Latest / The BEYOND Podcast / Robin Dunbar: Dunbar's Number, Gossip and the Limits of Friendship

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Robin Dunbar: Dunbar's Number, Gossip and the Limits of Friendship · The BEYOND Podcast

• 0:00
  Unknown: Robin, welcome to be on the Boardroom.
• 0:03
  Great to be here. You have a huge brain full of
• 0:07
  incredible information and we're going to pick some of that out
• 0:10
  and learn that that that's what the goal is for today.
• 0:13
  We're going to be learning. So 1st and probably the most
• 0:17
  important question, what is the maximum amount of friends one
• 0:22
  should have? Well, the official limit on the
• 0:26
  number of friends and family, I hasten to add that you can have,
• 0:31
  is 150 people, which is Dunbar's number.
• 0:35
  So that's your extended family and all your friends.
• 0:40
  It's the one way to think about it, is all the people who at
• 0:43
  least once a year you try to keep contact with.
• 0:48
  In the old days when people sent Christmas cards, it was exactly
• 0:51
  who you sent Christmas cards to. They've totted up everybody in
• 0:54
  the family that you sent a card to.
• 0:56
  It comes out to about 150 A. 150 still scenes are quite a lot if
• 1:00
  you if you can't see you're counting friends and family and
• 1:03
  and Co workers in here. Oh, Co workers can be friends.
• 1:06
  I mean, that's the difference. Out beyond 150 is another layer
• 1:11
  that we think of as acquaintances, and so a lot of
• 1:15
  the people you work with would be in that sphere, as it were.
• 1:20
  But some of the people you work with become friends because you
• 1:24
  get on well with them, You see them afterwards.
• 1:25
  OK, so when people have like 300 plus friends on Facebook, that's
• 1:29
  not true. Well, it's not true anyway, for
• 1:34
  two reasons. One is the average number of
• 1:37
  friends on Facebook is actually 149 according to the last
• 1:40
  census. And that was 61 million Facebook
• 1:43
  pages, right? That's not to say that some
• 1:47
  people don't have more than that, but what they do is they
• 1:51
  do what we do in everyday life is they're including as friends
• 1:55
  because that's how Facebook and social media, but.
• 1:57
  They not find really. They but really what they're
• 2:00
  including is acquaintances. So acquaintances, people, we'd
• 2:04
  go and have a beer with them after work, but we would never
• 2:07
  invite them home. That's the big difference. 150
• 2:10
  you would invite home. Could acquaintance be someone
• 2:12
  you've come across? Just someone at Yes.
• 2:14
  Oh, yes, I know you, Yes. But I think acquaintance is a
• 2:17
  bit more than just AI met you once at a party and, and, and we
• 2:21
  exchanged phone numbers that you actually seen, see them on a
• 2:24
  regular basis. And you would go out and do
• 2:28
  something occasionally with them, even if it's only go and
• 2:30
  have a have a beer. Because beyond the, the so, so
• 2:34
  the acquaintances layer runs out to about 500 people.
• 2:37
  And then beyond that is one more layer which includes people
• 2:41
  whose faces you can put names to basically.
• 2:45
  So they. Sometimes.
• 2:47
  Sometimes. Well, no.
• 2:49
  That anybody else is beyond that layer.
• 2:51
  We can't put a phase name to the.
• 2:53
  Phase. Well, it, it, you know, I mean
• 2:56
  these, these things have a range of variations.
• 2:59
  So, you know, OK, the average size number of friends and
• 3:03
  family that people have is 150, but the range of variation is
• 3:08
  probably from about 100 to about 250.
• 3:11
  So introverts it would be about 100.
• 3:13
  Extroverts it would be about 200.
• 3:15
  OK, So what about that kind of variation?
• 3:17
  Builders, you know, get the builders around.
• 3:19
  What? What?
• 3:19
  So they, the group beyond the 150's, You recognise their
• 3:22
  faces, They hike to them in the supermarket.
• 3:24
  Yeah. Hello.
• 3:24
  Hello. And if you went and had a beer
• 3:26
  with the builders, they'd probably count in the
• 3:29
  acquaintances. Length, OK, so that's.
• 3:31
  If they turned up once, you'd probably recognise them in the
• 3:35
  street. If you saw them again but and
• 3:38
  you remember who it who it was, you could sort of put a put a
• 3:42
  name to the face really. But that takes you out to about
• 3:45
  1500 people. Wow, Well, there's no ways you
• 3:49
  can remember all those people's names, I mean.
• 3:51
  No, no, it's literally that is the number of faces you can put
• 3:55
  a name to. And a lot of them are sort of,
• 3:57
  dare I say it, weird people like, you know, presidents of
• 4:05
  the United States. Of course, of course I was going
• 4:07
  to ask you celebrities. Celebrities.
• 4:09
  TV personalities, all that kind of thing.
• 4:11
  But you wouldn't. You wouldn't.
• 4:12
  And it's that those relationships are one way.
• 4:15
  You know who they are, but they have no idea who you are real
• 4:18
  realistically at that level. And as you come in, the
• 4:21
  acquaintances lay you both know who each other, but you don't
• 4:23
  really have a meaningful relationship and you certainly
• 4:27
  wouldn't lend them £50. OK, that's.
• 4:31
  The big difference? That's a huge difference.
• 4:33
  OK, so then if we go back to the intimate circle, why do some
• 4:37
  friendships last a lifetime and others not?
• 4:40
  They're still your friends, so why is it?
• 4:42
  And that, well, that's because friendships are kind of on a
• 4:46
  scale of intimacy or emotional closeness.
• 4:49
  So if you think about the 150 friends and family you have,
• 4:53
  actually you can easily identify within them a series of
• 4:58
  gradations of friendship. You can see this beautifully in
• 5:01
  terms of who you phone most often or who you post to most
• 5:04
  often on Facebook, for example, right?
• 5:08
  It turns out there's a series of layers that occur at very
• 5:11
  specific numbers as a layer of five, what we call the shoulders
• 5:15
  to cry on friends, which are kind of like your support group,
• 5:18
  as it were, that you'd go to. Inside the shoulders to cry on.
• 5:21
  Yeah, it is. It is, you know, if you when
• 5:23
  your world falls apart, they're the people who who will pick you
• 5:26
  up and put you back on your feet.
• 5:27
  Then out beyond that, there's a lair at 15, which is known as
• 5:31
  the sympathy group because they're the group of people who
• 5:34
  if they died tomorrow, you would be genuinely upset about not
• 5:38
  just sorry that they've died, but you would be genuinely
• 5:42
  upset. And that seems to be about 15
• 5:43
  people. And then beyond that, there's a
• 5:45
  layer at about 50, which I always identify as your kind of
• 5:50
  weekend BBQ friends. If you're going to have a if
• 5:52
  you're going to have a dinner party.
• 5:53
  It would come with a 15. Layer, you know, three or four
• 5:57
  people for a, for a dinner party.
• 5:59
  If you're going to have a big slightly bigger party for your
• 6:01
  birthday in the garden in the summer with a BBQ, you would go
• 6:04
  to that layer of 50 and then your 150 is what I call your
• 6:08
  kind of barn. It's for and funerals group.
• 6:11
  Yes, they will say the bigger group.
• 6:13
  Once in a lifetime events, they will come to those.
• 6:16
  Yeah, because my husband was actually asking me.
• 6:17
  I mean, it's very strange in a way to put numbers to these
• 6:21
  emotional things. I didn't really think about it
• 6:24
  Like, okay, the intimate group of five and then we go beyond
• 6:27
  and you've got the group of 50 that you invited a party.
• 6:29
  But it makes sense. Yes, it it's kind of spookishly
• 6:33
  accurate. I know it.
• 6:35
  It's frightening, you say, But I mean, if you ask, yeah, as we
• 6:38
  have done many of our studies, you ask people to rate these
• 6:42
  people in these circles for their emotional closeness to
• 6:46
  them. You can see this beautifully
• 6:49
  laid out. They're they feel much more
• 6:51
  emotionally because they will, they will give a higher rating
• 6:53
  to people in that inner core of five to say the people in the
• 6:55
  150 or the people out in the 500 layer of acquaintances.
• 7:00
  And you're right for that, for that garden party, I'm having to
• 7:02
  say how many or who should we invite?
• 7:03
  It is about, you know, it is, it's just the right sweet spot
• 7:06
  of 50. But then you're right at a
• 7:08
  wedding, is it? About 150.
• 7:10
  Yes, you have. You might, you know, I mean it's
• 7:13
  other cultures. I mean Asian cultures tend to
• 7:16
  have very big weddings, but what they're doing is they're going
• 7:18
  out into that layer of acquaintances very often because
• 7:22
  there's no family out in that layer of acquaintances, right?
• 7:25
  All your in laws and laws or whatever proper word is for your
• 7:31
  genuine biological family are all contained within the 150
• 7:38
  right? And we don't have one of the
• 7:39
  oddities is that that extends out to about second cousins,
• 7:43
  ish, right? And no culture in the world has
• 7:48
  a kinship term for anybody who's more remote, biologically more
• 7:52
  remote than that. So most of them just have
• 7:56
  different kinds of cousins. And that's that's as far as they
• 7:58
  go. After that, you're strangers.
• 8:01
  Well, you're not strangers, but you're not our kin.
• 8:04
  Yeah. Well, you're not kissing Kin.
• 8:06
  Yeah, you're there. Yeah.
• 8:08
  Yeah. OK, so let's say you have
• 8:12
  someone that you meet and you want them to be closer to you.
• 8:15
  You want them to like you, but you want it to happen faster.
• 8:19
  How do you do that then? The whole thing revolves around
• 8:23
  how often you see people, so another way of defining the
• 8:27
  layers is simply in terms of the frequency with which you see
• 8:30
  them. And the IT turns out that the
• 8:33
  layers are defined by very specific frequencies of contact.
• 8:37
  And those frequencies of contact are evident not only in face to
• 8:40
  face contact, but in how often you phone these people, how
• 8:43
  often you even post to them on Facebook.
• 8:46
  Making me really worried about how I treat.
• 8:49
  People. So that inner core of five
• 8:51
  people are people who you, you generally generally see at least
• 8:57
  once a week, right? At least once a week.
• 9:01
  And the people in the 150 circle, it's at least once a
• 9:04
  year. Can I ask you a question?
• 9:06
  So do you really have this, these, these 5 intimate close
• 9:09
  people, more or less? Do you know?
• 9:11
  Because I'm a bloke. Come on.
• 9:17
  Well, blokes have more boys have more diffuse kind of anonymous
• 9:21
  kind of relationships. They, they live in a kind of
• 9:24
  clubby world compared to girls. Girls have much more intimate
• 9:27
  dyadic relationships. They can specify much more where
• 9:29
  people lie. Whereas boys it's, it really is
• 9:33
  anonymous. It's it, it's out of sight, out
• 9:36
  of mind. If Jimmy goes off to Thailand
• 9:37
  for the rest of the the everybody you know who used to
• 9:41
  go drinking with him or climbing mountains or whatever they used
• 9:44
  to do together would shrug their shoulders and say, well, it was
• 9:47
  fun. While he said.
• 9:48
  Now, who's next in the queue for membership of our little?
