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Short Stuff: Dunbar's Number · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. Chuck's on a roll.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Let's get it up. Jerry's here too, Let's go it's
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: short stuff.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: And speaking of Jerry, does this not start with a
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Seinfeld ref?
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the Boyfriend episode part one.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I don't remember that one, walk me through it.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I don't remember the episode either, but I definitely remember
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: this part. So they're talking about meeting new friends in
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: your thirties and how it's just basically impossible to do that.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: I think Jerry says, whatever group you've got is the
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: one you're going with. You're not interviewing, you're not looking
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: at any new people, not interested in seeing any applications.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: And it's such a truism, like, as you get older,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the chances of you making new friends or especially adding
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: to your group, especially pre social media, was really low.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: The chances were relatively low, especially compared to how you
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: were as a kid. And it's not just necessarily because
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: you lose interest in it. You potentially max out your
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: friends by a certain age, say your thirties, And the
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: idea that we can even max out the number of
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: friends we have suggests that there's like some sort of
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: cognitive load that having friends puts on us and that
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: we can only do so much, so we are limited
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: to a certain amount of friends.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Well, my friend, I would agree that in most cases
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: that's true. But it's funny that I fly in the
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: face of this because I have met a lot of
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: friends since my thirties and in my forties even Wow,
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: But a lot of it is because of this job.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: And you know me, I'm kind of a friend collector anyway. Sure,
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: And I just I don't know, I was just thinking
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: about it because of this stuff you sent me that, Like,
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I've met a lot of really really good friends. You know,
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: I've got my my my crew from way way back,
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: from like high school and even college. But I've made
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: a bunch of new friends and some are really close,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: but some are just sort of professional colleagues that I
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: consider friends. But it's interesting and I've really enjoyed meeting
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: new people in my thirties and forties.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: That's awesome. Well, if this whole episode didn't make me
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: feel like a loser before, it definitely does now.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you and I are different. You're you're
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: more likely to keep your your tribe small. True, and
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: there's nothing wrong with that either.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Well, it is how I put it.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but there's no right way to be.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: I know, I'm just teasing, of course, but.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: I mean that's sort of the yin and yang of
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: us and why we work I think as partners.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So let me ask you this, then, Chuck, would you
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: say that your number of friends people you would call
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: friends to one degree or another, exceeds that one hundred
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: and fifty.
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: Well, no, that's a lot of friends.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: It is a lot of friends. And the reason that
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: that numbers even out there is because of a British
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: anthropologist I believe from Oxford named Robin Dunbar, who I'm
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: just going to say it became obsessed with the idea
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: that there was a magic number, a limited number of friends,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: which is, okay, that's something in and of itself, but
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that you could actually predict the number of friends a
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: species would have based on the size of their neocortex.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Right, that there was a ratio between your neocortex and
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: the amount of people that you could It's almost like
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: the amount of people you can manage before it starts
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: falling apart. And he studied, he studied this. He didn't
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: just come up with a number. He studied primates at first,
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: and you know, kind of at least in that world
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: found it to be true, and basically said, the size
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: of your neo cortex relative to your body size, and
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: that's the part of the brain that handles language right
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: in cognition mm hmm.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: And also like just managing people and interacting with people,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: it starts there, which is.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: How it figures in here.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: But that ratio basically will limit how complex of a
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: cohort group that you can be a part of.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Right, And so he took these primate studies that he conducted,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: doing fMRIs of neocortices of primates and then looking at
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: the size of their social groups, and then said, okay,
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: let's apply this to humans. Humans are social animals, we're primates.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Let's measure the size of the human average size of
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the neocortext and a human and just guess, like or
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: I guess, extrapolate based on our findings, how big the
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: average human social network would be. And he did that,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: and he came up with one hundred and fifty. And
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: then he set about finding things that proved it right.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: But first he took a commercial break, and we'll be
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: right back to talk about what he discovered, all right,
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: so he landed on one fifty, and he it wasn't
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: just like friends. He looked at you know, working groups
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: and factories and military squadrons and you know, ancient villages
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: in England and Christmas card lists, all kinds of things,
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: and he found that one fifty sort of stuck in.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Anything above that it would either you know, people would
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: turn on each other and you know the case of
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: like many many years ago, or it would just come
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: to unwieldy to manage and splinter off into smaller groups.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, your Christmas card list goes over one fifty, all
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: the people on are going to turn against each other.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: Uh huh.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: So he also said that even more fascinatingly, beyond the
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: number one fifty, that's just one of several numbers that
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: pop up and mind bogglingly, they're all factors of five.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: In fact, in fact, oh it seems super hinky. In fact,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: he said, you have five the closest people, the people
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: you consider your loved ones, usually number five. After that,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: you've got fifteen good friends, fifty friends, one hundred and
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: fifty meaningful contactskay, five hundred acquaintances, fifteen hundred people you
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: can recognize. No and then he said also like this
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: is not these aren't like static lists, Like depending on
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: how frequently you interact with these people, somebody from your
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: recognized group can end up becoming one of your good
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: friends if you see them enough and you hit it
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: off and you connect, so you know, they're not locked
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: in any list, and you know your loved ones can
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: turn on you and end up with its just people
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: you can recognize. Who knows it depends on how your
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: life goes.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and obviously it's a you know, it's in an arrange.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: If you're an extrovert, you might have more you know, acquaintances.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: At least I think they found that women have a
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: smaller number of I guess what would be considered good
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: friends than men do. Yeah. And it's interesting though that
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: some organizations and you got, you know, some of this
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: stuff from this was an article on the BBC.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: BBC Courts Biology Letters, a few others good stuff.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: But some organizations have sort of adhere to this, like
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: they buy into it, like the Swedish Tax Authority. Apparently
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: with their offices they don't have more than one hundred
