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In the Event of The Apocalypse · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we Do
• 0:16
  what we do. I am your doomsayer host Abraham, and I am definitely
• 0:21
  not your survivalist host Shane. We're psychology podcast. We talk about the things
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  that people do and what people might do hypothetically in an event that is almost
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  certainly never going to take place, at least we hope not. Uh huh.
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  Anyway, we talk about psychology things. That's what we do. That's
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  mostly what we do. Yeah, and this is one of those weird ones
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  where we can only hypothesize what would happen because in the event of a true
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  apocalypse, we could not retroactively study it because we wouldn't be around to study
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  it. You said, the word it is we're talking about the apocalypse,
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  but not like the fun, cool metal ones like in the Bible, like
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  where it's like very metal and there's dragons, Like. We're talking about things
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  that happen in the real world where you know, it's a little bit scary
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  and maybe we've seen some examples and movies. As you said, it is
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  hypothesizing, it is speculating in it. But we're going to largely couch this
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  on precedent. We're going to use the events that have happened in the past
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  to talk about what might happen in the future if we were to be faced
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  with some extinction level catastrophic event. Hopefully that does not happen in our lifetimes,
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  yes, and or maybe ever, you know, it'd be great or
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  ever really truly. Yeah, I mean, eventually the Sun will swallow the
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  Earth, but hopefully humans will have been gone for a long time at that
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  point, so that's the goal. Yeah. Yeah, But anyway, before
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  the Sun swallows the Earth, before humans wipe each other out, or evolve
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  into something else, or just abandon our planet and go live on some other
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  planets, we can acknowledge that at least on the day that this releases,
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  we can wish everybody happy. Atheist Pride Day. I never realized there was
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  a holiday that I could feel so seen, but here we are. There
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  you go. Yeah, yeah, as a white man, you know,
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  I finally get a holiday. It's also be in for Peace Day, so
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  that's kind of fun. I like that Bibliomania Day. There's a lot of
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  book centric holidays. I think it's great. I like that it's extraterrestrial abductions
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  Day. So I guess if you want to get away from an apocalypse,
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  that's a good way to do it. That's pretty good. Now, confusingly
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  with Atheist Pride Day, it is also International Astrology Day. Yep, mercury
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  is in Marmalade. It's also International Day of Happiness. Kick Butts Day,
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  I think may and maybe even more metaphorically than anything like kick your butt doing
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  a really hard workout or something, or like maybe you debate really well and
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  kick someone's but metaphorically by wood you have the debate. Yeah, don't touch
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  anybody without their consent is really what we're trying to get out there. Yeah,
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  don't assault anybody. It's also National jump Out Day. Sure don't know
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  what that means, but it is National Native American HIV AIDS Awareness Day,
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  very specific and very important. It's National Ravioli Day, which I particularly enjoy.
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  It is won't you Be My Neighbor Day? Oh, mister Rogers,
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  I saw something that said he was part of like the Holy Trinity with Bob
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  Ross and I forget who the other person, oh, crocodile Hunter. Like
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  the three of them were like it was like be kind of nature, be
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  kind to others, and be kind to yourself and that was like the real
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  Holy Trinity, and I was like, I love that. That's perfect.
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  That's really fun. It's so great. It's also World Frog Day, so
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  if you like that sort of thing, Yeah, frogs are great. Presumably
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  I think that means be nice to frogs. In addition to the fact that
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  it is the International Day of Happiness, it's also ACT Happy Week, so
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  for one day, be happy. For the rest of the week, ACT
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  Happy, uh huh. Yeah, yeah. They don't mince words there.
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  It's also American Chocolate Week, which you know, for our international listeners you're
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  probably thinking, eugh, But I like chocolate, so I'm fine with it.
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  Yeah, and I would say Hawaiian chocolate specifically. And I've said this
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  many times on the show, so I'm sorry you all keep hearing it,
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  but Hawaiian chocolate, you just you can you almost can't do better. I'm
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  sorry everybody around the world, but try the Hawaiian chocolate. And I love
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  I love the like dark bitter chocolates that are common in other places around the
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  world. That's a big island. Yeah, that's right at my alley,
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  But Hawaii, we just lost all of our Belgian listeners. That's right.
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  Yeah, yes, Belgian chocolate very good, Hawaiian chocolate very very very good,
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  just just saying on a scale very very it's very very good. That's
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  right. It is Clutter Awareness Week, Get the clutter out. Yeah,
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  I mean, I'm very well aware of mine. So it's International goof Off
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  Week, which I feel like is just what I do every every day.
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  So sure, glad that it's recognized International Teach Music Week. Love that that's
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  great? Anymore? Is that just a plain synthesized tones and loops? I
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  hope not. I hope. I hope everybody gets a trombone, you know,
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  violin if you like that stuff too. It's also Ramadan, so hey,
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  hey, that's nice. A piramedon. Our thoughts are with you those
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  people for whom this is a very tough time because of the state of the
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  world at the time. And it's World Folk Tales and Fables Week, Yes,
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  yes, which I love. I love a good story so yes,
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  well, and that actually plays beautifully into our topic for today because we're going
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  to be telling some good stories. It is a certainly end of the world
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  story day. Hey, yes, that's a that's what we're celebrating. So
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  we are going to talk about the apocalypse, but really we're going to focus
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  on talking about how people respond in the face of an apocalypse, because I
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  think there are a lot of depictions and there are a lot of kind of
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  guesses and questions, but we're really going to spend some time unpacking what it
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  is that people will do in the event that things go terribly terribly wrong.
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  And I mean, doomsday preppers, conspiracy theorists, extremely religious extremists, and
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  Hollywood have all sort of speculated on what the doom's day would look like.
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  And there's I mean, there's so many movies and TV shows about this,
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  uh huh. There's Day After Tomorrow, Moonfall, Walking Dead, Mad Max,
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  Zombie Land, Last of US TV shows, and in the Game I
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  Guess, Bird Box, The Road, Water World, Into the Forest,
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  Children of Men, Book of Eli, Twenty eight Days Later, and Twelve
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  Monkeys are just some examples of Hollywood telling stories about what the end of the
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  world will be like and how people will be in the event of the apocalypse,
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  right, And so you'll find that a lot of these kind of end
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  of days scenarios, their predictions kind of talk about how humans will behave and
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  in all of these scenarios. Humans descend into roving gangs of murderers and looters
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  and a few good guys just trying to get by, but it's mostly just
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  total chaos, total pandemonium, and any stranger meeting another person immediately pulls a
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  gun and threatens violence. And that's kind of the image, right, So
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  when things go wrong and all of the structures of humanity breakdown, we are
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  left to danger, to aggression, to just constant survival mode, and we
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  don't really know that that's the most accurate way to describe what would happen.
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  We fortunately have not actually had to experience, like the biblical ending of the
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  world, everything on fire and gods and demons coming down and killing us all,
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  at least not exactly in that way, and so we've sort of just
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  speculated what would happen. And I think for the sake of drama, it
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  makes a lot of sense in a storytelling capacity where your only goal is entertainment,
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  is to have antagonists, is to have conflict, and so you manufacture
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  the conflict for the sake of the story. Are these musings a good depiction
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  of how people would behave and what would people actually do in the event of
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  the apocalypse, and that could be zombie apocalypse, it could be a major
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  meteor crashing into Earth and breaking down civilization, nuclear war, whatever it might
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  be. What would we expect people to do in one of these situations that
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  they've just depicted in movies and TV shows. We're gonna look at some of
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  the most destructive crises in history that humans have experienced and kind of talk about
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  some logical deduction using our understanding of psychology and how humans will respond in these
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  types of scenarios. Just knowing kind of what we know about pro social behavior,
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  about systems, about all of those things, we're going to kind of
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  apply those models to these end of the world scenarios. Yeah, it's a
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  two pronged approach of looking at history just what has already happened, What can
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  our experiences as a species tell us about what we might do in an event
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  like this? And then also we can take this from the angle of what
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  makes logical sense with our understanding of a very basic application of logic to the
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  circumstances of the scenario, as well as our understanding of human behavior in psychology.
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  Right, absolutely, so, it's worth starting with what an apocalypse is,
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  and there are kind of two different definitions here, because I think the
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  term apocalypse was more or less introduced and understood by the Bible, and this
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  is a book of revelations, and it is the complete and final destruction of
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  the world, or at least the people on the world. It is the
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  end of days, at least for humans. Not the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where
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  he's a drunk detective that fights the devil. Yes, not that one,
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  very different end of days. But really, what we're talking about with an
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  apocalypse and kind of what it's come to be known as, is a catastrophically
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  devastating, destructive event. So there are a lot of different ways this could
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  come up. I mean, if you follow anything from NASA, then you
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  know that there are always asteroids that fly by the Earth far too close for
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  comfort. It could be nuclear war, it could be an oncoming ice age,
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  it could be any of these things. But these destructive events, essentially,
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  the idea is that it wipes out structures humanity or the majority of people
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  in a lot of different ways, or all of the people, and kind
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  of leaves folks to survive in these kind of after event atmospheres or environments.