• 9:51
  Little club, so it varies actually.
• 9:53
  Oh yes, yeah, yeah. So these are dynamic.
• 9:56
  I mean, you can't do much about your family.
• 9:58
  You can throw them out, but yeah.
• 10:01
  And it does happen surprisingly often, but the but it, and this
• 10:06
  is true even to be fair of family relationships.
• 10:09
  They slide up and down the scale from one the nearest and most
• 10:14
  emotionally close person to you to your 150th person.
• 10:18
  People come and go through the layers basically, and that's as
• 10:21
  a consequence of how much time you invest in them.
• 10:24
  OK, so how do you make them like you faster instead?
• 10:29
  I mean there would be people say I really like that person, I
• 10:31
  want them to like me more and quicker.
• 10:34
  OK, what do you do then? You you.
• 10:36
  Well, there are several caveats, but the basic thing is to spend
• 10:40
  more time with them, right? Because it's all dependent on
• 10:44
  spending time in fact, to get somebody to who is outside your
• 10:51
  150. So somebody you've, you've
• 10:52
  basically just met a stranger into at least your 15 layer,
• 10:57
  your regular sort of social little clique takes about 200
• 11:02
  hours of face to face contact, right?
• 11:06
  It's hard work. And that's partly because you've
• 11:09
  also got to drop some. You've got to drop somebody.
• 11:11
  If you want to bring somebody else in, Somebody's got to fall
• 11:15
  out of your circle. Brutal.
• 11:17
  Right. And you see this most clearly
• 11:20
  demonstrated in romantic relationships because for
• 11:23
  obvious reasons, not many of us fall in love with the people in
• 11:26
  our inner innermost circle, right?
• 11:29
  They come in from way outside the solar system.
• 11:32
  Usually they're strangers, but very often we're introduced to
• 11:35
  them by member of Oxford Circles so that you bring them right
• 11:40
  into the centre and you've now got six people instead of five.
• 11:45
  But this person is taking, because of the nature of the
• 11:47
  relationship, is taking up twice as much time.
• 11:50
  So they're taking up two units. So you've actually got 7, seven
• 11:55
  units of person time where you should only have 5.
• 11:59
  And what do you do? You drop two people.
• 12:01
  So you reduce the size of that circle to 4 and what you usually
• 12:06
  do is drop a family member and a friend, right?
• 12:10
  Because the that inner circle will typically consist of two
• 12:13
  family members, brothers, sisters, parents, whatever
• 12:16
  granny. That's a huge price a person
• 12:19
  spending. Just shows how expensive romance
• 12:21
  is. That's so expensive.
• 12:24
  And if you think about, I mean, if you're a consultant and you
• 12:26
  think about your hourly rate and you're talking about this
• 12:28
  investment of all these hours, it's like I never thought about
• 12:31
  this like this. I have to say, this is freaking
• 12:33
  me out. But it's, I mean, it's, yeah,
• 12:36
  it's quite disturbing. Yes, yes, it's.
• 12:39
  Disturbing actually. So you have to invest more time.
• 12:42
  You want them to like you. Yes.
• 12:44
  You have to invest. More time.
• 12:45
  There's a catch here. And that's, that's that's what I
• 12:48
  call them the Jane Austen problem.
• 12:51
  OK, right. So everybody, what makes a good
• 12:55
  friendship is this phenomenon known as homophily.
• 12:59
  We tend to like people who are very similar to us, like not
• 13:03
  only in kind of traits we can't don't have any control over, you
• 13:08
  know, like our sex or our personality or our age.
• 13:12
  These we tend to prefer people with the same sex, the same age,
• 13:16
  the same psychological personality, particularly on the
• 13:20
  extrovert introvert. So introverts prefer introverts,
• 13:22
  extroverts prefer same ethnicity.
• 13:25
  Say, you know, might be race, it might be just people from your
• 13:30
  village as opposed to the next door village, if you like.
• 13:33
  So those things we kind of can't do anything about, but there's a
• 13:36
  bunch of things which we acquire culturally, we learn them and
• 13:41
  which define us as a member of a cultural sub community.
• 13:44
  And these are what we call the seven pillars of friendship.
• 13:47
  So they're like a supermarket barcode of The Who you are.
• 13:50
  They're the things you like, you know, the sense of humour, the
• 13:54
  music you like, your hobbies and interests, your moron political
• 13:57
  views, these kinds of things. And what we're looking for is
• 14:00
  somebody who resembles us as much as possible, right?
• 14:04
  So there you are in a classic Jane Austen situation.
• 14:07
  Everybody has an ideal Mr. Darcy.
• 14:10
  He's rich, he's famous, you know, he's got connections, big
• 14:14
  house, all this kind of stuff. Entertaining.
• 14:16
  Tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick.
• 14:18
  So everybody wants to marry Mr. Darcy.
• 14:21
  Well, or be friends with Mr. Darcy, as the case may be.
• 14:24
  The problem is Mr. Darcy has a choice, right?
• 14:27
  So of all the people, he can't be friends with everybody.
• 14:30
  So he's only going to choose one.
• 14:31
  What do the rest of you do? Well, you end up marrying, as
• 14:35
  the case may be, being friends with the curate who's boring,
• 14:39
  not very handsome, poor, so. So most of our friends and and
• 14:46
  and and even romantic partners, I dare say, are friends of
• 14:50
  convenience until we find somebody better.
• 14:53
  So that's why they people can easily drop a friend.
• 14:56
  You know, that's why you know, I I for my romantic partner, for
• 15:00
  my future partners. I'm not compromising on this
• 15:03
  because it's possibly one of the most important decisions of my
• 15:07
  life and I must be genuine and I must go for the right person or
• 15:12
  I'm in trouble forever. Yes.
• 15:14
  Well, it, it turns out that as with friendships, so with
• 15:17
  romantic partners is the more similar you are culturally and
• 15:21
  so on the things you have in common, the longer the
• 15:24
  relationship will last. And we actually when we first
• 15:27
  meet somebody and we, we actually showed this going in
• 15:30
  effect going on, on in telephone call data.
• 15:33
  So phone call logs and very, very big samples and in three
• 15:39
  different countries that we, when we first meet somebody, we
• 15:44
  make a big effort either to see them or we phone them a lot.
• 15:49
  And it turns out that we could predict both how long the
• 15:54
  relationship the friendship would last and it's intimacy
• 15:58
  that say which layer it would line on the basis of the
• 16:00
  frequency with which that person was called phoned in the 1st
• 16:05
  4:00 to. Six weeks.
• 16:06
  After after that number, first a meet appears in the call long,
• 16:11
  right? So we make this big effort to
• 16:13
  engage them, find out all that we're ticking the boxes all the
• 16:16
  time and we kind of get no think I'll try somewhere else or yes,
• 16:21
  perfect, perfect. Yeah.
• 16:22
  The stronger that energy because also it has to last the
• 16:25
  lifetime. So it it, you know, dissipates
• 16:28
  over time, maybe a little bit, but it needs to kind of keep you
• 16:30
  growing the fuel. Well, there is the weird thing
• 16:32
  that people converge with each other.
• 16:35
  They do it with friends as well as with romantic partners.
• 16:38
  So if you if you see a lot of each other or you live together,
• 16:41
  inevitably you tend to share experiences.
• 16:43
  So you're kind of. Converging.
• 16:46
  Your interest because you're you're, you're 7 pillars as it
• 16:49
  were. Although they what they really
• 16:52
  seem to point to is where you grew up, your teenage years
• 16:55
  where you learnt how to be a member of the community,
• 16:59
  whatever that community might be.
• 17:01
  There's something about that period in life then becomes a
• 17:05
  benchmark. You never quite the music of
• 17:07
  that period, you never quite forget.
• 17:12
  It's true, that's true. It's the real marker for that,
• 17:15
  isn't it? But but of course, you know, we
• 17:18
  have different experiences as we go through life.
• 17:20
  So your, your, your, you know, your musical taste may change,
• 17:23
  your sense of humour may change, whatever your moral views might
• 17:26
  change. But part of that is trying to
• 17:30
  bed into a new community. So as you move, you know, your
• 17:34
  friendship circles change, moving to a job in a different
• 17:37
  city or a different country or something you're trying to embed
• 17:40
  into it. And you know, you adjust your, I
• 17:44
  mean, one, one of the components of this is your dialect, right?
• 17:48
  And therefore your accent that identifies where you, where you
• 17:51
  grew up and children from the age of five know whether your
• 17:57
  accent is the same as mine or not, right?
• 18:00
  Whether it's the local one or it's, it's somebody from
• 18:03
  outside. We're incredibly good at
• 18:04
  identifying them. But of course, if we move
• 18:06
  somewhere else, then we try to bed in and you get this
• 18:11
  phenomenon which is known as Mid-Atlantic, which was very
• 18:14
  common, particularly in the 70s and 80s when a lot of people
• 18:16
  moved to America from Britain and they tried to become more
• 18:20
  Americanised. You had this sort of semi
• 18:22
  Americanised thing. Yes, I know.
• 18:24
  I mean, I did that. I mean, I came came to Britain
• 18:28
  when I was 12, Right. So I had a completely different
• 18:31
  accent. Yeah.
• 18:34
  And you had to. I had to reinvent yourself.
• 18:36
  I had to reinvent myself. But I never completely lost that
• 18:41
  accent. So my accent doesn't.
• 18:42
  Nobody can ever figure out where I come from because I don't
• 18:44
  sound like a a native English, Yeah.
• 18:49
  Because I can hear your, I can hear a bit of that, yeah.
• 18:54
  But it's nice not to lose that because it's also part of you.
• 18:58
  And although you're reinventing and you're adapting and you
• 19:00
  trying to fit in, as long as it's school, you know you're
• 19:03
  trying to fit in and that you don't.
• 19:04
  Want to fit in too much? Yeah, you're much better at
• 19:07
  learning a new accent in the kind of well, up to up to say
• 19:12
  the end of the teens. And it's the younger you are,
• 19:14
  the better you learn it. But after the teens you in your
• 19:19
  20s onwards, you never quite learn the local accent to
• 19:24
  perfection. People, local speakers, can
• 19:27
  always tell just the way you pronounce the odd word, or the
• 19:31
  odd syllable, or the way you use a word in the wrong place.
• 19:35
  OK, can I ask you this question? And this this wasn't one that we
• 19:39
  discussed in the pre the pre podcast call.
• 19:43
  But let's just say, you know, we're talking about fitting in
• 19:45
  here in order to make the the group comfortable with you and
• 19:50
  all that sort of thing. But what if you're the type of
• 19:52
  personality that sort of comes in and is a bit of a like, you
• 19:57
  know, and and you know, they're interested in that a little bit
• 20:02
  scared, but but then you don't really want to necessarily fit
• 20:04
  in because you like you are that sort of person that isn't a
• 20:08
  fitter inner, if you know what I mean.
• 20:11
  There are some people like this is a kind of version of the Mr.
• 20:15
  Darcy effect, you know, because you're being parachuted in from
• 20:19
  far outside the village and you're very exotic, the way you
• 20:24
  do things, your accent, whatever and and the way you behave.
• 20:28
  And that does have a certain attraction, but.
