Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367]

Starting point is 00:00:02 Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest like the best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is Robin Dunbar. Robin is a biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behavior. He is the man.

Starting point is 00:01:04 behind Dunbar's number, a theory about the number of stable relationships we can maintain at once. Robin unravels the thread of research that led him to Dunbar's number and describes how this plays into every single person's layers of human connection. It was fascinating to hear how his findings on social circles have implications for optimally structured businesses and organizations, as well as the idea of homophily, all of which Robin thoughtfully explains. It was a treat to get to explore these topics with Robin Dunbar himself, so please enjoy this great conversation. Well, Robin, thanks for doing this with me. I have to start with the obvious question, which is I would love to hear the story behind you arriving at the incredibly famous Dunbar's number. Oh, my goodness. How long have you got? I got a long time.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Quite a convoluted story, really, actually, because there was a proposal made back in the late 80s. The reason primates, monkeys and apes had much bigger brains than anybody else was that they lived in complex societies. and therefore needed a big computer to manage this. But it was based on largely casual observation as much as anything. And that was a real problem because primates do have much bigger brains. This stuff is expensive. Why would you be carting around all this heavy-duty computer consuming energy like Fury if you weren't doing anything different to what everybody else is doing? So anyway, the suggestion was made.

Starting point is 00:02:31 It's to do with the complexity of their social systems. And I had the bright idea one evening when I was, trying to solve a completely different problem, which is why primates groom each other. If that hypothesis is true, then we ought to find correlation between some measure of group size in primates and their brain size. And so I collated data on group sizes, and I collated data on brain sizes. I stuck them together, and sure enough, there's a very nice relationship. And now we're about 3 o'clock in the morning and getting quite excited.

Starting point is 00:03:06 about how this is going, it occurs to me that we should be able to use this to predict what humans group sizes are. So I did. This gave me a number about 150, so I then spent obviously the rest of the night and several other days and nights sitting in the library looking for data, natural human group sizes. Metropolises like New York and London and Tokyo in mind, They're all very recent things, barely a century old. We spent most of our time in small-scale hunter-gatherer groups. I was looking for data on the size of these groupings. Because they're quite complex grouping is not just a single group.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Hunter-gatherers, like we do, live in sort of multi-layered social systems. So I was looking for a layering within their social systems that was about 150 in size rather than, say, 2000 or 25. And sure enough, there is one. It's generally called a clan or a regional grouping or something like that. It's basically a unit that shares hunting territory as much as anything. It shares the right-stinted territory, let's say. They don't necessarily all live here.

Starting point is 00:04:18 And after that, we just kept finding this number everywhere. Everywhere we looked in the modern world. Our entire modern world is built around this number, 150. Can you explain the scaling up and scaling down of the number that sort of dividing by three or multiplying by three and the fact that you then see this bizarre nesting or layering everywhere too? So it's not just the 150, but it's these other scalar versions of Dunbar's number as well. Think of it best in terms of your personal social network, all the family, extended family and friendships you have. If you look at those and the frequencies are that you contact them or how emotionally close you feel to them or your willingness to do them a favor that would cost you something serious, not a question of just putting a dollar in a beggar's box, as they say, but actually giving them a significant amount of money they asked you to lend money for a project. all of these reveal a kind of layered structure, and that layered structure looks pretty much like

Starting point is 00:05:26 the ripples on a pond where you throw a stone into a lake, for example. So if you think of yourself as the stone surrounding you, these layers moving out from you. And as you go further and further out, the area covered by each ripple gets bigger and bigger, but the kind of amplitude of the wave, the height of the way, it gets lower and lower. And that's quite a good metaphor. for what your social world looks like. So you have these series of layers going out from you, which increase in size, but the quality of the relationship and the frequency that you contact them gets smaller and smaller and smaller, lower and lower as you go further out. So these layers occur at very, very specific numbers. Core is really this 150 number, Dunbar's number.