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  Yeah, and they could also include things a little bit more I guess you
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  could say pedestrian like disease. You know, we just recently made our way
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  through a global pandemic. It could be something like the catastrophes that have been
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  developing as an outcome of global climate change, which we don't even know what
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  those all are going to be, but we've already started to see what some
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  of them will be, and they are very unpleasant, and that could lead
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  to you know, sea level rise. And then of course the threat of
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  global self annihilation in the form of mass you know, global war against one
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  another using highly, highly destructive weapons that are very capable of ending human life,
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  the whole species as it were. So anyway, with all those considerations,
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  we could look back and say, what have people done in the times
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  of severe crises? And as I said, you haven't gone through the biblical
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  apocalypse, but we have gone, apparently through some things that were kind of
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  close to that. And how the magnitude of them and the severity of those
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  events. Right, And as we kind of start to gather more information about
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  the history of humans and we start to look at the events that are coming
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  up, and all the possibilities and all the models. There are some I
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  think it's really fascinating and we'll probably get into this. There are some signs
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  that the apocalypse is on its way, or there are some signs that things
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  are going to get worse for humans, and one of those signs is ads.
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  Okay, well, unfortunately we've doomed this all with the We did make
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  it through the AD break though, So let's talk about the time that all
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  the proto humans died except for a very few. Yeah, so human antswer's
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  date back over one million years ago. I mean, if you subscribe to
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  like evolution and like history and all that stuff. If you're reading like an
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  old book written by people, then not so much. But yeah, what
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  we subscribe to is this idea that humans have been around for a while as
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  humans evolved into different species. Eventually, Homo sapiens only emerged around three hundred
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  thousand years ago. One source suggested that Homo sapiens from three hundred thousand years
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  ago were archaic Homo sapiens, and that modern Homo sapiens emerged only about one
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  hundred and sixty thousand years ago. It's still like too much time for me
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  to comprehend that's a long time. Like, it is really difficult to try
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  and wrap our minds around even one hundred and sixty thousand years, let alone
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  one hundred and forty thousand on top of that to make three hundred thousand years.
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  And yeah, like our lives are so short that we tend to look
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  back in history and it's hard to make sense of it, and so we
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  may subscribe to a nonsensical view that contradicts all available evidence that, like humans
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  have been around for five thousand years or six thousand, well, I mean
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  the nineties were only couple of years ago, So like I think that all
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  of us have like a weird distortion of time in general, you know.
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  Yeah, yeah, so time is hard. Big numbers are hard, and
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  it's okay to not be able to wrap your head around that and have it
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  still be accurate. Right, that's where we're at. But anyway, this
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  is Homo sapiens we're talking about that have only been around for let's say,
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  three hundred thousand years. There was this weird enigmatic gap in the human fossil
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  record of ancestors of current Homo sapiens around nine hundred thousand years ago, just
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  all of a sudden there were far fewer human fossils for a significant chunk of
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  time, and in addition to fossils, researchers developed new techniques for sequencing DNA
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  that illustrated the lineage of genetic evolution of ancestors of humans into what would become
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  Homo sapiens and according to essentially what they did in compiling the available evidence in
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  this twenty twenty three article in Science the journal Science by Who and colleagues,
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  a human ancestor of Homo sapiens may have come to the brink of extinction.
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  So we'll describe sort of what happened in this event. But essentially they said
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  there was this severe population bottleneck where the number of humans on Earth plummeted to
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  very very few, relatively speaking. And it is worth pointing out that the
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  study was criticized by some other scientists for the strength of their conclusions, but
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  many scientists have accepted this as a reasonably plausible interpretation of the data so far,
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  so there's at least good reason to believe that they're probably right at least
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  about parts, if not all, of their discussion in this article about this
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  bottleneck. But just to say that we understand there is a little bit of
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  controversy. I think it's worth simply accepting that what they said is most likely
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  pretty much accurate or pretty close to it, right, just to kind of
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  illustrate though, I think maybe why people are also a little bit nervous about
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  accepting this as a thing that happened is this shift, this kind of this
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  bottle neck in the population saw ninety eight point seven percent of humans on the
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  planet wiped out, either due to extreme cold or severe drought, or both
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  or both. Right, it's a significant drop in human population, to the
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  degree that most species would probably not come back from such a low number,
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  from such a catastrophic population decimation. Yeah, essentially, the data suggests their
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  model suggests that the humans dwindled down to only one thousand, two hundred and
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  eighty people left on the entire planet. Aliens visiting Earth at this point I
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  have found the wild Yeah, they would have found these like these human ancestors,
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  because they really weren't Homo sapiens yet. But they would have found these
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  human ancestors and there would have only been a little over a thousand of them
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  on all of Earth. That was it, And that this population stayed that
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  way, stayed at that size for about one hundred and seventeen thousand years.
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  I think that in itself sounds unbelievable, but if there's significant evidence, or
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  at least gaps in evidence to suggest otherwise, like, it's completely plausible to
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  think about that. So yeah, and to be clear, it was not
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  It was not the same group of people that lived for one hundred and seventeen
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  thousand years. It was just that right population level. So they were obviously
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  having kids, and there's subsequent generations. People don't live for one hundred thousand
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  years. Yeah, we're not talking about Adam and Avier. I'm sorry,
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  I know I'm taking a lot of jabs of the Bible. It's just easy.
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  It's easy. It's low hanging fruit here. Yeah, it's not the
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  same people, but especially because I would imagine that, like life expectancy was
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  probably fairly low at that time. So that's you're talking like hundreds of generations
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  inside of that. Yeah, So had these remarkable individuals not proven to be
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  so resilient, we would not be here today. And that's I think a
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  really important thing to consider, considering that our population has now bloomed to what
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  it is and maybe a little bit overpopulated. It's pretty incredible to think that
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  only about twelve hundred people are responsible for us being here today. Yeah,
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  I mean, this wasn't the fire and brimstone destruction of the world as described
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  in the Bible, but I mean it was the near extinction of humans.
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  You know, the humans that would eventually become Neanderthals, Denizavians, and eventually
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  Homo sapiens like those were almost gone down to this tiny handful of people that
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  are the reason that we're here today, assuming that the evidence that we have
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  is all accurate how we've interpreted it, and again it seems like for the
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  most part we think that that is that is pretty close to accurate, if
• 17:36
  not dead on right. So let's shift gears a little bit. We're gonna
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  do a time jump, as we talked about in our Patreon specific stuff about
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  Dune. We're gonna do a little bit of a time jump as Frank Kerbert
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  would do, and talk about Mount Toba. Now, about seventy four thousand
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  years ago, a super volcano called Mount Toba and what is now Indonesia exploded
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  in a catastrophic event that nearly wiped out the humans again, because what you're
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  going to discover as we go through this is that humans are fragile, squishy
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  creatures. We are We're not like tartar grades that can survive in these situations.
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  We hurt and we squish and we and we're just sacks of meat that
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  are just trying to survive at our computers every day. So this mountain explodes
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  and nearly wipes us all out, exactly. You know, it's one thing
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  to have, like a you know, extreme cold and drought that would wipe
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  out food and nearly kill everyone on Earth. And that's certainly something that could
• 18:32
  happen, and you could see why something that affects the whole planet and that
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  way would be a sort of extinction level event. But just a volcano exploding
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  seems like it wouldn't be. Well, this was no ordinary explosion here.
• 18:45
  This eruption sent shockwaves across the entire planet. The explosion alone, just the
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  initial explosion, blanketed Indonesia what's now Indonesia and India in six inches of debris.
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  So we're talking like a massive, massive geographical area far from the actual
• 19:06
  volcano itself, covered by tons of debris and ash. Right, and the
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  ash from the eruptions filled the atmosphere so completely that the average global temperature dropped
• 19:15
  by three to five degrees. And that doesn't seem like a lot, But
• 19:18
  when the overall global temperature drops, that's bad. Yeah, that's a significant
• 19:25
  shift. Yeah, that's not like your day. It's like, it's not
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  like seventy degrees and it drops to like sixty seven degrees and you're like,
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  oh no, it's we're talking global shift in temperature, which is a global
• 19:34
  shift in climate, which is a global shift in all the things that sustain
• 19:38
  ecosystems. So this change massively disrupted many ecosystems and killed many animals and plants
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  alike, leading to mass starvation. So this one event caused catastrophic damage globally
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  simply by disrupting those ecosystems. The eruption was so severe and widespread in its
• 19:59
  effect, researchers interpreted the evidence and calculated that ten thousand people, or even
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  as few as only three thousand humans survived this event due to the severe alteration
• 20:10
  in climate and food resources, the mass starvation, the cold, and the
• 20:15
  inhospitable environment of an ashen landscape that destroyed the possibility of life for a huge
• 20:23
  chunk of the world. It really brought human population again down to just a
• 20:27
  few thousand individuals. Somehow we soldiered on. So here's the thing that I've
• 20:34
  kind of learned about the planet. The planet wants us dead. Like I
• 20:37
  don't know that everybody realizes that, but when you think about it like that,
• 20:41
  like that's why we have to build things to protect ourselves from the planet,
• 20:44
  because the planet itself does not want us around. Like, let me
• 20:48
  be clear, it just doesn't care that we're around. Like, the planet's
• 20:51
  going to do whatever it does. It's not actively trying to kill us.