• 20:32
  So that can work. It can work.
• 20:34
  It can work forever. But it's a high risk strategy.
• 20:37
  Yes, it's a high risk strategy. You, you know, if you want to an
• 20:41
  easy life, try and meld in with everybody else.
• 20:45
  But if if you're very, you have to be very confident, I think as
• 20:48
  an extrovert and you have to be very sure of how you can handle
• 20:53
  situations and people, because people are very easily put off
• 20:59
  by boastfulness, which has no substance.
• 21:03
  Yes, you know so and the same. Can you call it narcissism and
• 21:07
  all that sort of that, all that traffic?
• 21:09
  You know, those those sort of people can be very successful,
• 21:12
  but by and large they're successful as bullies rather
• 21:17
  than as people managed. So what's the difference between
• 21:20
  that? Someone who's genuinely, let's
• 21:21
  say the exotic confident doesn't mean badly to anyone is just by
• 21:27
  nature such a person. And then the one that is
• 21:30
  maliciously, well, I don't even know the difference because
• 21:33
  maybe they're not trying to be malicious, but maybe they just
• 21:35
  are a bit what what is that thing that is?
• 21:37
  So it's a. Charismatic leadership actually
• 21:39
  is what it boils down to, and we're very prone to following
• 21:44
  people who appear charismatic and appear to have gifts that
• 21:50
  are greater than the ones we have.
• 21:52
  They make good leaders to follow, you know, and we do it
• 21:56
  all the time, pop stars, celebrities, you know, people
• 22:02
  who invent stuff and become, you know, CEOs, charismatic CEOs of,
• 22:09
  of a, of a big organization. And, and that kind of has a
• 22:14
  place in our social world because in the end, social world
• 22:19
  is about cooperation and diplomacy.
• 22:23
  But you can't have sort of 500 Braves in the organization.
• 22:30
  You've got to have some chiefs somewhere to provide kind of
• 22:33
  direction and strategic things. And that's what your charismatic
• 22:36
  lead to does. So that then becomes a kind of
• 22:39
  focus and, and we kind of do it all, you know, why do we have a
• 22:41
  monarchy here? It's not in itself very
• 22:44
  important. It is a figurehead.
• 22:46
  It's a flag, you know, and you can sort of attach yourself to
• 22:50
  the flag as, as kind of standing for, you know, your wider
• 22:56
  community. And some, some countries take
• 22:59
  this very seriously. If you think of the United
• 23:01
  States in school every morning, they pledge allegiance to the
• 23:06
  flag, you know, as a school. And I'm sure it has this effect
• 23:10
  of creating this sense of community in a way which we no
• 23:15
  longer do. Yeah.
• 23:17
  Sense of community is important. It is important.
• 23:21
  So just going back to the the whole acquaintance thing, if
• 23:25
  just to clarify. So if you want to someone to
• 23:27
  upgrade from acquaintance to close circle, it's about the
• 23:30
  time you have to invest the time.
• 23:32
  And then is it so that some people are just naturally better
• 23:35
  at making friends, having friends, keeping friends and
• 23:38
  some just don't have those skills or do we?
• 23:40
  Are we all born with the same thing?
• 23:41
  We're, we're definitely not all born with the same skills
• 23:44
  because the skills, the skills of managing a social
• 23:48
  environment, whether it's an organization or just your
• 23:51
  friendship circle or even your family and even your romantic
• 23:55
  relationships all hinge around a core set of cognitive abilities,
• 24:02
  which we all share, but not to the same extent.
• 24:06
  They're quite variable. And now the key ones are
• 24:08
  probably the ability to understand what somebody else is
• 24:10
  thinking right now. The the way that's viewed is we
• 24:21
  have we we're very good at sort of thinking through a chain.
• 24:25
  So I'm wondering what you're thinking about what Jim over
• 24:28
  there is? Supposing and what somebody?
• 24:31
  That's right. That's right.
• 24:32
  It is chess actually, Exactly. So now, and, and that's a very
• 24:36
  good analogy because clearly, you know, superstars in chess,
• 24:40
  what makes them superstars is they can think through many
• 24:44
  successive moves. Well, that's true, yes.
• 24:48
  Whereas you know a a, a, a, a very bad chess player like me.
• 24:53
  You know, just you. Think one move, one move.
• 24:57
  So the natural, the the the, the range.
• 25:00
  Although the average mentalising abilities allows us to handle 5
• 25:06
  people's mind states, including my own.
• 25:08
  So that's me thinking about four other people.
• 25:11
  The range of variation is from about 3:00 to about 6 probably,
• 25:16
  right? So some people, and that has
• 25:18
  very, very wide consequences. So one of the things that we've
• 25:23
  shown is that people who have the average capacity of 5 might
• 25:30
  be able to handle 5 Minor states prefer fiction, fictional
• 25:34
  stories which have five or four of them, four mind states going
• 25:39
  on in this in the same thing. And and the the place to see
• 25:41
  this is Shakespeare. It's absolutely wonderful about
• 25:43
  it. You can see the number of
• 25:45
  speaking parts he has on the stage at anyone time is never
• 25:50
  more than 4. Incredible.
• 25:51
  Right. But if they're talking about
• 25:53
  somebody's mind state, Hamlet who's not there, it's Hamlet's
• 25:56
  friends talking about his Hamlet's mind state, and he's
• 26:01
  doing whatever he was doing somewhere else.
• 26:02
  He reduces the number to three, and what he's doing is making
• 26:06
  sure he doesn't overload his audience's abilities.
• 26:09
  Right? But smart.
• 26:11
  Smart Wow. Three the the the people normal
• 26:15
  human adults. There's nothing unusual about
• 26:18
  them as they were psychologically.
• 26:20
  The the lower limit is about handling 3 mind states, and
• 26:24
  that's perfectly fine. You can get by in the social
• 26:26
  world and conversations and all these things quite happily with
• 26:29
  with 3rd order mentalising as it's called.
• 26:33
  But it does mean that a 5th order mentalising story just
• 26:37
  becomes incomprehensible to you. So you like stories which
• 26:41
  involve only a couple of people's mind states.
• 26:43
  And this applies to our sense preferences for humour as well.
• 26:47
  You know, those with with 5th order mentalising prefer long
• 26:50
  complicated jokes with several characters in them, whereas
• 26:56
  people with sort of 3rd order mind states capacity will will
• 27:01
  prefer 3rd order jokes that say only two two characters in in
• 27:05
  the joke. Such a scientific way of
• 27:07
  thinking about such things in life.
• 27:09
  I can't. So, so there's, there's that.
• 27:12
  And what we tend to do is pick people who are similar, mind
• 27:15
  state, mentalise, incompetence. The other thing is, is capacity
• 27:19
  to inhibit, inhibit your selfish desires, your tendency to grab
• 27:25
  the biggest thing on the plate, because if you do that too much,
• 27:29
  then you just drive everybody away, right?
• 27:32
  So if you can't, it's, you know, to keep every to keep everybody
• 27:35
  round, round, round the table, you, you need to be able to
• 27:39
  inhibit yourself from grabbing everything that you want and in
• 27:44
  order to allow them to have a bit of a share of.
• 27:46
  There's a lot of social awareness to keeping these
• 27:48
  friends. So it's hard work.
• 27:51
  People vary a lot on both these traits and therefore, you know
• 27:57
  it that has implications for both the stability of
• 28:00
  relationships. You know, people who have people
• 28:03
  who have very poor inhibitory capacities and, and this appears
• 28:06
  very early in life. You know you can.
• 28:09
  You can predict people's relationship stabilities in in
• 28:16
  their 40s from how good they are at not grabbing the sweets on
• 28:21
  the table when they've been told at the age of 5.
• 28:24
  Wow, parenting one O 1. Well, it the problem is it's pre
• 28:30
  parenting. I mean there's those are
• 28:33
  exceptional and there tends to be a genetic component to it.
• 28:36
  And you know, The thing is beyond change, as it were.
• 28:45
  For those sort of people. It's extremely hard for them to
• 28:48
  learn to to be tolerant in that sense.
• 28:51
  They just fly off the handle all the time and these kinds of
• 28:54
  things. Can ask another question then
• 28:56
  there are things going around social media and actually I've
• 28:59
  I've liked some of these sometimes I'm going to admit
• 29:02
  this now where it's like, oh, you know, sometimes I'm just
• 29:07
  happy coming home to my pet. Yes, I just cat or dog.
• 29:11
  It's like just much rather spend time with them than having to
• 29:14
  socialise. And I mean I just friends are
• 29:17
  nice and everything but it's hard work and then your cat or
• 29:19
  your dog nice pets, you know, watching some birds.
• 29:21
  I mean I'm getting older. I'm not ashamed to say it.
• 29:23
  Sometimes you just want to chill out and and not see these
• 29:26
  friends. Is that OK?
• 29:28
  But it is OK. There's there's absolutely no
• 29:31
  prescription why you have to have people in your 5 closest
• 29:36
  relationships or your 150 friends and family you're
• 29:39
  perfectly entitled to. You have your pets.
• 29:43
  I'm not saying never, I'm just saying sometimes, you know?
• 29:46
  Yeah, yeah. No, no.
• 29:47
  But I but I think that's partly because cats and dogs, because
• 29:52
  of the way we've domesticated them, are so responsive to us
• 29:56
  and so giving in that sense that they're the perfect friend.
• 30:01
  They're never in a bad mood. They know exactly and and you
• 30:04
  know, they're, they're like the perfect friend.
• 30:06
  And so the temptation, you know, whereas normal people vary and
• 30:10
  they have their own interests. You know, they want a share of
• 30:13
  the of the cake on the table. In fact, they'd rather have a
• 30:17
  slightly bigger share than you, whereas I was going to say your
• 30:21
  dog. The dog will let you have half,
• 30:24
  but actually he probably wouldn't.
• 30:26
  But anyway. But you'd happily let them have
• 30:29
  that, this thing. You sacrifice yourself, wouldn't
• 30:31
  you? For your pet?
• 30:32
  Your friend. And I think that's not uncommon,
• 30:37
  you know that that people have very close attachments.
• 30:39
  I was happy actually to see the posts on Facebook.
• 30:41
  So I thought, oh, it's like me. So I wanted to ask you about
• 30:47
  there's something I read on your LinkedIn which is about gossip
• 30:51
  and that that's a really lovely good thing.
• 30:53
  Why would you say something like that?
• 30:55
  Because gossip, gossip for me, I do find sometimes when I go into
• 31:01
  these circles and you know, chatting and, and it tends to be
• 31:04
  actually a lot, a lot of the time, you know, the sort of the,
• 31:07
  the mum with the kids crowds and, and then the gossip starts
• 31:10
  and there's someone being sold at all times, you know, and I
• 31:15
  always why? Well, well, this all hinges
• 31:18
  around how you define gossip, right?
• 31:21
  So that kind of horrid sense of gossip, right, wicked sense of
• 31:28
  gossip, is actually relatively recent.
• 31:30
  It's not the original meaning of the word gossip.
• 31:32
  So the word gossip comes as a corruption of God, Sib, right?
