy. I thought that if a company gives to charity, it's nice but not necessary. If a company like Amazon gives to the local education system and the local Health Care, then they're really just enriching the pool of their employees. They know that their employees are going to have to go through there and get treated. That's not so much charity as just giving to the community around you to keep your employees healthy.

After researching, my thoughts on charity for corporations changed a little bit. I am starting to lean more toward if a company only exists to make a profit, that is fine, but they can't have so much say in their employees and the environment around them if they want to mess with local laws like Amazon does. Now, we get into the actual charity numbers. Yes, companies spend a lot of money advertising, but when you get to the just rock bottom numbers, most of the giving every year comes from individuals. 

Each year, individuals give out about $290 billion to charity and make charitable donations, which account for 70% of all giving. If you look at foundations, they come in at about $67 billion. That equates to 16% of donations, and corporations give $20-21 billion each year, which is about 5% of all donations. In short, individual charities collect 10X more than what corporations do. So, we know whose selflessness and who isn’t. The reason why you see how generous corporations are on TV is because of advertisements. They talk about it on their recruitment posters and on commercials for the image. 

Final Thoughts 

Selflessness might be humanity's default, which means as we age, we learn to down our natural generosity so we don't go broke. If you ever watch kids in the park excitedly feeding ducks or donating toys, then you've seen our generous human nature. In action, nobody's born a Scrooge. And if you're not convinced yet, maybe this can sway you.

Scientists with magnets can disrupt the planning center in people's brains - the prefrontal cortex. But guess what? When participants can’t rationalize why they shouldn't give away their money, they become more generous. This means it takes mental strain to think of reasons to be selfish. It takes mental work to walk past that donation bucket and not be generous. Even more, selfless people have higher incomes, and generous people have more children on average. Those same generous people consistently beat out corporations on charitable donations by a difference of $250 billion per year. If nothing we've said so far makes you want to give to your favorite charity, then we have one last fact to leave you with: selflessness is sexy, especially when it comes to long-term partners, according to science. 

This means we just have one question for our mega gift-givers Roy Collette and Larry Kunkel; Exactly how big a wall did you have to build to keep the groupies out?