• 20:53
  It's going to do whatever it does. It does not care whether we are
• 20:56
  here or not. It probably does now it's probably going like, oh God,
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  like this is like a We're like a wooly sweater that they're trying to
• 21:03
  shake off, you know. Well, and it does seem like and thinking
• 21:07
  through this because at least these first couple of events were not even homo sapiens
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  yet. Well, we were Homo sapiens for the Mount Toba explosion, but
• 21:15
  prior to that, the huge bottleneck that happened and any that we don't have
• 21:19
  other records of that may have occurred, these major extinction level events like these,
• 21:26
  You could also look at these as evolutionary selection pressures that pushed the evolution
• 21:30
  of humans towards some of the traits that we ended up developing. Right that
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  the ones who didn't have the traits that we have now are the ones that
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  died off, and so what was left what was was what was selected for
• 21:41
  by these events. Oh, I love evolution. So but let's talk for
• 21:45
  a second about temperatures and freezing with our next section called so good. If
• 21:52
  you're not familiar, you know, we both like further scenes forever, So
• 21:55
  that's that reference. Yes, So the first time the event we were talking
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  about people or too cold, there's freezing temperatures in drought. Then it was
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  too hot volcanic eruption, although technically part of what was really the killer was
• 22:07
  a lot of cold after that anyway, So we had the cold, we
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  had the volcano, and then the Earth was plunged into a ten thousand year
• 22:15
  colossal ice age starting about twenty thousand years ago. Right, so the average
• 22:21
  global temperatures dropped as much as ten degrees, which again does not sound like
• 22:25
  a lot on a day to day basis, But when the entire globe changes.
• 22:29
  It shifts ecosystems, it shifts populations, it shifts all these things.
• 22:32
  And so this change resulted in massive glaciers stretching across much of the land in
• 22:37
  the northern hemisphere, North America and Eurasia. So you see just kind of
• 22:41
  widespread ice and cold and chilliness and not a sweater to be seen. Yeah,
• 22:47
  I mean, if you imagine these massive, massive glaciers, like,
• 22:52
  things aren't growing in these they have essentially wiped out places where land was where
• 22:59
  things could grow and was just at a freezing temperature all the time. So
• 23:03
  the world became almost impossibly inhospitable to many animals, including humans. And this
• 23:10
  is also like this is when mastodons and saber toothed cats died out because of
• 23:15
  the severity of the environment. Right, And so despite these temperatures driving well
• 23:19
  coated, hearty creatures such as these to extinction, somehow the soft, defenseless,
• 23:25
  mostly furless humans managed to adapt and survive. So again, you know,
• 23:30
  maybe it's God's will something. So people have been soldiering on through these
• 23:36
  huge environmental disasters that are largely about things freezing and food being disrupted and all
• 23:41
  that sort of thing, and I guess massive amounts of lava and hot ash
• 23:45
  as well. But as humans continued to soldier on, we eventually started coalescing
• 23:51
  into these massive groups of people, and in doing so, we were able
• 23:53
  to construct large buildings for shelter. And also these buildings that, because they
• 23:59
  protected us from the elements, would enable a variety of human activities that may
• 24:03
  have otherwise been prohibited during certain seasons. So essentially we could be productive all
• 24:08
  year round in all kinds of weather, and we could do so in a
• 24:12
  way that allowed us to kind of build and expand all the things that we're
• 24:17
  doing much more rapidly. And there was just a ton of people all grouped
• 24:21
  together. But it's that ton of people all grouped together thing that actually started
• 24:25
  to become a problem. Right, So as human groups became larger and larger,
• 24:29
  some new diseases started to breed in the gross conditions created by large groups
• 24:33
  with poor infrastructure, because you know, for some reason, nobody thought they
• 24:37
  should anywhere but in the streets, so that was happening a lot. And
• 24:41
  because people were pooping in the streets, that didn't make for conditions to stay
• 24:45
  healthy, and they're dumping like human and other like construction waste into their drinking
• 24:51
  water supplies and then being like, huh, yeah, but you know today
• 24:55
  we're worried about fluoride, right, and and so people were I think understandably
• 25:03
  mostly only drinking alcohol because it could be distilled from plants that get you know,
• 25:06
  we're getting groundwater and not like fresh water because there was very little freshwater
• 25:11
  because we were polluting the crap out of it. Anyway, in these conditions,
• 25:14
  a little bacteria called Ursinia pestis was started hitching a ride on some fleas,
• 25:19
  pleas that were largely living on rats, but they were also living on
• 25:22
  other animals and definitely living around humans. And this little bacteria was one of
• 25:27
  the most easily communicable and also deadliest bacteria that we had ever encountered as a
• 25:33
  species. Yes, so symptoms of this bacteria when you caught this thing included
• 25:38
  diarrhea, blister It's all the things that you hear about in peptobisma commercials,
• 25:42
  but worse diarrhea, blisters like a general malaise, chills, delirium, bloody
• 25:48
  coughs, and black bulges or bubas in the thighs and armpits and those sores
• 25:53
  gave rise to the common name for this disease, the bubonic Plagueoo. So
• 26:00
  the first time this happened in five point forty one CE, the bubonic plague
• 26:04
  swept across the world, killing more than fifty million people and quote came close
• 26:11
  to wiping out the whole of mankind end quote from Procopius in The Secret History
• 26:17
  as the author in the name of the writing, Well, it's funny that
• 26:19
  he wrote a book called the Secret History and its public book. So now
• 26:25
  you know how secret is it? That's right, a fuckative title, I
• 26:29
  guess. So in thirteen forty seven, the plague returns and wipes out another
• 26:32
  two hundred million people in Eurasia and Africa. So real bad. This thing
• 26:37
  is pretty gnarly. I mean, we did an episode on it. It's
• 26:40
  gnarly. Yeah, it was rough. And so as these filthy colonizers continued
• 26:44
  to grow and spread their numbers in a variety of unsanitary conditions, essentially they
• 26:48
  actually started developing immunities to all of these diseases and plagues that they were cultivating
• 26:55
  in their everyday environments. And so even though they they started to adapt to
• 27:00
  and live I guess you could say symbiotic lives with these diseases that they were
• 27:06
  creating out of their horrific conditions that they were also creating. They also were
• 27:11
  starting to explore and colonize the world, and they brought these diseases with them
• 27:15
  as they're tramping around the world in a mad genocidal rampage to steal land from
• 27:19
  indigenous people and in other parts of the world. Oh me, and people
• 27:23
  are gonna be so mad that we told the truth. Yeah, humans are
• 27:26
  gross. I mean that's something too like humans are soft and squishy, but
• 27:30
  humans are gross, and we make diseases that are gross and we give them
• 27:33
  the people unfairly. So these colonizers had more advanced weapons, but more than
• 27:37
  that, they brought things like smallpox, measles, typhoid, and cholera to
• 27:42
  these different civilizations that did not have these things. And these diseases alone destroyed
• 27:47
  ninety five percent of these indigenous peoples over one hundred and fifty years. The
• 27:51
  totality of their death was so massive that researchers believe the decrease CO two being
• 27:55
  put into the atmosphere by the people being killed off actually decreased the global temperature
• 28:00
  slightly, resulting in a quote little ice age. So the mass destruction that
• 28:04
  disease brought because of colonizers may have actually caused a global event simply because of
• 28:11
  the lack of CO two that was being produced by people. Yeah like that,
• 28:15
  that's how many people died because of it. So again wiped out a
• 28:19
  huge chunk of the population. All right, So, just as a quick
• 28:23
  recap here, we have things that have almost killed humans. We had this
• 28:27
  ice age fault with a drought. We had this massive volcano that also drops
• 28:30
  temperatures. We had another really massive ice age. Then we had the spread
• 28:36
  of significant diseases. Then we had ads. We survived another AD break,
• 28:48
  only to talk about the next thing that almost killed humans another volcano. Of
• 28:52
  course it was a volcano. So as this little ice age was starting to
• 28:56
  thaw out, a volcano gave it a violent push into into a warming direction.