• 31:38
  So the peer group equivalent of your godparents, so the people
• 31:44
  who look after you and you hang out with, and therefore the
• 31:47
  older sense of gossiping is literally in English, is
• 31:50
  literally hanging over the garden fence, passing time with
• 31:53
  your neighbors, Right? All inconsequential, probably.
• 31:58
  You know, doing no more than saying it's a lovely day today.
• 32:01
  Just. Hanging out The problem if with
• 32:06
  anything in a in an evolutionary biological world is it Can it
• 32:10
  always be exploited for both good and bad and and like many
• 32:15
  things, this capacity to pass information.
• 32:18
  So there is a sense in which gossip, this positive sense of
• 32:22
  gossip plays an important role in managing our relationships
• 32:25
  because you by definition, cannot possibly know everything
• 32:30
  that's happened 24 hours a day to all your 150.
• 32:34
  You know, you can't even do it for your probably your romantic
• 32:37
  partner as the one closest person in position #1 because
• 32:43
  some of the time they're, they're elsewhere, right?
• 32:46
  So what we rely on is a chain of information flow.
• 32:51
  I gossip through the network created by our hundred and 50s,
• 32:56
  you know, and you see this particularly with families.
• 32:59
  So that in, in in family context, there's a almost always
• 33:02
  a person called a, a kin keeper, OK, usually female because they
• 33:08
  do it best. But what that what their role
• 33:11
  is, is to keep everybody up to date on how everybody's doing,
• 33:15
  how little Jemima's new baby is getting on.
• 33:17
  I might be guilty of that as well.
• 33:19
  But they play a terribly important role.
• 33:21
  They play, yeah. They really do my duty to say
• 33:24
  to, you know, so and so this has happened.
• 33:25
  So, but you know. And you, in some sense, family
• 33:29
  networks are better than friendship networks in this
• 33:31
  point of view because there are so many interconnections.
• 33:34
  It's like a spider's web. So you can get information.
• 33:36
  If Jemima doesn't tell you, Penelope will, you know.
• 33:40
  Information transfer. Yes, it's all about information
• 33:42
  transfer now that helps us keep up to date with how things.
• 33:46
  Therefore we don't make faux pas when you bump into somebody and
• 33:51
  you know, you say, you know, I don't know, maybe they just got
• 33:55
  married or something like that. And and you do you don't want to
• 33:59
  say, you know how how lovely only to discover in fact, they
• 34:01
  got divorced the next day, right, And you didn't know about
• 34:04
  it. So all those kind of dreadful
• 34:06
  things, which can be very they're the kind of thing that
• 34:10
  caused friendships and family relationships to breakdown.
• 34:14
  So it's a loss. What causes breakdowns?
• 34:16
  I mean, by this, I mean terminal breakdowns, catastrophic
• 34:21
  breakdowns is either loss of trust or over exploitation.
• 34:26
  You know, you just end up doing all the work.
• 34:29
  They're always borrowing stuff off you and never paying you
• 34:31
  back, these kind of things. Or it's, you know, sort of just
• 34:38
  not knowing what's going on in the relationship and always sort
• 34:42
  of saying things either in public or unintentionally and
• 34:46
  not, you know, perhaps, but just saying things which, you know,
• 34:51
  offend you or hurt you or whatever.
• 34:54
  Right. So being being and that's
• 34:56
  because they're they're not really engaging well enough with
• 34:59
  you. So, you know, you kind of go
• 35:01
  Sonic, that's it. I'm not talking to you ever
• 35:04
  again. That that kind of information
• 35:08
  flow then becomes very important.
• 35:11
  But like a lot of these things, these these capacities can be
• 35:14
  exploited for gain, as in propaganda.
• 35:20
  The propaganda sense the. PR kind of PR spinning.
• 35:24
  Spin, right? And that that leads you very
• 35:27
  quickly. And that, of course, is also
• 35:29
  important because you do want to know if somebody in your social
• 35:33
  world or maybe your charismatic leaders are behaving in ways
• 35:37
  which are bad for for you and your interests or you consider
• 35:44
  are unacceptable in some way, right?
• 35:46
  So you don't keep following or keep retaining as a friend
• 35:49
  somebody who actually has changed so dramatically that you
• 35:53
  don't want to be seen out with, right?
• 35:56
  So that there is a sense in which hearing about the negative
• 36:00
  side of gossip becomes important.
• 36:02
  But once you have that in the system, it's only a very short
• 36:06
  step to somebody exploiting it and using it to promote
• 36:10
  themselves or over prevent themselves or to cast
• 36:14
  dispersions on somebody else's character who's a rival, right?
• 36:19
  So that happens a lot. But what's interesting in this
• 36:21
  context is we actually are very intolerant and do not like
• 36:26
  people who overplay the negative gossip card too much.
• 36:31
  OK, explain. Well, it gossips in that sense,
• 36:35
  so the negative sense tend to get shunned socially because
• 36:41
  they're regarded as unreliable, so they're not going to keep
• 36:44
  your secrets. Yeah, because you think you'll
• 36:47
  do that about me? Yes, right.
• 36:49
  You know, if they're telling, telling me all these tales
• 36:51
  about, I don't know. Some of them seem quite socially
• 36:55
  flourishing. I don't know.
• 36:57
  Well, they maybe in a different they can be because they provide
• 37:00
  information. So they, and that's why they do
• 37:02
  it. It's at one level anyway.
• 37:05
  It it, it gives them, it makes them into a kind of charismatic
• 37:09
  leader. So people come to them for
• 37:10
  information. But on the other hand, you know,
• 37:14
  you probably don't want to, you know, commit yourself
• 37:19
  emotionally too much no, to that sort of person because.
• 37:22
  Trust. Yeah, it's trust.
• 37:24
  Trust. The hugest thing in the world
• 37:26
  for relationships. Central to all these
• 37:29
  relationships. But then again, if you, yeah,
• 37:31
  they can broadcast information that you want released if you
• 37:34
  they're, they're broadcasters in a way.
• 37:36
  I mean, you can play the game and feed them information you
• 37:39
  want you want to get out, but yeah.
• 37:42
  You never know how reliable they are.
• 37:44
  OK, so what's the key ingredient?
• 37:46
  I think it is trust. Isn't it?
• 37:48
  Deep friendship, long lasting, that is the cornerstone And that
• 37:52
  empathy as well too. Well, empathy is the kind of
• 37:56
  root to creating trust because what seems, and this is kind of
• 38:01
  the interesting feature of the, the, the seven pillars of
• 38:04
  friendship, that kind of these kind of cultural dimensions that
• 38:10
  define our relationships. What they seem to do is to act
• 38:15
  as a shortcut to identifying people we can trust because we,
• 38:19
  it identifies the community they're from.
• 38:21
  And therefore we know how they think.
• 38:23
  We know the kind of ways, you know, people in that community,
• 38:29
  how they view the world, what they expect of other people in
• 38:33
  terms of behaviour and their values and all these kind of
• 38:35
  things. So it's a shortcut to that which
• 38:37
  allows you to. Otherwise you've got to spend
• 38:39
  all this time getting to know them.
• 38:41
  Whereas if you could have come out with your little checklist,
• 38:44
  this is a shortcut. Yeah.
• 38:45
  You know, do you like such and such a joke?
• 38:47
  Do you like sound and So's music?
• 38:49
  You know, do you believe X is the case?
• 38:51
  It's like it's like a business investment.
• 38:52
  It's like what sort of company, what sort of human like this,
• 38:54
  right? You've got these things.
• 38:55
  Shortcut, yes. Less a few hours, you know, 200,
• 38:58
  it's costly. But that's, but that's, that's
• 39:01
  because business or any organization, you know, whether
• 39:04
  it's either a government department or, or, or, or a
• 39:07
  private business, it is a social world, right?
• 39:11
  It's people doing stuff, collaborating to do produce a
• 39:14
  product of some cool kind. You know, whether it's designing
• 39:17
  the layout of the streets and making sure there are enough,
• 39:21
  you know, sort of sewers and electric cables and stuff for
• 39:24
  the, for that, for, for the businesses and houses around, or
• 39:28
  literally producing a product that other people might want to
• 39:31
  buy. All those organisations are
• 39:34
  built around trust essentially, that people would do their share
• 39:38
  of the work and will provide the right kind of leadership and
• 39:42
  the, you know, fulfil their tasks as it were properly in the
• 39:46
  grand scheme of things. And if, if, when businesses sort
• 39:51
  of fall down or organisations of that kind fall down, when trust
• 39:55
  is lost, that doesn't make any difference whether it's a kind
• 39:58
  of, I don't know, you know, a little club of, of, of dog
• 40:02
  lovers of some kind. You know, this sort of of a
• 40:06
  particular interest if you like, or a Sports Club run by
• 40:10
  volunteers or or an organization, a big organization
• 40:14
  like a business. When the the people lose trust
• 40:19
  in the leadership, the thing falls apart.
• 40:23
  So is a leader socially in a social circle, Would you
• 40:26
  consider a leader, a social leader, someone who makes the
• 40:30
  effort to bring friends together and organizing, you know, I'm
• 40:35
  coming to town. Let's meet up.
• 40:37
  So and so you come from there, you know, organizing, planning,
• 40:39
  the logistics. Is that what what do you think
• 40:42
  about people like that, that, that care enough that organize
• 40:44
  these things that what are they? Is it a good a good?
• 40:48
  Force being as I'm not not that sort of person, it's a thankless
• 40:52
  task. It is, isn't it?
• 40:55
  But you've got to have it. I mean, you won't have a group
• 40:58
  basically if you well, you won't have a community if you don't
• 41:02
  have people who are willing to be the leaders.
• 41:04
  That's really what a charismatic leader does.
• 41:06
  They provide, not only do they provide the kind of figurehead
• 41:11
  for the organization, but they also provide in some sense, the
• 41:14
  structure to it. And make sure, you know, their
• 41:16
  commitment in some sense is to make sure everything works
• 41:21
  within it and that people are introduced in, in, in the way
• 41:24
  you suggest. And that's partly because that's
• 41:28
  very time consuming to do for the for, for most of us.
• 41:32
  And it's a thankless to ask, but what's interesting is it, it
• 41:39
  becomes necessary to have that kind of structural organization
• 41:43
  once your little community, whether it's a business or or a
• 41:47
  voluntary group gets above about 40 people.
• 41:51
  So as it hinges around that 50 layer, if it, if it's smaller,
• 41:56
  and we've shown this with communities of practice in
• 41:59
  business, if, if the, if the community is smaller than about
• 42:03
  40 or 50 people, everything can be done democratically.
• 42:07
  You don't need a lead, you don't need a committee.
• 42:09
  You don't people volunteer and there's somebody will organise
• 42:13
  the room and somebody will get the biscuits and the tea and
• 42:16
  without being asked to do it and it things get done.
• 42:19
  Once you get above 50, you get this extraordinary rapid phase
• 42:22
  shift where if you don't have a kind of management structure of
• 42:27
  some kind, so you have a committee that's responsible,
• 42:30
  right, and going round begging people to turn up to the next
• 42:34
  meeting, things won't happen. People will just drift away.