Starting point is 00:06:14 But within that, there are a series of layers at 50, 15, 5, and the smallest one at one and a half, 1.5. And then beyond the 150 going out further, there are layers at 500, 1,500. The last possible one is 5,000, because 5,000 identifies the number of faces you can say whether you've seen them or not before. In other words, it's the distinction between a complete stranger. I've never seen that face in my life and somebody you've seen, but probably for most of them you don't know much about. You don't even know their name, maybe. But then the 1500 layer within there,

Starting point is 00:06:58 which actually turns out to be the typical size of tribes in Hunter-Catter society, the distinction there is that you can put names to faces. So for all of us, whether you like it or not, nice Mr Donald Trump is in your 1500 layer. But that's only because if you saw him in the street downtown, you would recognize him straight away. But if you kind of wandered up to him, slapped him around the shoulder and said, Donald, come and have a drink with me, he would look very surprised.

Starting point is 00:07:28 I'm sure he'd be a good politician and pretend not to be. So it's that kind of relationship. And as you come further in, the 500 layer is the layer of acquaintances. Many of the people you work with will be in that layer. In other words, you might go and have a beer with them after work. You might even spend a weekend away for some big work-related project with them, but you would never invite them back to your home for a big party. Your 150 layer, well, that's what I always call your barmits for weddings and funeral party.

Starting point is 00:07:58 These are the people who will turn up out of obligation to you on that big once-in-a-lifetime event. you may not know they're there in the third case, the funeral party, but believe me, they'll be there. And then as you come in, so the relationship's getting stronger and stronger you go through the 15 layers, your sympathy group, the people who you would feel extremely upset about if they died. That's been known for a very long time. I didn't discover that. And then inside that is this layer of five, the cinema slayer, which is what we call the shoulders to cry on friends. And that layer turns out to be very important for it.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Usually consists of two family members and two friends plus an odd one from either side. That number turns out to be the one that has the most influence on your general health and well-being. So the best predictor of your mental health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today is predicted by the number and quality of friendships you have in that layer. The five is an average. So if you only have three, don't think yet. Because introverts tend to pervert to have fewer people but have stronger friendships. As a result, extroverts tend to prefer slightly more people but have weaker friendships,

Starting point is 00:09:17 those kind of effects. But on average, very much five. So as I like to say, if you really want to live forever, just make sure you've got five friends. And what about the 1.5? That seems like an odd number at the end of the cycle. I always used to sort of come out with this joke when I was giving talks because I actually thought it was a joke, which was, well, just look at these series of circles and how very tight the kind of fractal mathematical structure is. Each layer is three times the size of the layer inside. And remember, these layers count cumulatively. So the 150 layer includes the 50 people in the layer inside. It's not an addition. But just look at the regularity of this structuring of these numbers. And surely there's a layer missing, if you project backwards, because we only knew about the five, we thought the five was the smallest number.

Starting point is 00:10:09 If you project backwards, there's a number missing. And what is it? Well, it's one and a half. And everybody would say, how can you have one and a half relationships? The answer is obvious. Think about it. Half the population has one very, very close friend in that circle. And the other half the population has two.

Starting point is 00:10:28 What might the difference be? Well, the answer is gender. It's obvious. And if you want to know which way it goes round, he says jokingly, well, it's men only have one in that circle and women have two. That was kind of pulling the leg of the audience, really, because the audience automatically goes, aha, that's your romantic relationships. Clearly, women have one and men have two. It's the other way around. And then my collaborators in Italy, who are analyzing Facebook data, and said, you know, we get this.

Starting point is 00:11:01 layer at one and a half. We think we must have made some error here. They were looking at the frequency of postings and showing very nicely you can identify these layers, but they'd found this extra layer. And I went, what? One and a half, perfect. That's it. What's it all about? Well, we don't know. So when we looked into it, yes, it's true. And the question is, why are women having two? And the answer is they have a platonic friend called a best friend forever, BFF. And that's nearly always another woman, not 100%, but 85% of women at any one time have a best friend forever because the social psychologists who've explored this question have told us that constant reason that women always give is because their romantic partner who statistically obviously is usually

Starting point is 00:11:50 a male is completely useless at emotional issues. You need somebody else who's better qualified to deal with emotional issues, to sort of deal with that part of your life. And the only person that falls into that little bracket, as it were, is a girlfriend. Interestingly enough, when they have a male, 50% of them are male, those males tend to be much more feminized than the average of males. They're often gay men, for example. And what's interesting is that you can ask a guy, do you have a best male friend that kind of do stuff with him? And very often they'll say yes, Jimmy. Jimmy and I go for a beer together now and again.