• 29:00
  And this happened in eighteen fifteen. Yes, so in eighteen fifteen,
• 29:04
  Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Simbawa. I hope I'm saying that close
• 29:10
  to right. This blasted enough to bring into the atmosphere to thrust the world
• 29:15
  back into a volcanic winter. The explosion itself instantly killed ten thousand islanders,
• 29:21
  and the smoke and ash filled the atmosphere of the entire planet, dropping the
• 29:25
  global temperature by five degrees right, and so the cold and ash and smoke
• 29:30
  resulted in freezing and flooding and blocked out the sun around the world for so
• 29:33
  long it was called the Year without a Summer. Incidentally, this is when
• 29:38
  and why Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, because they were stuck inside due to the
• 29:42
  terrible weather, and she and her husband and their friends challenge each other to
• 29:45
  a writing competition, which is one of my favorite little bits of trivia,
• 29:49
  and also why Chuck Poalnok's book Haunted is written the way it is. It's
• 29:53
  written based on this experience from Mary Shelley. Oh, I didn't know that.
• 29:57
  I don't think I've read that, but now I want to check that
• 30:00
  out. Yeah. The premise of Haunted is a bunch of authors get together
• 30:03
  and try to recreate the experience that Mary Shelley and all those folks had in
• 30:07
  writing horror stories. And then the short stories that are in it are all
• 30:11
  based on what the authors came up with during that time. So in eighteen
• 30:15
  fifteen. Mount Tambora erupted in eighteen sixteen is when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein,
• 30:19
  and that was called the Year without a Summer, and it was because Mount
• 30:22
  Tambora had blanketed the earth and ash and the damage that this caused to food
• 30:27
  and supplies and crops around the world killed an estimated additional one hundred to two
• 30:33
  hundred thousand people. I mean, again, it's just we're fragile creatures.
• 30:37
  So those are like, those are the like five or six major events that
• 30:41
  have nearly wiped out humans or at least caused substantial, critical levels of destruction
• 30:48
  to a large number of people. So, I mean, that's just looking
• 30:52
  at history what has happened in throughout history, And every single time one of
• 30:56
  these happened, these one of these events happened and people pulled through. And
• 31:02
  so we'll talk about that in just a second. But so those are the
• 31:06
  types. Those are one type of event. But what about in the event
• 31:08
  that we get way too overcrowded. Yes, and this brings us to this
• 31:14
  really interesting experiment that is called ratopia. So we're calling at that. He
• 31:18
  called that rat utopia. Yeah, we're calling at that. Yeah, yeah,
• 31:21
  Ratopia sounds is way more fun though. Yeah, we're big fans of
• 31:22
  Portmanteaus here. Yeah. In nineteen forty seven, John B. Calhoun,
• 31:26
  which you know is just such an American name, conducted an experiment in which
• 31:33
  he it's like if I put into chat GPT and said, give me the
• 31:36
  most American name ever, it would be like, if it wasn't like Eagle
• 31:40
  mcfreedom, it would be John B. Calhoun. So in nineteen forty seven
• 31:45
  he conducted an experiment in which he gave rats a finite amount of space but
• 31:49
  all the resources they could ever need, so basically super enriched environment, no
• 31:55
  want for anything, as much food, water, everything they needed inside that
• 31:59
  space. He seeded these little environments with a few pregnant mother rats, and
• 32:04
  then he just let them breed indefinitely to see what would happen when the enclosure
• 32:08
  became overpopulated. And again food and water were always abundant. They had access
• 32:14
  to all the resources they could possibly need, but they were allowed to more
• 32:16
  or less just breed freely and just to see what would happen once their space
• 32:22
  was pretty much filled with rats. Thus, the rats rapidly populated and filled
• 32:27
  the entire space that they were in because resources were freely available and they really
• 32:30
  had no predators in that environment, right, So the rats were fine with
• 32:35
  each other. They were totally good until space started to become scarce and then
• 32:38
  was completely overcrowded in that space, and then that's when everything started to break
• 32:43
  down. Rats started killing each other, They started candalizing their dead, they
• 32:46
  started killing the babies. A lot of bad things happened, and somewhat drew
• 32:50
  in hid but seized other necessary self care behavior. So they kind of stepped
• 32:54
  away. They walked away, but they stopped doing all the things they needed
• 32:57
  to do to survive. You started seeing these variations and their overall behaviors,
• 33:01
  so particularly around sexual behaviors. So some started becoming exclusively homosexual, some became
• 33:08
  pan sexual, some became hyper sexual they would just mount everything, and some
• 33:13
  became a sexual. They wouldn't try and breed even if there was an eligible
• 33:15
  breeding partner there. And eventually with these mass die offs, like because of
• 33:22
  all the killing, all of the neglect, all of the lack of self
• 33:27
  care and basic survival behaviors and all of that, there were these mass die
• 33:31
  offs of these rats, and these enclosures and what would be left was a
• 33:35
  small non breeding population that would eventually die out and then the entire group would
• 33:38
  be extinct wild. They actually tried several variations of this with similar results,
• 33:45
  so you kind of saw the same thing happen over and over and over again.
• 33:46
  And this was eventually published in Scientific American in nineteen sixty two. Yeah,
• 33:52
  so, I mean this is a little bit different of a scenario and
• 33:57
  the previous examples we were talking about people dying off in large numbers, and
• 34:01
  in these experiments they were looking at what would happen with rats if they became
• 34:06
  overpopulated and overcrowded. What does overpopulation look like? Based on just these bits
• 34:13
  of data that we have, what did we learn? We learned so many
• 34:17
  things, so we have to ask the question, how did people survive so
• 34:21
  many of these massive catastrophic events and how did our ancestors beat the long odds
• 34:25
  and pull through events that killed off far more prepared creatures than us. That
• 34:30
  is ultimately the question that we are trying to solve here today. So an
• 34:34
  archaeologist at the London Museum, Nick Ashton, was really impressed with that study
• 34:37
  that was talking about the bottleneck of humans nine hundred thousand years ago, and
• 34:42
  he said, quote, this would imply that it occupied a very localized area
• 34:45
  with good social cohesion for it to survive. Of greater surprise is the estimated
• 34:51
  length of time that the small group survived end quote. And so he was
• 34:55
  commenting on the fact that like, how would these people have made it through?
• 35:01
  Well, they worked together to make to pull through. There was good
• 35:06
  social cohesion, they were supported one another. That's the only thing that would
• 35:10
  make sense for how that group would have made it through that event. Right.
• 35:14
  And there's another quote from one of the co authors. It says,
• 35:16
  quote, we believe that our ancestors must have been well united to fight against
• 35:20
  the harsh environment. And that was a direct quote from Yusa on Pan.
• 35:24
  Yeah, one of the authors on that study, which was a like multi
• 35:28
  country study. They had scientists from countries all over the world. There was
• 35:30
  like eight of them. I think that's cool. Yeah, So when faced
• 35:34
  with catastrophic events, what we have seen is that people work together. They
• 35:37
  work together to find food, to defend the group, to build shelter,
• 35:40
  to protect their young. They work together. That is what people have done
• 35:45
  in all the times that we've ever been faced with these extinction level events that
• 35:51
  could have and probably should have, if we weren't really lucky, wiped out
• 35:55
  our species. But it just so happened that we had some very res zilient
• 36:00
  people who are there. And the reason they were resilient is because they were
• 36:04
  so adept at working together to survive their circumstances. Right. So history has
• 36:10
  shown us time and time again that when humans are faced with our extinction,
• 36:15
  we band together, we pool our resources, we think, we experiment and
• 36:17
  work our way to a survival strategy. And if you don't really believe that
• 36:22
  we've got anecdotal support just from the global pandemic and watching us go through that,
• 36:25
  I mean, if that isn't an example of everybody coming together and going
• 36:29
  we should do this, I mean, except for people in Florida, we
• 36:30
  don't like masks here apparently. I mean, everybody else was doing a really
• 36:35
  good job I think for the most part, trying to get through that.
• 36:37
  Yeah, and they did. You know, people pointed to how many people
• 36:40
  behaved during the pandemic as an example of why people would be so adversarial during
• 36:46
  an apocalyptic event because they were so selfish. Certain groups of people were so
• 36:52
  selfish and adversarial. They were combative toward one another. Right, But honestly,
• 36:57
  like as humans throughout human history, are most defining characteristic And I say
• 37:01
  this not lightly like, our most defining characteristic is our social organization and our
• 37:07
  capacity for cooperation. The evidence is overwhelming that this is the case. It
• 37:13
  is probably the thing that has kept us alive. I mean, and this
• 37:16
  is the evidence that we're showing. It's like, it's probably the one thing.