• 42:37
  And, and, you know, any, any group that tries to be
• 42:41
  democratic in that sense that's bigger than 50 simply doesn't
• 42:45
  survive it just. You need a strong leader to
• 42:47
  manage a big group and and OK, So what then makes people want
• 42:52
  to push others away? Because you've got that thing
• 42:54
  too where you think, Oh, no. Oh, I think it's, I think it's
• 42:59
  just basically the fact that you don't connect with them, right?
• 43:05
  You've got nothing in common with them.
• 43:06
  So all these things that create this homophily effect both, both
• 43:13
  are biological and, and, and psychological traits, but also
• 43:17
  these cultural traits, the seven pillars of friendship.
• 43:20
  You know, at the end of the day, if you don't have enough
• 43:23
  connection with people, the relationship won't last, right?
• 43:27
  So this is, you know, the classic cases, you know, I don't
• 43:31
  know, you're there in the bar at at Ibiza or some seaside place
• 43:38
  and it's 4:00 in the morning and there's only one other person in
• 43:41
  the bar, you know, and it turns out you both happen to be
• 43:45
  enthusiasts for Tiddlywings, right?
• 43:48
  So suddenly you've got a friend for the night.
• 43:51
  But because it's only one tiny dimension of all the possible
• 43:57
  points of contact, you know that friendship is not going to
• 44:00
  survive the aeroplane journey home, right When you when you go
• 44:04
  home, you'll never think about them again.
• 44:06
  But for that one night, it works well.
• 44:10
  And you see this happening all the time.
• 44:12
  It's what I call school gate friendships, right?
• 44:15
  And it's very, very common. So, you know, you, you
• 44:19
  particularly sort of in the primary school period for your
• 44:23
  children because you have to go and collect them from the
• 44:27
  school. All the parents are standing
• 44:29
  around, you know, and, and the kids will come out and say, oh,
• 44:33
  you know, can Jemima come and play and say the parents get to
• 44:38
  talk to each other because they have to, to give permission,
• 44:40
  obviously. And then then the kids are such
• 44:42
  good friends. The parents start to spend time
• 44:45
  together because they do things at the weekend, maybe they go on
• 44:48
  holiday. And then as as time goes by and
• 44:51
  either the kids move to different senior schools or
• 44:54
  further on go to different universities.
• 44:57
  At that point the kids stop being friends, probably because
• 45:02
  they meet new people and the parents stop being friends.
• 45:04
  And what happens then is they bummer into each other in the
• 45:09
  supermarket, in the aisle in the supermarket.
• 45:11
  So I haven't seen you for ages. You must come round.
• 45:14
  I'll give you a call. They don't and they don't.
• 45:16
  And a year later, exactly the same little cartoon is is
• 45:21
  repeated again, the same aisle and the.
• 45:22
  Same. Too close to home.
• 45:25
  Frightening. But yes, this happens to
• 45:28
  everyone. This is this is just one of
• 45:30
  those you can't force this stuff.
• 45:31
  No, no. But it's also, you know, it's
• 45:33
  part of the fact that, well, your social network is dynamic.
• 45:38
  Yes, OK, you're stuck with the identity of your family, or you
• 45:42
  can move them up and down the layers, but with friendships,
• 45:46
  because you're meeting new people as you go through life
• 45:50
  who become more interesting to you because of your current
• 45:56
  kinds of interests. And people's interests drift
• 45:59
  apart when they when they're not together.
• 46:01
  So if you don't see somebody, this is the experience you have
• 46:04
  when you go back to a school reunion at the age of 40 or 15,
• 46:08
  right, for the first time. And you, all these people, kids
• 46:11
  that you in as a teenager, you spent all your time with,
• 46:14
  partying with and doing all sorts of wicked things with.
• 46:17
  And you meet them again when you're 1415 and you go, Oh my
• 46:20
  God, they're awful. You know, because I'm really
• 46:22
  friends. And it's simply because you've
• 46:25
  drifted apart and had different life experiences and therefore
• 46:29
  kind of different things become important to you.
• 46:31
  So that that's a normal part of the dynamics of friendship.
• 46:36
  If you don't constantly live together, that's what keeps you
• 46:40
  you in line, as it were, because you're you're having the same
• 46:43
  experiences all the time. You know, my, my experience is
• 46:46
  slightly different with that in the sense that I went to
• 46:47
  boarding school, so. So did I.
• 46:51
  You did so you stayed closer with the with the people because
• 46:54
  you you spend more time with them.
• 46:55
  It's kind. Of intense, probably.
• 46:57
  True. So it's formative years,
• 46:59
  although you also drift apart and you know, eventually, but
• 47:02
  it's a little bit different. No, I think, but yes.
• 47:04
  But I think there is there. You have to remember also there
• 47:08
  is a little core here or very, very close friends.
• 47:11
  So you spend a lot of time with, I don't know, let's say 10 or 12
• 47:15
  kids as a teenager partying together.
• 47:19
  But out of those 10 or 12, you have one or two who are really
• 47:23
  close friends as they were. And it's those close friends
• 47:28
  will never be lost. You can pick those friendships
• 47:30
  up again 20-30 years later exactly where you left off.
• 47:34
  And I think it's because they were so close.
• 47:37
  The emotional component of it is ground in stone, whereas the the
• 47:42
  others who are who are slightly less important to you, the the
• 47:46
  the intensity of the emotion wasn't quite so it's.
• 47:49
  The intensity of the emotion. That's why you know when you
• 47:53
  meet someone that you really, you know, fall in love with.
• 47:56
  And there is a saying when you know, you know because it's the
• 47:59
  intensity of the emotion and all this nonsense about wait, you
• 48:03
  have to wait approximately 3 weeks or half a year or one year
• 48:06
  before you must get married. And you don't.
• 48:07
  You did it before. All that nonsense needs to go
• 48:10
  out the window, doesn't it? When you know, you know this is.
• 48:12
  One of those things, yes, but it's the, I mean that, that the
• 48:15
  problem is you are at risk ways of a, of making a bad judgement.
• 48:19
  Even so, right, you, you might think they took all the boxes,
• 48:23
  but actually you haven't had enough experience.
• 48:25
  So what normally happens is you, I mean, it's a weird thing
• 48:31
  because you have to have this kind of rosy sunglasses effect,
• 48:35
  otherwise you wouldn't get off the fence.
• 48:37
  You've got to have something to make you get off the fence and
• 48:40
  go and talk to the person and and you know, sort of do you
• 48:44
  fancy a dance or whatever, you know, in order to build a
• 48:48
  relationship and that that that's not going to happen if
• 48:53
  you if you don't have this kind of everything is all your
• 48:56
  critical faculties are shut, shut off because what you see is
• 48:59
  a Greek God or a Greek goddess, right.
• 49:03
  But the rosier the sunglasses at that point, the longer the
• 49:07
  relationship will last because it takes longer to rub the the
• 49:12
  the shine of of the statue as it were with all because in the
• 49:17
  course of life, you get a lot of ground tracing that go goes on
• 49:21
  where, you know, they forget your birthday, they forget to
• 49:24
  turn up when they said they were turn up, etcetera, etcetera,
• 49:26
  etcetera, Most of which you kind of forgive initially until it
• 49:29
  happens often enough. You say that that's it.
• 49:33
  But that ground tracing becomes important.
• 49:35
  So it's a, it's a kind of weird split, as it were, between the
• 49:41
  need for this thing just to get you off the fence and go and
• 49:45
  make the relationship, which starts you off well, and the
• 49:49
  fact that you can get over committed.
• 49:52
  And where that comes out is in romantic scams on the Internet,
• 49:55
  because that's exactly how the scammers work.
• 49:58
  What they're playing on is that if they don't allow you ever to
• 50:02
  meet them, you become more and more besotted with this avatar
• 50:07
  that you've created in your own mind.
• 50:10
  To the point where when you finally meet them, it doesn't
• 50:14
  matter what they look like or how badly they behave.
• 50:17
  You are so forgiving it's unbelievable.
• 50:19
  And you just hand over all your money.
• 50:21
  But they they play a very long game on that because.
• 50:24
  But that's a red flag. You meet them.
• 50:25
  It's the red flags. These are I, I think, you know,
• 50:28
  people normally show you who they are and it happens
• 50:30
  relatively early on and you've just got to pay attention when
• 50:33
  they do, they do show you who they are.
• 50:35
  You. I see you for who you are.
• 50:38
  Well, it's it's back to this first four to six weeks after
• 50:42
  meeting somebody, you need to see them often frequently in
• 50:46
  order to have enough experience of them and kind of get a feel
• 50:51
  of what the real person beneath the shine is actually like.
• 50:58
  Oh, it's quite fun, isn't it? It's all this stuff, all this
• 51:01
  things. So we know the healthiest number
• 51:03
  now are friendships, and we know how important it is to spend
• 51:07
  time and invest and build trust. And we know about your number so
• 51:12
  your brain can maintain well, can it?
• 51:15
  More than one intimate relationship at a time?
• 51:18
  You said up to five. What if you replaced all those
• 51:20
  friends? Then you had five intimate.
• 51:23
  I'm not planning to do this. I'm just asking for other people
• 51:25
  who are watching who might want to do this.
• 51:27
  I have all kinds of people on my channel.
• 51:30
  This is, this is. We're now into consultants.
• 51:32
  I'm just asking for for the for the audience who would
• 51:35
  potentially could you have 5 intimate relationships at the
• 51:38
  same time? I mean, really.
• 51:39
  Not not romantically intimate relationships.
• 51:42
  Not, it seems not OK because what happens where, at least in
• 51:46
  our data, when people claim to have two romantic relationships,
• 51:52
  I'd say 2 sexual relationships, one is always takes precedence
• 51:57
  over the other. So 1 is in in at the pole
• 52:01
  position of the inner core of five, and the other tends to be
• 52:08
  pushed down into the next layer and that tends to be the
• 52:10
  previous. So it's.
• 52:12
  Always the favorite anyway. It looks like it looks like it's
• 52:14
  very difficult. And that's based on science.
• 52:16
  That's based on. Science.
• 52:17
  No one can. And you can have, you can have
• 52:20
  pseudo romantic relationships or sexual relationships with lots
• 52:26
  of people, but then they're not going to necessarily have the
• 52:30
  intimacy of and the emotional intimacy of that inner core.
• 52:35
  OK. And that's partly because it
• 52:37
  becomes, that probably is partly because the nature of sexual
• 52:43
  relationships have this intimacy and emotional component that it
• 52:47
  makes it very difficult if anything goes wrong with the
• 52:53
  relationship. So if you're, you know, sort of
• 52:56
  stood up as it were by by by a partner, it is so destructive of
• 53:05
  your mental state, you want to break the relationship.
• 53:08
  So, so it either has to be slightly anonymous seems or some
• 53:14
  sort of graduation where you can keep a balance between your
• 53:18
  emotional commitment because your emotional, The problem is
• 53:21
  your emotional commitment for relationships in general is
• 53:24
  limited, right? You've only got and essentially
• 53:27
  that means. Choose wisely.
• 53:28
  Time right so you you can choose to have lots of friends who are
• 53:33
  very weak friendships, or you can have a few strong ones and
• 53:39
  some super. Yeah, I find it totally
• 53:41
  exhausting to have lots of the the shallow conversations.
• 53:44
  I find it so difficult, you know, that the playground chat,
• 53:47
  it absolutely drains me of every cell in my body.