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: and fifty people in any like particular location.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Which is hilarious I saw it pointed out in one
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: of our sources. I don't remember which one they said.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: I guess the Swedish tax authority is just presuming that
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: its employees don't have friends or loved ones outside of work,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: because that totally undermines their entire pursuit. There.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, interesting, you know, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah,
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: And some people say this is all bunk anyway. Some
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: people say it's completely bunk, and then some people say
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: there's something to that. But I just don't know about
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: that one fifty number, right.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: So people have studied this and performed their own their
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: own studies and have tried to reproduce Dunbar studies and
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: have come up with different numbers. But they can come
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: up with a number. It's just some of them are
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: like two hundred and ninety. I saw one of them
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: came up with six hundred and eleven. But the thing is,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Dunbar was convinced that it was a regression line where
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: there was a there was a The data forms basically
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: a bell curve where the average is the highest point
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: and then the outliers are the smallest. And what a
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: bunch of other studies have found is that it's probably
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: actually what's called it power law, which is a huge
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: steep curve that starts really high and then comes down
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: and then evens out toward the bottom. And power laws
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: happen when some people really skew the numbers upward. But
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: then most people have far far fewer, say, contacts than
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: those people who are the actual outliers, So rather than
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: the outliers being the fewest, the outliers have the most.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: And yeah, that.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Changes a lot of stuff, so much so that I
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: saw there's a one study that found that the ninety
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: five percent confidence interval had a range of between four
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: and five hundred and twenty contacts that the average person had,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: so they kind of thiderrate out the window. Yeah, exactly.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's interesting. And of course, with the advent of
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: social media in more recent years, depending on what how
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: old you are, you might you know, some people our
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: age might not consider those people friends, even though they
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: may be like Facebook friends, even though neither one of
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: us are on Facebook, you know.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: What I'm saying.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: Whereas I think a younger generation might say like, oh no,
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: those are my friends and my gaming network that I
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: play like, these people are my friends. We never met
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: or anything. So the idea of what friendship is means
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: different things to different people, and a lot of times
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: depending on how old you are, what generation you're in.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Right, And then Dunbar was saying that even still he
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: sees the same things hold on the online world as well.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: In that BBC article, he puts it that it's like
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the same design features of the human mind that are
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: imposing constraints on the number of individuals like in the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: real world also do so in the gaming world as well. Yeah,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: you know, which is pretty interesting. And then you also
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: chuck us to wrap it up. You might be sitting
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: there like this is all fascinating, but it just feels
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: like navel gazing to me. Why does any of this matter? Right, Well,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: if you're like a demographer or an economist, coming up
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: with a way to reliably predict group size starting at
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: the individual level, would let you count huge groups like
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: really accurately, would let you count groups that are hard
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: to count, like victims of crimes who don't come forward,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the homeless. There's a lot of people whose entire field
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: would be revolutionized by being able to look at the
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: size of a cortex and predict the number of people
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: that person is friends with, but it just doesn't seem
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: to be fully holding up. It holds up enough that
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: the Dunbar Dunbar's number has stuck around this long, but
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: it's it's not just proving reliable in case after case.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I kind of went down this rabbit
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: hole interestingly recently because when I went to LA for
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: spring break?
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Did you make more friends there?
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: No?
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: I didn't make any friends that week, maybe, but I
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: was I wanted to throw I rented this house up
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: in the Hollywood Hills with the pool, and I was like, hey,
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: you know, I get to go back to LA and
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: live like a hot shot for a week, and I
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: wanted to throw a party, like a pool party, because
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: I have a lot of friends out there with kids,
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: and so I've made a list and that went. I
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: went down that rabbit hole of making a list of
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: my LA friends and I'm looking at it now and
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: it was like, you know, a list of friends. And
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: then I even made a second list of fringe.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: So like people I consider my friends.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Like Joe Randazzo and Janet Varney and her partner Brand
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: and like people that I'm like tight with, Like I
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: consider those people people like if they needed something, I
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: would be there for them, no matter what kind of
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: friends a friend. And then the fringe was everything from
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: professional colleagues that I've met here and there over the years,
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: all the way down to like I had this personal
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: movie crush once and we really hit it off that day, right,
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: but he didn't keep in touch at all. But I
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: just invited everyone. I just threw a really cast a
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: wide net and like a.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: Lot of people came.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: That really surprised me, And it was kind of fun
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: and cool to have all these different people from thirty
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: years of my life, because some people went way back
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: with me from Atlanta that live out there. Yeah, and
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: it was just kind of interesting to look at this
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: list of people and now how it relates to this episode.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: So you had new friends and old friends mingling together.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: How did it go?
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: It was great people that like a lot of the
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: very little crossovers, so a lot of people didn't most
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: people didn't know one another and just getting to know
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: each other, and it was like, it was fun, It
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: was really neat.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: I could see putting your old friends and new friends
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: together as a relatively low risk exercise because friends of
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Chucks aren't going to not get along with other friends
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: of Chucks. You know, it was all good folks.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: And you know what, big congratulations our buddy Josh Beerman.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: You remember Josh. Yeah, he came and I didn't expect
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: him to come. And he walks in with a brand
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: new baby.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Oh wow was it his?
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Okay, talk about a fun way to enter a party.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god, you get You've got
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: this great, great new baby. And it was kind of
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: a fun reveal, very nice.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: He had a cape that that made me reveal even better.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: He's like, I've got a baby. Holy cow. Uh well,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: I guess that's it for short stuff, right.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: I think that means we're out right yes.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: You.
• 14:22
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• 14:25
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• 14:29
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