• 37:20
  It's not our intelligence, it's not our unique individual acumen. It's the
• 37:23
  fact that we can band together, we can pull resources, and we can
• 37:27
  work together to find a survival strategy together as a species. We operate as
• 37:31
  one community. And here's the thing. Every day, millions of people climb
• 37:36
  into their little metal machines and go barreling down the paved paths with hundreds of
• 37:39
  other people doing the same thing. We moderate our speed against one another,
• 37:44
  communicate via signals, adhere to symbols and painted lines, and the vast majority
• 37:49
  of the time we do so successfully with no one getting hurt. That in
• 37:52
  itself, driving down a highway it should be that is in itself an accomplishment.
• 37:58
  I mean, I live like the road that I live on is connected
• 38:01
  to the most dangerous highway in the United States, and it's the most dangerous
• 38:06
  because by square mile, there are more decapitations on that highway than any other
• 38:10
  highway in the US because it's Florida. But I bring that up because for
• 38:15
  the moment, I've driven down that highway hundreds of times at this point in
• 38:17
  time and been safe, and you watch people for the most part, people
• 38:21
  are safe. That is a feat to be able to do that, and
• 38:22
  it's only a feat because other people are doing the same thing and communicating and
• 38:25
  working together to make it safe. Yeah. I mean, people complain all
• 38:30
  the time about how bad other drivers are on the road. And while I'm
• 38:32
  not going to say that you're wrong, like, certainly I think most people
• 38:36
  could improve in their overall driving skills a lot of the time. I think
• 38:39
  it's also worth pointing out that most of the time people get from point A
• 38:44
  to point and B successfully right the fact that we have far fewer accidents than
• 38:49
  we do successfully completed trips, and obviously I think it would have to be
• 38:52
  that way for people to trust that as a reliable form of transportation. The
• 38:57
  fact that we can do that where we're all. We all have the choices.
• 39:00
  We're driving to drive however we want, and we have put systems in
• 39:04
  place to try and ensure that people will be as safe as possible in driving,
• 39:07
  but nevertheless we do. And then when we get to where we're going,
• 39:10
  we walk into these buildings made by hundreds of people working together to mind
• 39:15
  chop or otherwise manufactured materials and meticulously engineer them together into building these safe structures.
• 39:22
  And in those structures we fill them with precious resources, and we walk
• 39:25
  in, we calmly choose goods, exchange our stuff for their stuff, and
• 39:29
  then we leave without incidents. Right, We only take what is allotted to
• 39:34
  us based on the systems that we've put into place. And granted, like
• 39:37
  this is an exchange of money, but like people don't just run in and
• 39:39
  in large groups and loot the store. They follow the systems and rules that
• 39:43
  we have because there is a social cohesion that helps us sort of navigate with
• 39:49
  respect to expectations of as a societal structure. Right, And people see strangers
• 39:52
  in need of food and need of money and need of help, in need
• 39:55
  of emergency services, and they jump in to help them without being coerced works
• 40:00
  to do so. I mean, I think the thesis of all of this
• 40:02
  is really to say that humans just help each other. And I think that's
• 40:07
  such a great thing for people who really struggle with the idea of humans being
• 40:12
  terrible or humanity is doomed, or maybe you have kind of a cynical view
• 40:15
  on the world. But I mean, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of
• 40:21
  years of history where humans have banded together to survive, to work together.
• 40:24
  And yes, there are a lot of dark corners of humanity, but for
• 40:29
  the most part, human beings do good for one another. They try to
• 40:32
  help each other, and humans themselves have survived, and one of the evolutionary
• 40:37
  benefits that we have had is that we have this kind of pro social,
• 40:42
  this helping behavior, this cooperative behavior that has led that has kept us around.
• 40:45
  If it wasn't for that those volcanoes that ice age, the Bubbontic plague
• 40:50
  would have wiped us out many many centuries ago. Exactly right, although you
• 40:53
  wouldn't think so because of the ads. Despite the ads, we made it
• 41:06
  through. We're on the other side again, and I think they'll be the
• 41:08
  last ad break for this discussion. Anyway, yeah, yeah, just thinking
• 41:12
  about this because we've been talking about the fact that humans are cooperative, they
• 41:16
  help each other, and you said that so beautifully in talking through Like the
• 41:21
  evidence just shows this, but it also makes logical sense too, Like the
• 41:25
  more people that are in a group, the more people that are to provide
• 41:30
  defense or offense or both. There are more people that are to produce and
• 41:34
  secure resources, so farming, hunting, agriculture, what have you. The
• 41:38
  more people you have, the safer and more secure you are pulling from.
• 41:44
  If I may Planet of the Apes, people apart are weak, people together
• 41:49
  strong. Oh I love that? Is that? Is that a quote from
• 41:52
  doctor Zaias? No, it's it's from Caesar, Okay, the Ape Caesar.
• 41:59
  I have only seen a couple of Planet Apes movies, but I always
• 42:00
  remember the Simpsons episode where they go to Planet the Apes the musical and they
• 42:05
  have then that's about toahaias Ohayas says that was one. Anyway, there's a
• 42:14
  deep cut for everybody. That's a very specific reference that I don't think anybody
• 42:19
  else will get like, but I think I like that. I have a
• 42:21
  Simpsons tattoo that's a very specific reference. It's lingo the grammar robot. So
• 42:24
  who knows whether there's anything to be learned from Calhoun's rats and ratopia. Rats
• 42:30
  can be a good analog for humans in a lot of ways, and we've
• 42:31
  kind of seen that a lot and a lot of human experiments where we have
• 42:36
  started with studying rats and carried that over and those concepts and principles and things
• 42:39
  we've learned into human experimentation. But they do not have our propensity to engineer
• 42:45
  solutions to our problems. So it's hard to say, I mean, we
• 42:49
  know it's not the best analog. However, we can say the overcrowding will
• 42:52
  come with problems unprecedented by humans in the past, because that's historically not been
• 42:57
  as much of an issue. Humans have adapted to scarce it. Humans have
• 43:00
  not really had to adapt to overcrowding to the extent that the rats did.
• 43:04
  But we seem to be trying to get there and trying to get there really
• 43:07
  really hard, like we are working at it. But you know, I
• 43:09
  mean, we won't really know how that if there's a one to one match
• 43:15
  on that until we get there, or unless we specifically analyze microcosms that do
• 43:19
  exist where there are overcrowding right now, right, Yeah, yeah, I
• 43:22
  think that we have we do have areas where we can sort of look at
• 43:27
  overcrowding and how people are currently dealing with that. And I think that there
• 43:30
  are places where people are packed in about as close as the rats were,
• 43:35
  proportionally speaking, and we still seem to be doing okay. I think you
• 43:37
  can look at the Kowloon Walled City, right, Like, the Kowloon Walled
• 43:40
  City was still successful despite the fact that it was like the most densely populated
• 43:45
  place on Earth, and that was like that island where like every square inch
• 43:49
  of it was covered by like buildings and apartments and all that. It might
• 43:52
  have been an island, but it was just like this one, Like it
• 43:53
  was like a city that was like stacked on top of each other in this
• 43:55
  really small space where like it was so densely packed that sunlight couldn't reach the
• 44:00
  street levels. Yeah. I definitely heard about that and and that that did
• 44:04
  not turn out well because I believe that that is an actual ghost town.
• 44:08
  Now, not to say that there's ghosts that city has gone now, but
• 44:12
  for a period of time it was okay, Yeah, like people made it
• 44:15
  work. I think that's and I think that's the thing, Like, you
• 44:16
  know, those circumstances were really terrible, but for a period of time people
• 44:20
  were making that work. And this is not meant to be an episode on
• 44:22
  like family Planning, if you will, enough, but just to say that,
• 44:29
  like I think we need we do need to consider the carrying capacity of
• 44:31
  the planet that we're on and maybe make intentional decisions about how we use the
• 44:37
  space so that we all sort of make sense here and that we're not filling
• 44:42
  spaces where we don't have room for people anyway. Point being, it's difficult
• 44:45
  to say what exactly we would learn from those experiments because we haven't had the
• 44:50
  kind of overcrowding. But it does seem like for the most part, we
• 44:52
  have engineered our way out of problems. And I think that and we have
• 44:55
  taken on things as a species to navigate gate some of these major problems even
• 45:01
  when we were at really large population levels. For instance, during some of
• 45:06
  these major these mass events of disease outbreak and I think of the nineteen eighteen
• 45:12
  flu that killed out so many people, we started doing these mass vaccination programs
• 45:16
  and back then when people when we came out with vaccines like they were just
• 45:21
  administered. People just got them, and that helped stop and slow the spread
• 45:24
  of those diseases and saved a lot of lives. And now we've sort of
• 45:28
  said, no, you can keep killing people. That's okay. We'll try
• 45:31
  and convince people that they should get vaccinated. But for those of you who
• 45:35
  want to just kill people wanton lely, you can make that choice instead.
• 45:37
  That is something I have a hard time understanding or app in my mind around,
• 45:40
  but it is. It does seem to be what people are doing currently.