• 53:51
  I can't take it. So hello, how are you doing?
• 53:54
  And whether I find it exhausting, if I am going to
• 53:56
  talk to someone, I want it to be meaningful and deep and I'll
• 53:59
  tell you the truth and please tell me your truth.
• 54:02
  And then we can have that moment.
• 54:04
  And then it's it's nicer than oh, actually, I prefer a huge
• 54:07
  crowd. And then I don't have any like
• 54:09
  responsibility to them. You know, I'm I'm talking to
• 54:11
  them, but. So this is kind of difference
• 54:14
  between introverts and extroverts because introverts
• 54:17
  seem to have so, so basically what's going on is you're trying
• 54:21
  to manage this little group, this little in a clique of, you
• 54:26
  know, maybe only 3-4 or five people who provide you with your
• 54:32
  deep emotional support. You know when crisis happens,
• 54:36
  you know they will drop everything to come and pick you
• 54:39
  up, as it were, all right. So to keep them in the loop, you
• 54:43
  have to invest very heavily in them and maintain the
• 54:46
  relationship. Of course, they are then having
• 54:48
  to do the same to you. So it's.
• 54:50
  I never thought about like this, but it's an investment.
• 54:52
  Gosh, now what? What seems to happen is
• 54:57
  introverts take a kind of risk averse.
• 54:59
  So they really want to be sure that when disaster happens and
• 55:04
  the problem is you can't legislate for it, you, you know,
• 55:07
  it's too late to go and ask somebody to help you out in, in,
• 55:12
  in those sort of states of affairs, as it were.
• 55:15
  If you don't already have a relationship with them, you have
• 55:18
  to have set that up ahead of time, well ahead of time for
• 55:20
  them to be willing to do it. So that what they want to be
• 55:23
  sure is that the people they have in that little group really
• 55:27
  will do the job. So they'd rather have fewer of
• 55:29
  them and invest more time in each one.
• 55:32
  And that means they have smaller networks, whereas extroverts
• 55:35
  seem to trade on their social skills, as it were, and social
• 55:41
  confidence to handle weaker relationships.
• 55:44
  So their view is, well, you know, if Jemimah turns me down,
• 55:47
  won't help, I'll go and ask for the meaner, you know, because
• 55:52
  somebody will do it. Somebody because, you know, then
• 55:54
  they can then what they have is more friendships.
• 55:58
  So their social social networks are bigger than 150.
• 56:01
  But the average emotional closeness is much weaker you.
• 56:06
  Call that. Are you saying that I'm an
• 56:08
  introvert? Because I don't know.
• 56:12
  There's no Now I'm worried. But there's nothing wrong with
• 56:14
  being an introvert. Well, I don't know, I'm a
• 56:17
  podcaster and all those, no, I mean I did all those like Myers
• 56:22
  Briggs things and I've always been like a communicator and I'm
• 56:25
  sales and I, I definitely don't shy away from a crowd and all
• 56:27
  that sort of thing. It's just that these little chit
• 56:30
  chat things, I find them slightly pointless.
• 56:33
  I mean, I know we have to do them and I know why I know that
• 56:35
  obviously, no, we have to do that.
• 56:37
  But it's just, it is exhausting. And then then maybe I have a.
• 56:40
  Fine, fine. And I think it's more exhausting
• 56:43
  for, for for introverts than it is for extroverts because they
• 56:45
  don't really extroverts tend not to think about it.
• 56:48
  They're just operating in well, kind of, yes.
• 56:52
  I mean automatic mode, open the mouth, things will come out.
• 56:56
  Whereas introverts tend to think more carefully about what
• 56:59
  they're well, that's what I think because I'm an
• 57:01
  introverted. Yes.
• 57:02
  OK, No, I don't know what I am at interface.
• 57:06
  I'm confused. Confused about right.
• 57:10
  This one is a big one. Why do families fight so much
• 57:13
  and so badly? Why we're supposed to be tight?
• 57:16
  What's the? Problem and in general they are
• 57:19
  very tight relationships, but the problem is in the end it
• 57:23
  comes back to this trust issue primarily.
• 57:28
  The one thing that will cause relationship breakdown of any
• 57:33
  kind is a breakdown of trust, and that can be exaggerated by
• 57:39
  competition for resources within the family.
• 57:44
  Like. What access to, I don't know a
• 57:50
  particular but let's say mum or dad as a SO.
• 57:54
  Fighting over mum and dad's attention.
• 57:56
  Source of support. Ultimately the, the big test
• 58:02
  case is when the parents die, that's when families fall apart
• 58:07
  because they start arguing about who gets what.
• 58:09
  It's extremely common, extremely common.
• 58:14
  But in general, that kind of can happen at any time.
• 58:19
  And because you're, you have these very close relationships,
• 58:22
  you spend a lot of time with these people, you, you're kind
• 58:26
  of much more attentive to how evenly balanced the relationship
• 58:31
  is. Are they getting more than me?
• 58:33
  Am I having to do all the work all the time?
• 58:36
  And that, you know, that those little niggles create sort of
• 58:42
  fracture lines that eventually, if you get enough of them,
• 58:45
  'cause terminal collapse. And what's interesting is, I
• 58:50
  mean, this probably doesn't apply to kind of your second
• 58:52
  cousin's twice removed, but you know that inner core of sort of
• 58:57
  siblings, parents, grandparents, whatever cousins may be, when
• 59:03
  you fall out with them, it is catastrophic.
• 59:05
  Almost always these are deathbed reconciliations only literally,
• 59:11
  whereas with friendships. Horrible that you just said
• 59:13
  that. With friendships and you fall
• 59:15
  out with them, you tend to just drift away from them.
• 59:19
  You just stop seeing them. Before you get to that point,
• 59:22
  but I think, yeah, with this betrayal trust, this emotional
• 59:25
  raw stuff, it's tough to fix that.
• 59:27
  But I think it's because you you are by definition, with any
• 59:32
  close relationship, whether it's a friend or a close family, you
• 59:35
  are more forgiving. So they stand you up once.
• 59:38
  Oh, it's just Jim again, you know?
• 59:40
  Yeah. He's just like that.
• 59:41
  Yeah. He's always like that.
• 59:42
  But eventually, when it happens often enough, you kind of go
• 59:47
  enough is enough. And that point it is terminal
• 59:50
  because you've committed so much trust and emotion that you feel
• 59:55
  very let down. Whereas if a a casual friend and
• 1:00:00
  the same is true with romantic, you know, it's what happens with
• 1:00:02
  romantic relationships as it when divorces, it's what happens
• 1:00:06
  with best friend relationships when they part company for the
• 1:00:11
  same reason and they they are irreparable, whereas somebody
• 1:00:14
  more distant. You just stop seeing them long
• 1:00:18
  before you get to that point. And that, that makes it easier
• 1:00:22
  then to reconcile because you know they, they, they can, after
• 1:00:27
  a reasonable gap, can try to repair the relationship in some
• 1:00:30
  way and you're open to accepting it.
• 1:00:32
  But with these catastrophic relationship breakdowns, you've
• 1:00:38
  committed so much emotion to it and feel so madly let down that
• 1:00:43
  nothing is going to persuade. That investment, it hurts.
• 1:00:46
  Yes. But then also.
• 1:00:48
  Over investment. Over investment but is it also
• 1:00:50
  that with our family and our you know our partner, whatever we
• 1:00:54
  set the bar really high when it comes to trust and the standards
• 1:00:58
  we expect from them and like you cannot do this and also the
• 1:01:00
  expectations of our parents. You're supposed to be like this
• 1:01:03
  like this like this, like this my sisters, brothers, you have
• 1:01:05
  to behave like that partner. I expect all these golden
• 1:01:08
  standards, and the higher the standards, the bigger the drop.
• 1:01:11
  Yes, yes. Wow, don't have standards then?
• 1:01:15
  No, Do have standards. Don't please have standards.
• 1:01:18
  Well, no. You know what?
• 1:01:19
  If they let you down, then sorry.
• 1:01:21
  But it's like it's a trade off. There are no absolutes in, in
• 1:01:24
  real life, right? There are only trade-offs.
• 1:01:27
  So you are free to, you know, if you want to set the bar very
• 1:01:32
  high, that's fine because that produced a very strong
• 1:01:36
  relationship. But the risk you run is that
• 1:01:38
  it's kind of you're, you're asking for perfection where
• 1:01:42
  perfection can never exist. And therefore the you, you the
• 1:01:46
  relationship at some point may be put at risk of fracture.
• 1:01:51
  Whereas if you're and that's because you expect a lot of out
• 1:01:56
  of the relationship and you're going to give a lot in return,
• 1:02:00
  as it were for the equation balances.
• 1:02:03
  Whereas with more casual friendships, you kind of don't
• 1:02:07
  expect quite so much attention to the detail.
• 1:02:12
  You know, you, you if, if, if, if you invite them 10 times too
• 1:02:17
  many to, to your party to, to the number of times they invite
• 1:02:21
  you to their parties, you kind of go, well, you know, they're
• 1:02:23
  just froth in the in, in the, in the crowd.
• 1:02:26
  They make up the numbers, whatever, whatever.
• 1:02:28
  And you're more forgiving of it. And therefore when something
• 1:02:34
  they do, something that upsets you is not a usually not a
• 1:02:38
  catastrophic upset. It's more if you're going to
• 1:02:41
  behave like that, I'm not going to bother.
• 1:02:43
  And and not going to bother means you don't pick up the
• 1:02:46
  phone to arrange to see them. And therefore you, you don't see
• 1:02:50
  each other. And the emotional quality of the
• 1:02:52
  friendship decays steadily with time, in a natural way.
• 1:02:56
  Can I ask you something of the present phenomenon, which is
• 1:02:59
  called ghosting? I just think I, I mean, I
• 1:03:03
  understand why people do it, but I just think it's so rude.
• 1:03:06
  I think it's so hurtful. It's so rude.
• 1:03:10
  I mean, just say you don't like it.
• 1:03:11
  You know, I spoke to to The Apprentice winner the other the
• 1:03:14
  other day. You know, he's made a lot of
• 1:03:15
  money. He sold his business.
• 1:03:16
  Lord Sugar, he's a busy guy. He's doing all these things, so
• 1:03:19
  much going on and he doesn't ghost people, you know, when
• 1:03:22
  they send, you know, business. Are you interested?
• 1:03:24
  No, thank you. I'm not.
• 1:03:25
  Thanks, Rich. I'm not interested.
• 1:03:26
  Not interested. Takes millisecond.
• 1:03:29
  Boom, boom, boom, done. And he does that because he
• 1:03:31
  said, you know, I see I'm a brand as well.
• 1:03:34
  And any interaction with me, I don't want to be the ghost.
• 1:03:36
  I don't want to be the one that doesn't respond.
• 1:03:38
  I don't want to be that. And yeah, I just, I, I had a out
• 1:03:44
  of the five, I would put in the top 50 person I reached out to
• 1:03:47
  and I got ghosted. And I just thought, but, but
• 1:03:49
  it's so strange that you would have ghosted me.
• 1:03:52
  I just think, would you not have?
• 1:03:53
  It's just polite. It's menace.