• 45:45
  Maybe you know what, maybe the anti vaxxers are just trying to ensure
• 45:47
  that we don't ever reach over crowding. Yeah, maybe they're the people on
• 45:51
  the street trying to make sure that we cull part of the population at regular
• 45:53
  intervals so that we don't have too many humans on the earth. That must
• 45:57
  be their agenda. I think that's what it is. Yeah, maybe they're
• 46:00
  looking out. Maybe they're looking out you know. Okay, that's not true.
• 46:02
  No, No, it's not that could even be terrible about that.
• 46:07
  No, No, it feels disingenuous. Yeah. I think the thing is,
• 46:10
  with the premise of this being humans have depicted this chaotic, murderous,
• 46:20
  criminal inherentness to what humans will do when society breaks down. That's sort of
• 46:28
  what has been painted by these apocalyptic movies and books and TV shows, et
• 46:31
  cetera. And at this point, I think it's worth asking, is there
• 46:36
  a nugget of truth to this idea that that's how humans would behave in an
• 46:40
  end of day's scenario? Right? And so you know, there's always a
• 46:45
  question of fight or flight or freeze that does come up a lot, and
• 46:47
  I think you know, there are always exceptions to the rule. There are
• 46:52
  always going to be people who decide to work alone or they try to go
• 46:59
  like and you'll see those kind of pockets of people that will disappear. But
• 47:01
  if there is any truth in the fear that people will turn on each other,
• 47:05
  that we will see the kind of every person for themselves type of chaos
• 47:07
  depicted in movies and TVs. It might be that we now have a set
• 47:12
  expectation for this. It's not necessarily that that was always the case. It's
• 47:15
  that we have kind of created a narrative around that based on the entertainment that
• 47:20
  we consume. You almost have to kind of undo a little bit of that
• 47:23
  for people who maybe in a real situation, have only ever watched, you
• 47:29
  know, some type of apocalypse movie or some type of apocalypse entertainment where they
• 47:31
  think that that's what's supposed to happen, right, And the truth is is
• 47:35
  it's very unlikely that that would happen without that kind of narrative. So,
• 47:38
  yeah, we're now faced with the circumstance that many people they've seen this depicted
• 47:46
  in art in like TV show, movies, and books, et cetera,
• 47:50
  so often that if there was a catastrophic event that decimates the human population,
• 47:55
  we might actually expect to see at least some groups of survivors who expect to
• 48:00
  other people to come and attack them, and so they treat strangers with fear
• 48:04
  and skepticism that we see in those movies and TV shows, And it could
• 48:08
  be just because they believe that it's how people would or should act in those
• 48:14
  events, and so they pull guns on each other, they steal each other's
• 48:17
  resources, and they go all sort of rogue bands of marauders basically, and
• 48:25
  not because that's what humans do in these events, but because that's what they've
• 48:29
  been led to believe humans doing these events based on totally fictionalized scenarios, and
• 48:35
  I know dispared dooes. I love disaster movies, I love end of world
• 48:37
  stories, I love zombies. I love the storytelling, and I love the
• 48:43
  creativeness of it. That's just not what humans have ever done. And now
• 48:46
  I'm afraid that we've told. I think for the sake of telling a story,
• 48:51
  it makes sense to have antagonists that are other people that are like It
• 48:55
  makes sense to keep people engaged in the story by having them feel fear toward
• 49:00
  like that could happen, someone could do that to me. And so I
• 49:05
  think from a storytelling perspective, it makes total sense to leverage that idea.
• 49:08
  But that's just not how what we've ever seen people do. But now people
• 49:13
  might think that is what people do, right, you see in kind of
• 49:15
  like more acute disasters, right, So, like I think, and I
• 49:20
  think there's probably a conversation about like these really acute events that happen versus like
• 49:24
  long term survival needs. And I like to look at something like maybe like
• 49:29
  an earthquake in a city that causes a lot of disaster versus like the global
• 49:31
  pandemic, and the differences in behavior across both of those. Right, So
• 49:35
  in an emergency. There's a difference between emergency and apocalypse, right, So
• 49:38
  like in an emergency where like an earthquake happens, people are going to scramble
• 49:43
  for a minute, like there's a crisis, or like think about nine to
• 49:45
  eleven, right, Like something happens and there's a crisis, and people are
• 49:47
  going to first scramble for safety most of the time to kind of make sure
• 49:52
  like okay, like let's say, let's like assess what's going on, and
• 49:54
  then they're going to immediately after dive in to try to help and try to
• 50:00
  figure out what to do. You saw that in nine to eleven. You
• 50:01
  saw that in the earthquakes in the Dominican Republic and all that. You saw
• 50:05
  this kind of or in Haiti, and you see these kind of situations that
• 50:07
  occur where in the moment when the disaster is happening, people are gonna scramble,
• 50:14
  but they are going to go right back in. You look at the
• 50:16
  pandemic and you look at for the most part, people came together and they
• 50:20
  said, you know what we're gonna do. We're gonna work from home,
• 50:22
  We're gonna develop these systems to do this. We're all gonna mask up.
• 50:24
  We're gonna change some systems, We're gonna update some systems, We're gonna do
• 50:27
  some things right now, just because this is the information that we have,
• 50:30
  so we're gonna keep safe. And that was a movement of I mean,
• 50:34
  global human behavior that changed based on some type of impending doom. And I
• 50:40
  think that those examples you see that, like whether it's acute or whether it's
• 50:45
  kind of like a slow burned disaster type of situation. In both those situations,
• 50:49
  you see that the majority of people went so far as to help one
• 50:52
  another, to look out for their fellow human, to really do the best
• 50:58
  to make sure that they were doing their part to protect other people. And
• 51:01
  I think that, you know, whether those movies out there are going to
• 51:05
  inform that decision. I think for the most part, what we're still seeing
• 51:07
  is that people will jump into action in the right ways and really work to
• 51:12
  serve their fellow human. Did we ever do I feel like we did an
• 51:17
  episode that was sort of tangentially related to the Lord of the Flies, this
• 51:22
  idea of like people being stranded on an island. Do you remember us talking
• 51:25
  about that or am I making that up? I feel like we, you
• 51:29
  know, I feel like you and I talk about all kinds of things all
• 51:30
  the time, So it's very possible that you and I talked about that,
• 51:32
  but we maybe never did an episode on it. Okay, Well, so
• 51:36
  because there was this real life example of people who got stranded on an island,
• 51:39
  and it was like a bunch of kids and while they're what they did
• 51:44
  is they like they worked together to form a little like society for themselves until
• 51:50
  they were rescued. You know, they they didn't devolve into this chaotic like
• 51:53
  winner Takes All system on the island, which was the story of Lord of
• 51:58
  the Flies. Well, the play crash, the Chilean football team that crashed
• 52:01
  in or Argentina, like that team that crashed, like they had to like
• 52:06
  survive for like sixty nine days on the mountaintop, Like they weren't like they
• 52:09
  didn't break down and start murdering each other. Like even the Daughner party wasn't
• 52:14
  really doing that. That's true. Yeah, we did an episode on that.
• 52:16
  As grim as that situation was, they weren't really doing that. Like
• 52:21
  so you know, even in those types of acute disasters, people aren't really
• 52:23
  doing those things. Yes, exactly, And there's so so many stories of
• 52:28
  this. There's there's acute disasters that were during expeditions and like when things broke
• 52:32
  down again, people still tried to help each other. I remember there was
• 52:36
  a story I was just hearing recently on a podcast talking about the first time
• 52:40
  people made their way to I want to say. It was the South Pole
• 52:45
  and when you're down there, the environment is extremely harsh and there was somebody
• 52:50
  there who was like in the crew, who was really sick. And so
• 52:52
  the person who was in there group of people who felt the best gave up
• 52:57
  his portion of food to this person to help them pull through. And it's
• 53:00
  like, because it's so cold and they're like care and equipment. They said
• 53:04
  that you easily are burning just through like three four thousand calories a day,
• 53:07
  right, and so like you just have to eat a ton of food,
• 53:09
  and so like for this person to give up their food for this other person
• 53:14
  was a huge sacrifice, right, and that they were willing to do it.
• 53:17
  And again, people do this. They sacrifice for each other, and
• 53:20
  as you've said, in these acute disasters, they sacrifice for each other.
• 53:23
  So like the it worries me that I think there are people who prep as
• 53:30
  if they do expect that this is how people will behave and the event of
• 53:35
  apocalypse, you know, they're armed to the teeth and they're like they're fully
• 53:38
  planned to like isolate from people and be prepared to kill their neighbors. That's
• 53:43
  the thing I think that worries me about where there might be some truth to
• 53:45
  this, But most of the time, what we've seen people do is banded
• 53:47
  together, and those people will be stronger for it, right, And I
• 53:51
  think that's that's just the thing to know, is like, if you choose
• 53:53
  to accept people into your group and to protect each other, you will be
• 53:58
  far stronger than trying to so with a bunch of guns, right exactly.
• 54:02
  All right, Well we did make it to one more ad break and haha,
• 54:07
  yeah, that's the thing that's happening. Sorry, all right. So
• 54:16
  we do have a couple of like interesting tidbits, I think, things that
• 54:20
  are just kind of worth knowing or thinking about that I sort of came across
• 54:23
  and doing the preparation for this, And one of them was that there was
• 54:27
  an actual study that tried to calculate whether humans would survive a zombie apocalypse,
• 54:32
  and the answer, it turns out, is no, No, not even
• 54:35
  close. The study created mathematical models to predict how long people would survive given
• 54:40
  the speed and communicability of a zombie virus. What they found was that,
• 54:45
  you know, we'd be wiped out within a year. No one would survive,
• 54:49
  and that humans would be wiped out within a year because of a lot
• 54:52
  of different factors. But basically, if there's zombies, you're just not going
• 54:55
  to make it. Yeah, it's just because they would grow down outnumber people,
• 55:00
  there would be impossible to essentially hold them back. That was sort of
• 55:05
  the general thing that they concluded with is that like, it's just your numbers,
• 55:08
  you just they would outnumber people, and then they would really outnumber people,
• 55:13
  and then they would massively outnumber people. So if their motivation was in
• 55:16
  fact to spread the disease and kill and eat other people, they would be
• 55:21
  impossible to stop them because they would come in waves that you can't even imagine.
• 55:24
  What they did speak to though, I think the authors of the study
• 55:28
  or someone else pointed out that they didn't really consider rates of childbirth and like
• 55:32
  how people might be reproducing to stave off their own extinction. But the authors
• 55:37
  that they also didn't think it would matter much as people would be killed off
• 55:40
  so quickly, they wouldn't really have time to pad their population to prevent like
• 55:45
  the total wholesale destruction of everyone. But they did say that, like,
• 55:50
  these are just sort of hypothetical models. But what they came up with is
• 55:53
  in these little simulations they created, everyone dies. And to be fair,
• 55:58
  this is it sounds like or this is like a disease model and not necessarily
• 56:01
  like a societal type of like, so there is a difference between like looking
• 56:07
  at kind of the variables that go on with human behavior versus just communicable diseases
• 56:12
  and totally just from a disease standpoint. Yeah, we're not going to keep
• 56:15
  up. That's a great point. Yeah, all right. The other one
• 56:19
  that I found was kind of interesting was this idea of apparently the CDC,
• 56:23
  the United States Center for Disease Control, has a protocol or like a manual
• 56:29
  for how people behave in a crisis. They call it the Psychology of a
• 56:32
  Crisis and how to respond to a crisis when it emerges. And I found
• 56:37
  this updated as of twenty nineteen, which is going to be ironic as we
• 56:40
  unpack what they describe in here. Yeah, so they discuss four ways of
• 56:45
  processing information. First, they say that you should simplify information, make it
• 56:47
  as simple as possible for people to understand so that it is not getting misconstrued
• 56:52
  and it is not confusing for everybody who is involved in that crisis. And
• 56:57
  actually specifically like that is what they do recommend, and it is because people
• 57:00
  tend to simplify their own synthesis of information that they receive. So people basically
• 57:07
  when they hear information, they sort of derive a quick takeaway from that,
• 57:10
  and so the simpler you can make your message, the more you can direct
• 57:14
  what people's takeaway is. But people tend to simplify information that they get.
• 57:19
  Another one is that people tend to hold on to their current beliefs. So
• 57:22
  people, whether they would have been flexible or not, become pretty rigid in
• 57:24
  what their thoughts are and beliefs are in crisis scenarios. Does that sound familiar.
• 57:30
  Also, people will look for additional information and additional opinions because there is
• 57:35
  kind of a general and healthy distrust of scientists over the many years, or
• 57:39
  it's just the public like this type of information that goes out, people don't
• 57:43
  trust anybody, like nobody trust anybody anymore so when information goes out, they're
• 57:47
  always looking for additional information or opinions, and additional opinions or information that might
• 57:53
  jive with their current beliefs. So you've got that kind of working against you
• 57:57
  when you're disseminating anyway. Yeah, I mean, they're obviously going to be
• 58:00
  highly motivated to receive as much information as possible in a cataclysmic sort of event,
• 58:05
  Like they're trying to just learn what they can, So they're very susceptible
• 58:08
  to hearing anything, and what that means is that they'll often will believe whatever
• 58:14
  the first messages they receive might be. So the speed of communication is really
• 58:17
  important. And so the CDC basically recommends as a not a counter but like
• 58:24
  a in preparation for this is how people react in these situations, that like,
• 58:30
  how to try and best support people through this is to use simple messaging,
• 58:36
  to ensure that messaging comes from a credible source, to use consistent messaging,
• 58:40
  and to be accurate as soon as possible. And so they publish this
• 58:45
  in twenty nineteen, and then we were faced the global pandemic and it seemed
• 58:49
  like everyone in charge at the CDC did not read their own book or manual
• 58:55
  on this because we did not see consistent and clear communication from them very confusing
• 59:01
  times. For sure, I think they own that. I think they have
• 59:05
  said as much that that was a fault of theirs, but that is the
• 59:07
  thing that happened, and so it's worth just pointing out that that that is
• 59:12
  how they they oriented to like how people behave in a crisis, and I
• 59:15
  think those are reasonable descriptions of what to expect in those situations and it makes
• 59:20
  a lot of logical sense. Yep. Absolutely one. So I think just
• 59:23
  one thing I want to add before we wrap up here is talking about what
• 59:28
  we understand of psychology, and essentially, as we said, humans are very
• 59:31
  susceptible to social consequences and our social environment. We're very susceptible to cues from
• 59:38
  people around us for things that they like and things that they don't. And
• 59:42
  that is kind of part of why we were able to be cooperative in the
• 59:45
  first place, is because we are looking to one another for feedback and support
• 59:52
  and communication to help us do the things that we do. And so just
• 59:57
  thinking very logically about what we understand about behavior is that like, we are
• 1:00:04
  going to do things that I think are both in line with what we already
• 1:00:08
  expect and believe. But we also find a lot of it's a loaded term,
• 1:00:15
  but there's like inherent reward in helping each other. Right. You get
• 1:00:20
  people who do volunteer things all the time, and some of them do it
• 1:00:23
  because they feel compelled to do so for religious reasons, but plenty of people
• 1:00:28
  do it for totally altruistic reasons. Setting aside whether or not altruism is real,
• 1:00:32
  they do it because they feel it's the right thing to do for other
• 1:00:35
  people, right, Right. That I think is really important to unpack is
• 1:00:38
  that, like we see this all the time in people's day to day when
• 1:00:42
  they don't have something that they have to fight against that they try and like
• 1:00:45
  support others. And when we are faced with crises, most of the time,
• 1:00:50
  like the world comes to help, Like we help each other, the
• 1:00:53
  powers that be come to help. Yeah, And it's kind of a nice
• 1:00:57
  thought if you're ever struggling with just kind of I guess that humanity is doomed,
• 1:01:01
  it's good to know that there's evidence that says otherwise, that people are
• 1:01:05
  just kind of primed to like from an evolutionary standpoint, not even from like
• 1:01:09
  a societal standpoint, just from like an evolutionary standpoint, we are primed to
• 1:01:15
  help each other, and that's that's a pretty nice feeling. Yeah, absolutely,
• 1:01:19
  Okay, So I think that's what we have to say about what people
• 1:01:22
  would do in the event of an apocalypse. It's something I've wanted to talk
• 1:01:24
  about for some time because while I really enjoy all those stories, I have
• 1:01:30
  always felt like, I'm like, this isn't what people do. Like,
• 1:01:34
  have a hard time connecting to this all the way, Like I can totally
• 1:01:37
  get immersed in sort of the stories that carry the overall narrative thread of those,
• 1:01:43
  but I'm like, this isn't. People just don't behave this way in
• 1:01:45
  these scenarios. They never have and there's really no evidence to suggest that they
• 1:01:49
  ever will, except for maybe those people who are expecting that to be the
• 1:01:52
  case, and so they sort of create, they manifest the problem they're afraid
• 1:01:57
  of. Right, But that even seems like that'll we have a fairly small
• 1:02:00
  number of people. I think most people will do what people have always done,
• 1:02:02
  which is that we band together, we pool our resources, we defend
• 1:02:07
  each other. We have more people for defense, more people for producing resources,
• 1:02:10
  and we support each other and the more people we have, the better
• 1:02:13
  able we are to do that sort of thing. So that's I think what
• 1:02:15
  I would expect from people in an apocalyptic event for real. Yep, agreed,
• 1:02:21
  Okay, I think I've said the same message like twelve or fifteen times
• 1:02:23
  now, so probably it's about time for us to instead just give credit where
• 1:02:29
  credit is due. If you like this and you'd like to support the show,
• 1:02:31
  you can join us on Patreon, and people who have already done that
• 1:02:35
  include this awesome group of people that we really appreciate. That is Mike,
• 1:02:37
  m Megan, Leila, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad,
• 1:02:42
  Stephanie, Olivia, Brian Ashley, Kiara, Christy Michelle. Thank you
• 1:02:46
  all so much, We really appreciate you. If you join that group of
• 1:02:51
  people, we will read out your name as I have just done. You
• 1:02:52
  will also get behind the scenes and additional content recordings of us talking before we
• 1:02:57
  actually hit record for the episode and after, as well as videos and notes
• 1:03:01
  and early access to episodes that are AD free, all that kind of stuff.