• 1:03:55
  No, Well, yes. And, and that whole point is
• 1:03:59
  that that's one of the key skills the, you know, what keeps
• 1:04:01
  relationships going, what keeps communities going, organisations
• 1:04:05
  going, are the skills of diplomacy, right?
• 1:04:09
  They're these abilities to understand how somebody else is
• 1:04:11
  seeing the situation. So I can kind of adjust how I
• 1:04:17
  interact with you in a way that keeps you in the loop rather
• 1:04:21
  than putting you off and, you know, sort of messing you about
• 1:04:25
  this ability to, to, to inhibit, you know, your natural instincts
• 1:04:31
  to, you know, emotionally jump to conclusions, as it were, the
• 1:04:38
  red mist rising, You know, those skills and, and this ability
• 1:04:44
  simply to be courteous to people, right?
• 1:04:49
  Because that's exactly the kind of thing that undermines trust.
• 1:04:54
  You know, if if, if you just don't answer naturally, you kind
• 1:04:58
  of go, what have I done? But you know, I can understand
• 1:05:02
  why some people don't answer as well because it's it's also
• 1:05:04
  effort, investment and difficult and uncomfortable to say no to
• 1:05:07
  someone. You might be scared to say no to
• 1:05:10
  them, so you'd. Rather just, but there's also a
• 1:05:12
  situation. I mean, the one of the problems
• 1:05:14
  at the moment created by the Internet essentially in social
• 1:05:18
  media is we just get overwhelmed all the time with contacts, you
• 1:05:28
  know, so, so you know, the, the scale of his in the days when we
• 1:05:32
  wrote letters, you would write a letter to somebody saying, can
• 1:05:35
  you tell me about something or maybe some information?
• 1:05:38
  They would send it back and you might send a note back which
• 1:05:41
  just says, thanks very much, end of the story.
• 1:05:44
  Now with e-mail, you feel a compulsion to reply to every
• 1:05:49
  reply. So you end up sort of
• 1:05:51
  meaningless replies. Yeah, it's some of those are
• 1:05:54
  make up to apologies to interject, but to say, oh, can I
• 1:05:57
  add that to your calendar now can we add Winkley, would you
• 1:06:00
  like to schedule a meeting today in 15 minutes?
• 1:06:02
  I can. Oh.
• 1:06:04
  No, exactly, exactly. And I, but I think that's too
• 1:06:06
  much causes causes a lot of if you like the ghost thing is does
• 1:06:10
  and I, I know I do it all the time.
• 1:06:12
  There's somebody emails and says ask the question and you kind of
• 1:06:18
  go, well, I don't know what the answer is.
• 1:06:20
  Yes, I need to think about it. But you know, and you park it,
• 1:06:24
  and then the problem is you forget about it.
• 1:06:26
  You forget about. It and you come across it about
• 1:06:28
  two months later, you're Oh my gosh.
• 1:06:29
  It's understandable. It's understandable.
• 1:06:31
  But I was saying that in a top 50 crowd, you know, the one
• 1:06:34
  where like it's someone that you know and you've interacted with
• 1:06:37
  and you might have done business with them or whatever that that
• 1:06:39
  then becomes that that's actually not Yeah, that's a
• 1:06:42
  little. Bit, yeah, I mean this, if you
• 1:06:44
  think about it in terms of you're historically as it were,
• 1:06:49
  you know, if you go back 100 years, everybody lived in small
• 1:06:51
  villages of a couple of 100 people.
• 1:06:54
  Everybody knew everybody else, everybody was in everybody's
• 1:06:56
  150. They're just orientated
• 1:06:59
  differently, right? So most of the time you had
• 1:07:03
  enough capacity to manage the relationships you had.
• 1:07:07
  Now what happens is we move so much, you know, you go to
• 1:07:12
  university, you grow up here, you go to university there, you
• 1:07:15
  get your first job somewhere else.
• 1:07:16
  You move after a few years to a different city, to a different
• 1:07:20
  country, and you end up with little pockets of people.
• 1:07:23
  So what you're accumulating is not 150 people who are
• 1:07:26
  relatively stable as used to be the case, but you're getting
• 1:07:31
  sort of, you know, you, you in effect, you're 150 is being
• 1:07:34
  pushed up to 1500 people and you're not able to cope with
• 1:07:38
  that. You just don't have the time.
• 1:07:40
  It's very. We haven't evolved evolved.
• 1:07:42
  We haven't evolved to that. We have to keep evolving and
• 1:07:45
  right. The time is time.
• 1:07:48
  Time is yes. You know you can't.
• 1:07:50
  You can't create time because each relationship require has
• 1:07:56
  its own time demand depending on the emotional closeness, which
• 1:08:01
  layer that dictates how much time you have to invest.
• 1:08:04
  Because if you don't invest that time, that relationship will
• 1:08:08
  decay inexorably. It takes about two years of not
• 1:08:13
  seeing a person for them to move from, say, your 15 layer.
• 1:08:18
  So a good regular social friend to become just an acquaintance,
• 1:08:22
  somebody I once knew, that's frightening.
• 1:08:26
  That's if you don't see them at all, right?
• 1:08:28
  Which is what tends to happen. You know, if you think about
• 1:08:31
  your experience, you, you went away to university somewhere,
• 1:08:34
  you had this little group of people you did stuff with and
• 1:08:37
  then your party company went different parts of the world,
• 1:08:40
  right? And some of them you tried, made
• 1:08:43
  a big effort to keep up with and they tended to be this the one
• 1:08:46
  or two platonic close friends. But the others you kind of feel
• 1:08:51
  very guilty about not keeping up with, but you just don't have
• 1:08:55
  time because you're meeting all these other new people.
• 1:08:58
  Yeah. And so they kind of grad.
• 1:09:00
  Placing you do take you up. Put you in.
• 1:09:04
  Yeah, Yeah. And then, you know, that means
• 1:09:06
  you, you, you're, you're squeezing your time availability
• 1:09:09
  and somebody has to go. Someone has to go, yeah.
• 1:09:12
  Right, and and eventually you don't intend to push.
• 1:09:14
  Actually, I quite like that because I don't like hoarding,
• 1:09:16
  you know? Yeah, well.
• 1:09:18
  I like that refreshing the it's not bad.
• 1:09:20
  It's a good concept, but let's talk about, you know, that this
• 1:09:23
  thing, there's there's a lot of talk about people being
• 1:09:26
  infectious, you know, people rubbing off on you.
• 1:09:30
  So one of the reasons why I've got this podcast is because I
• 1:09:33
  want to rub off on the wider planet in a very lovely positive
• 1:09:37
  and come on, let's do this so we can really like make change and
• 1:09:41
  do stuff here, you know, positive mindset and
• 1:09:45
  interviewing the right people with the right messaging and
• 1:09:47
  that kind of thing. And I love spending time with
• 1:09:49
  people like you because it's just wonderful.
• 1:09:51
  You know, you, you just filled with all this knowledge and it's
• 1:09:54
  a good influence, you know, and I hope that I'm radiating some
• 1:09:57
  positive energy towards you. But then you've got toxic
• 1:10:00
  people. You really do negative,
• 1:10:04
  damaging, not the right agenda. How do you deal with it?
• 1:10:09
  Like is that have they always existed or has this?
• 1:10:11
  Have they become a thing in today's modern age?
• 1:10:15
  How do you deal with them? Everything about these toxic
• 1:10:17
  people and what do you. Do they've always existed?
• 1:10:24
  Usually in in historically in the past they tend to be people
• 1:10:30
  with psychopathic traits, right? And all, all small scale
• 1:10:35
  societies have problems with these people because they're
• 1:10:38
  very destructive. So they're biologically
• 1:10:40
  different, as in they've got like what?
• 1:10:42
  What? Because like sarcopaths have
• 1:10:43
  extra chromosomes or. Things they've not got extra
• 1:10:46
  chromosomes, they just tend to have different alleles.
• 1:10:48
  So they, they tend to be very poor on the capacity to inhibit
• 1:10:54
  action, right. And so rather than hanging back
• 1:10:58
  and making a, a considered view. So if you think about it, you
• 1:11:03
  know, in the playground sense. So there you all are in the sand
• 1:11:07
  pit of life and people are running up and down, kids are
• 1:11:11
  running up and down and and you know one of them kicks sand in
• 1:11:15
  your face, right? So what a psychopath will do is
• 1:11:19
  he again sorts the kid out, right?
• 1:11:21
  Because he assumes that it was malicious.
• 1:11:24
  Whereas a sensible person, social person, if you like, will
• 1:11:28
  sit back for a moment and go, was that an accident or not?
• 1:11:31
  Right. And you're the right way to
• 1:11:33
  behave depends on whether it was an accident or whether it was
• 1:11:37
  done deliberately. If it's an accident, you've got
• 1:11:39
  to forgive them and forget it. You know, if they did it
• 1:11:42
  deliberate, maybe you sort them out, whatever.
• 1:11:45
  But those kind of skill, skills of diplomacy that allow you to
• 1:11:52
  keep a group functioning, you know, are very difficult to
• 1:11:57
  maintain in the context where somebody is constantly behaving
• 1:12:03
  as a psychopath. And, and they tend to be pretty
• 1:12:06
  violent people. And they tend to be in small
• 1:12:08
  scale societies and tribal, small scale tribal societies.
• 1:12:12
  They tend to be people who, who, who, you know, responsible for a
• 1:12:16
  lot of homicides, quite literally.
• 1:12:19
  And, and, and mostly small scale societies live in fear of these
• 1:12:23
  people because they're so destructive.
• 1:12:25
  Never mind their personal risk they run, they're just
• 1:12:28
  destructive of the community and you.
• 1:12:30
  Your whole ability to survive depends on the community being
• 1:12:34
  cooperative and coordinated. So what happens in the end
• 1:12:37
  usually is the community gangs up against them.
• 1:12:40
  You get them drunk on Saturday night and sort them out forever,
• 1:12:44
  right? Or they get blamed for
• 1:12:46
  witchcraft and then they get strung up for for being witches.
• 1:12:52
  So that's extremely common in these small schemes.
• 1:12:54
  So there's the extreme, there's the homicide ones, but then
• 1:12:57
  there's also, you know, in the Patrick Bateman, you know,
• 1:13:01
  there's all that, there's all that kind of thing.
• 1:13:03
  But then there's, there's ones that are just, you know, they
• 1:13:05
  exist and they just, I don't know if it's hurt people hurt
• 1:13:12
  people or what, what it is, but but they see the world in a
• 1:13:14
  negative way. And so they respond negatively
• 1:13:17
  and they cause, they manipulate, they cause trouble.
• 1:13:21
  This is what says the dark Triad, Psychopaths, narcissists
• 1:13:27
  and exploiters. Machiavellian people.
• 1:13:29
  Yeah, I mean they those guys. They're there.
• 1:13:33
  We all know one or two. You know, for the better or
• 1:13:37
  worse exotic. They're the They're the rich
• 1:13:40
  tapestry of social life that. We have to We like having them
• 1:13:43
  in the tapestry, but members. You know, you know, you're right
• 1:13:47
  that you know, life can't go can't run smoothly if it's if
• 1:13:53
  there are a lot of them, that's why they tend to be rather rare.
• 1:13:56
  Otherwise it would be totally destructive.
• 1:14:00
  And when, whether they're, there's clearly a kind, some
• 1:14:04
  kind of genetic process going on.
• 1:14:08
  They're often associated with what's known as the warrior gene
• 1:14:13
  in the brain, which is one of the, the genes associated with
• 1:14:16
  bits of the brain. But it is tied up very much with
• 1:14:19
  this inability to inhibit, you know, they, they just are
• 1:14:23
  selfish basically. Grab things off the plate.
• 1:14:25
  Grabs things off the plate. Doesn't matter if you don't get
• 1:14:29
  any and you know, if if that becomes very destructive either
• 1:14:36
  of your well-being in relationships or the community's
• 1:14:40
  relationships, somehow it has to get sorted out.
• 1:14:45
  And in, you know, in, in small scale societies, they were just,
• 1:14:50
  you know, you got banished or you got killed.
• 1:14:54
  I mean, there's movies about people like all the time.
• 1:14:56
  And in a way they've got a set so you can sort of almost feel
• 1:14:58
  sorry for them because you want them to have a friend and you
• 1:15:00
  think, why are you harming yourself all the time?
• 1:15:02
  Why are you acting like completely?
• 1:15:04
  In, in, in, in, In the modern industrial world we have these
• 1:15:08
  enormous communities. The point is they have places to
• 1:15:11
  hide if we live when you live in small villages, as we've done
• 1:15:17
  for, you know, sort of since time immemorial, long before
• 1:15:21
  history until very recently. I mean, I think Rome was the
• 1:15:26
  first city to have a million people and that was 2000 years
• 1:15:29
  ago only, right? So we've, we've not lived in
• 1:15:32
  these very large communities for very long.
• 1:15:35
  So we kind of don't have the skills to handle them basically.
• 1:15:39
  But in small scale communities, you know, it, it, it is so
• 1:15:43
  destructive that you can't tolerate it.
• 1:15:46
  And you have to have have some fairly, you know, ultimate
• 1:15:51
  violent solutions. Otherwise everybody just gets
• 1:15:55
  overwhelmed in, in the kind of modern world where you've the
• 1:16:00
  world actually consists mostly of strangers.
• 1:16:03
  These people have places to hide and that's why, you know, sort
• 1:16:08
  of so So what you get in villages is communal policing,
• 1:16:13
  right? I like that.
• 1:16:14
  And communal policing people, people take a responsibility
• 1:16:18
  for, for dealing with or pacifying or sorting out in the
• 1:16:24
  nicest possible way, people who are troublesome, you know, and
• 1:16:28
  they police each other's kids and, and make sure they behave
• 1:16:31
  and don't become destructive. But as you once you get above
• 1:16:36
  about 150 people in an organization, whether it's a
• 1:16:39
  village or an organization or a business, that there is a loss
• 1:16:45
  of a sense of willingness to police.
• 1:16:47
  Because what happens in a village is, you know, I behave
• 1:16:51
  badly on Saturday night at the village dance.
• 1:16:55
  You decide to say something to me and I go, oh, Alexander, I'm
• 1:16:58
  terribly sorry. It was really appalling.
• 1:17:01
  I won't do it again. But if we're living in, you
• 1:17:05
  know, an enormous modern city of 10 million people, my response
• 1:17:13
  to your trying to explain to me that my behaviour is shockingly
• 1:17:16
  bad is and who do you think you are, Right?
• 1:17:20
  Well, I don't owe you any obligation, you know, by what
• 1:17:23
  right do you? That's why we have to end up
• 1:17:24
  having a police force, right? It's in some sense neutral,
• 1:17:29
  whereas in small communities, the community acts as its own
• 1:17:32
  police force. And especially because of the
• 1:17:35
  the kind of generational hierarchical structure, because
• 1:17:39
  sitting at the back of the village somewhere is great
• 1:17:42
  grandma by her turf fire as the wagging her finger, you know,
• 1:17:48
  And she's maintaining the peace because all the great
• 1:17:52
  grandchildren who are all your second cousins are all equally
• 1:17:57
  valuable to her, right? So don't you go upsetting little
• 1:18:02
  Jimmy because you know he's one of my great grandchildren too,
• 1:18:07
  right? So you have this kind of very
• 1:18:12
  neat, in some ways, internal structurings which are based on
• 1:18:16
  relationships. So you take great granny
• 1:18:19
  seriously because you like her probably or she's very fierce.
• 1:18:23
  They come in two varieties. And also she's backed up by the
• 1:18:29
  older generations, right? So she can she she can, you
• 1:18:33
  know, individuals can impose discipline and and we accept
• 1:18:38
  that discipline out of the sense of obligation because we have
• 1:18:42
  meaningful relationships is when we our arrangements with each
• 1:18:45
  other are neutral. We have no, because they're
• 1:18:49
  strangers. We don't really know.
• 1:18:51
  I don't have any obligation here.
• 1:18:53
  That's when you start getting zinc estate problems.
• 1:18:57
  Yeah, I think individual speaking up and and maintain
• 1:19:00
  your standards is important. I just tell you something very
• 1:19:03
  quickly. Someone littered the other day
• 1:19:05
  in the countryside that I on a route that I run on religiously
• 1:19:08
  and I just saw him and he threw a little sushi box into the
• 1:19:12
  thing and I just sort of stopped and I picked it up and I gave us
• 1:19:16
  that's yours because we don't litter in the in the
• 1:19:18
  countryside. And I ran off and he just sort
• 1:19:20
  of looking, but I think he won't want to do that again and I
• 1:19:25
  might get into trouble one day for doing that, but I would but
• 1:19:27
  I but I but I. You know, that's why people stop
• 1:19:30
  doing it, because most of the. Time.
• 1:19:31
  I don't mind that that much even, because I would be angry
• 1:19:34
  with myself if I didn't say anything.
• 1:19:36
  And I think I want that. I want that standard maintained
• 1:19:38
  in that countryside, full stop. That's it.
• 1:19:41
  Like you don't come into this countryside a little here, ever.
• 1:19:44
  Yeah, but it, it depends on the the wider community having that
• 1:19:49
  sense of obligation and you know, that you're not just being
• 1:19:55
  nasty and abusive and rude. I'm helping him too because he
• 1:19:59
  likes the countryside. He's there enjoying it.
• 1:20:00
  Do you want to enjoy? Part of the community too, but
• 1:20:03
  it that and that works fine. But the problem is where
• 1:20:06
  anonymous relationships become utterly anonymous, then you have
• 1:20:10
  scope for people who are essentially psychopaths and
• 1:20:16
  selfish to go. I'm not going to take that from
• 1:20:19
  you. Yeah, I know.
• 1:20:20
  Then you're in trouble. And then you're in.
• 1:20:21
  You're in big trouble. And that's why people stop kind
• 1:20:26
  of acting as good citizens. Yeah.
• 1:20:31
  And it when it becomes literally dangerous or can become very
• 1:20:35
  dangerous, you know, when you go to the aid where somebody's
• 1:20:38
  being attacked and you go to the aid of an innocent person and
• 1:20:42
  it's not, you know, the police often say afterwards, don't do
• 1:20:45
  it. It's a ring for us.
• 1:20:48
  That's what we're here. For then we need more.
• 1:20:50
  I know. Yes, it's a.
• 1:20:53
  It's a quandary and it's, but it's part of the fact that there
• 1:20:57
  aren't simple solutions in life. The real world is complicated,
• 1:21:01
  particularly the social world. It's probably the human social
• 1:21:03
  world is probably the most complicated thing in the
• 1:21:06
  universe, partly because it's completely unpredictable and
• 1:21:10
  partly because it involves so many different dimensions.
• 1:21:13
  Each person is a dimension. So you're not dealing with a
• 1:21:16
  kind of 1 dimensional universe, which is just you.
• 1:21:19
  You're dealing with a, you know, sort of 500.
• 1:21:23
  Mega complicated. Individuals, each of whom has
• 1:21:27
  their own interests and it just becomes impossible to manage.
• 1:21:31
  So you end up having to engage in compromises.
• 1:21:35
  So everything in real life becomes a kind of compromise and
• 1:21:40
  and a trade off. And how important the trade off
• 1:21:43
  is to you will determine yes what your solution.
• 1:21:47
  Yeah, the sudden, the negotiable, the non negotiable,
• 1:21:49
  all that, all that kind of thing.
• 1:21:51
  I could talk to you for hours and hours and I've got more
• 1:21:53
  questions, but I'm going to condense the most important
• 1:21:56
  things because we we have limited time now.
• 1:21:59
  What's the best tip that you can give?
• 1:22:02
  You know, if we want to improve our social connections, have
• 1:22:06
  better friends, be closer. Is it singing, dancing with
• 1:22:09
  them, gossiping with them? What is it?
• 1:22:10
  How do we what? What's the the tip for everyone?
• 1:22:15
  Well, I think the answer comes down to the the the mechanisms
• 1:22:19
  we use for fast tracking friendships, which are what a
• 1:22:27
  set of behaviours that I refer to as our social toolkit.
• 1:22:30
  And these are laughter, singing, dancing rituals.
• 1:22:35
  And in the normal world, the rituals of religion in
• 1:22:38
  particular, feasting, eating and drinking together socially and
• 1:22:43
  storytelling and all of those helped to create a sense of
• 1:22:48
  community. But of those, by far the best is
• 1:22:52
  singing. We always refer to singing as
• 1:22:54
  the icebreaker effect because we've shown choral singing.
• 1:22:58
  So singing together, right? Community singing.
• 1:23:00
  I mean, don't been, you know, Bach and Tartars or something
• 1:23:03
  fancy. I just mean old folk songs
• 1:23:05
  around the camera. And what we've shown is you can
• 1:23:08
  take a bunch of complete strangers, give them an hour's
• 1:23:12
  community singing together. So the Gareth Malone, you know,
• 1:23:16
  community singing the old songs that everybody knows, an hour of
• 1:23:20
  that and they'll come out of it feeling as though they've known
• 1:23:24
  each other since they were at primary school.
• 1:23:27
  It's absolutely incredible how fast that is.
• 1:23:29
  And nothing, nothing else works as fast as that.
• 1:23:33
  And you actually haven't interacted with anybody.
• 1:23:35
  What you've done is stood in a circle or maybe a line and sang,
• 1:23:40
  but you've been singing in synchrony with each other,
• 1:23:45
  highly synchronised. And singing triggers the
• 1:23:48
  endorphin system, which is what provides the emotional raw feels
• 1:23:53
  component to relationships. And it does it very, very fast,
• 1:23:57
  much faster than anything else. Second best thing is probably
• 1:24:00
  eating together or that. Yeah, eating, going out
• 1:24:03
  together. So singing.
• 1:24:04
  Which is why we do. Eating together.
• 1:24:06
  Arranged in a party. Or podcasts.
• 1:24:08
  Or podcasts. That's another one.
• 1:24:10
  So Robin, it's been so lovely having you and hopefully we'll
• 1:24:13
  do a Part 2, get through the rest of the questions.
• 1:24:15
  It's been a great. Pleasure.
• 1:24:16
  Thank you so much. Thank you.