• 1:03:05
  So consider that. If you'd like to support what we're up to,
• 1:03:07
  you can also just leave us a rating and review, subscribe like to share
• 1:03:12
  us with a friend or somebody. That's a great way to help support us
• 1:03:15
  non financially, at least for you. Yeah, you can also pick up
• 1:03:17
  some merch and I think that that is all the things about support. Also,
• 1:03:22
  I need to thank my crew of people who without whom I could not
• 1:03:25
  do this show. That includes writing in, fact checking from Shandon myself,
• 1:03:30
  audio editing from Justin, and our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson. I
• 1:03:36
  feel like I'm missing something. What am I missing? Am I missing anything?
• 1:03:38
  I think we're just missing recommendations, recommendations. So I have been spending
• 1:03:52
  a lot of time watching movies and shows that have to do with giant monsters
• 1:03:57
  fighting giant robots with my son. So, like, my son is obsessed
• 1:04:00
  with Godzilla, so we've been watching a lot of like Kaiju related things,
• 1:04:02
  and so yesterday I introduced him to Pacific Grim and so that is my recommendation,
• 1:04:08
  because man, what a brilliant movie, like so fun Here's the thing,
• 1:04:14
  people get really funny about movies that don't require a lot of thinking.
• 1:04:17
  This movie does not require a lot of thinking. But that's okay because you're
• 1:04:20
  talking about giant monsters fighting giant robots and how could you not find joy in
• 1:04:26
  that? Right? I mean like seriously, And so if you're not familiar,
• 1:04:30
  this movie is written and directed by Guiermo del Toro co writer Travis Beacham,
• 1:04:34
  and it stars Charlie Huntum, who plays some of the best names character
• 1:04:39
  names ever in a movie. So Charlie Huntam plays Rally Beckett, There's Rinko
• 1:04:45
  Kikuchi who plays Mako Moury. You've got Charlie Day who plays doctor Newton Geisler,
• 1:04:50
  and Idris Elba that plays a really like just kind of like no nonsense
• 1:04:56
  type of character named Stacker Pentecost. What great names, right, those are
• 1:05:01
  great names. Ron Perlman is in this is like a weird He plays Hannibal
• 1:05:04
  Chow, who's like a weird gangster. And the whole movie is about these
• 1:05:10
  giant monsters to come up out of the Pacific rim from what they call the
• 1:05:13
  Breach, and human beings have come together to and pull their resources to build
• 1:05:17
  these giant robots to fight these kaiju since the kaiju are, you know,
• 1:05:23
  threatening the world, and it's kind of how the story evolves, and they
• 1:05:26
  have these what they call jaggers or jaggers to fight the Kaiju, and it
• 1:05:30
  is just the coolest, man. It is just it's a it's a just
• 1:05:32
  a beat him up awesome robots versus monsters movie. And I don't know how
• 1:05:36
  people don't like it more. I mean, movies are a visual medium,
• 1:05:41
  and I love all kinds of film. I really am a big, big
• 1:05:45
  fan of movies in general. But I mean, like it's so good just
• 1:05:49
  watching it's so satisfying. Just watch fought and a giant like alien monster Kaiju.
• 1:05:57
  They're just giant robots and monsters beating the living crap out of each other.
• 1:06:00
  Is just just a delight. It's just so much fun. It's so
• 1:06:03
  fun, Like you can't you can't sit and watch this movie and watch one
• 1:06:08
  of the robots grab a giant oil tanker and just use it as a baseball
• 1:06:12
  bat and like fight the sponsor and go, yeah, it's whatever, Like
• 1:06:16
  come on, y'all, like grow up, like enjoy this stuff, like
• 1:06:20
  don't grow I think of, like don't grow up? I think, yeah,
• 1:06:24
  I think of what do they say in Step to Step Brothers, Like
• 1:06:26
  don't lose your dinosaur? All right, I'm not gonna go and go to
• 1:06:30
  my recommendation here So that was Pacific Rim. That's available lots of places.
• 1:06:34
  When did that come out? Was that like twenty twelve or something like that,
• 1:06:38
  twenty thirteen thirteen? Okay, so it's been out for a minute.
• 1:06:41
  There was a sequel. The sequel was not as good, but it was
• 1:06:43
  still fine if you're like into that sort of thing. Sure, we just
• 1:06:45
  want to see robots fighting aliens. That's that's all that's I watched that forever.
• 1:06:49
  Yeah, so sequel's fine. The first one's really really good. Anyway,
• 1:06:54
  that's Pacific Rim. I'm recommending another board game. I've been on a
• 1:06:57
  streak of recommending board games lately. I've had the the wonderful opportunity to learn
• 1:07:01
  several and so this board game is by stone Myo Games. It's called Apiary,
• 1:07:06
  and I'm just going to read really quickly the summary of Apry as it's
• 1:07:09
  described on the website, because I think it's very funny. I mean,
• 1:07:12
  it's funny for a game nerd such as myself. It is a competitive worker
• 1:07:15
  placement hive building game about hyper intelligent bees in space. So that that is
• 1:07:23
  the one liner about this. I love that. The thing about it,
• 1:07:26
  like thematically, that's very silly and weird, and the art is really beautiful.
• 1:07:30
  It's really pretty how they did a great job. It's just like a
• 1:07:32
  really well constructed game too, in that like it just it really does a
• 1:07:39
  nice job setting up like here are the different things that you can do,
• 1:07:41
  and essentially what you're doing is your exploring planets to spread the hive the bees,
• 1:07:47
  and in doing so you get resources which allow you to do more things.
• 1:07:51
  And that's that's just the game. So it's fairly straightforward in that sense.
• 1:07:55
  But it's got all these like really clever, unique little mechanisms that you
• 1:07:59
  don't see very often in other games. And so it's just a well done
• 1:08:02
  game. So if it's on the heavier side strategically, so if you're out
• 1:08:06
  looking for a simple game, I would not put this in the category of
• 1:08:10
  games that are like super easy. But I think it's really worth it.
• 1:08:13
  It's it's a game that's totally worth it to like learn the learn the rules,
• 1:08:15
  learn the game, and then really get into it because I think you
• 1:08:19
  could play it just over and over and over again and really enjoy it every
• 1:08:23
  time. Yeah, it looks I mean you're right, the art looks beautiful.
• 1:08:27
  It sounds like it's a lot of fun and it sounds like it's really
• 1:08:29
  funny. It's a pretty silly little game that I enjoyed for the space.
• 1:08:32
  Yeah, be's in space. How could you? Where could you go wrong?
• 1:08:34
  How could you be mad about that? So both of our recommendations were
• 1:08:38
  actually tangentially like end of the world, like end of humans type thing,
• 1:08:42
  because mine, no, it's not funny. Yeah, my game it takes
• 1:08:45
  place after humans are gone, and yours is that caid you threaten to destroy
• 1:08:48
  the world. So yep, anyway, they're very close. That's the apocalypse.
• 1:08:51
  If you would like to email us and tell us, or just reach
• 1:08:54
  out to us at all and tell us something that we got wrong, something
• 1:08:57
  you agree with, or maybe something you disagree with, and give us some
• 1:08:59
  kind and constructive criticism, you can do that by reaching out to us directly
• 1:09:02
  at our email info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com. You can also reach out to
• 1:09:08
  us on the social media platforms and chat with us there and give us your
• 1:09:11
  thoughts. We're happy to hear those in all those places, and thank you
• 1:09:14
  so much for listening. Is there anything that I forgot, anything that you
• 1:09:16
  would like to add before we say goodbye, Shane. Just be excellent to
• 1:09:19
  each other, Yes, be excellent to each other. That is lovely,
• 1:09:24
  all right, great, well then that's a great note to end on.
• 1:09:26
  This is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out, see ya. Be
• 1:09:29
  excellent to each other. You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
• 1:09:33
  You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to wwdwwdpodcast dot
• 1:09:40
  com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day. Wh