Starting point is 00:12:32 We've known each other since primary school. And you explore a bit further, the quality of that relationship, and you go, this is not a best friend forever. It's completely different. Because if Jimmy decides he's going off to Thailand for the rest of his life, it is a case of outer sight, out of mind. If he comes back again, you can pick up where you left off. No problem.

Starting point is 00:12:53 But while he's not there, It's really a case of our sat-out-at-at-a-moment which will never ever happen with women, their close friendships. They're on social media, they're on the phone, whatever, trying to keep that relationship going and keep it ticking over. And guys don't do that. What's interesting in that particular context, though, is that it's very clear that men either have one or the other.

Starting point is 00:13:16 That's why they only have a peer with one, if you like, in that layer, rather than the one and a half or the two that the women have. Of course, it's the average of the male's one and the women's two that makes the one and a half for that layer. But men tend to have either a romantic partner or a best friend. So if they don't have a romantic partner at the time, or these things happen as you get older, the intensity of a romantic relationship calls, as you might say politely. And then they might re-institute a male best friend that they hang out with. I'm sure that you have looked at an incredible amount of data and that the internet and social

Starting point is 00:13:58 networks and just the world of digital data has exploded your ability to explore these ideas and these numbers. What has been the most surprising data that you've ever encountered in or around your ideas? There are two prizes potentially here. One was a very notorious study of Facebook, which was published in a very eminent journal about 10 years ago, which became notorious because they'd used Facebook to manipulate people's feeds because they were interested in trying to understand what influence feeds had on people's perceptions of the world. What we all worry about. Nice Mr. Putin, sending us endearing messages

Starting point is 00:14:39 on our Facebook pages to vote for one president candidate or another presidential candidate, according to the one he would really prefer. There are serious issues. behind this, but I'm afraid they got into a lot of trouble. Anyway, they have 61 million, as I recall, Facebook pages that they worked with. That's a huge sample, ginormous, probably talking about, what is it? One percent of all the people, billion people on Facebook or something of that order. Huge, huge sample from all over the world. And they came out with an average number of friends on Facebook of 149. Wow. Now, But believe me, if you work on animal behavior or human behavior like I do, you do not often

Starting point is 00:15:25 get predictions that come out that close. So I think on the strength of that, I'm entitled to go, go past go, cut my $200 and retire to the Caribbean. The other one was really cool because we've done a lot of work and a lot of other people to start to do work on which bits of the brain are involved in this and showing that you can predict the number of friends that people have in their social circles. friends and family, of course, by the size of particular regions in the break, it turns out to be a particular, huge neural network that we used to process social information.

Starting point is 00:15:59 There were some Korean guys who did an entire village. What they did was kind of neat, because most of the time, what we're having to do is to ask people, how many friends have you got? How many friends have you got on Facebook? Check. Write down the list of all the friends and family you have. Who are you phoning? Let's look at your phone calling records on your cell phone.

Starting point is 00:16:18 So we're always looking at it from the individual's point of view. You know, well, you know, okay, you can argue the list of people I phone regularly looks fairly hard-nosed and convincing, but, you know, there may be people that actually have close relationships with that I don't phone because they kind of live next door or in the same house, so I don't bother to phone them. And if I ask people just, who are your friends? Famously, if you ask sort of kindergarten and primary school kids, who are your friends, they'll say, you know, Jimmy, Susanna, Penelope, and then you go to Jimmy, Suzanne,

Starting point is 00:16:51 and Penelope and ask them, are you friends with so-and-so? I'll say, what? Never. So who knows if the data we have is really reflective of the relationships. And what these Korean guys did is they went to everybody else in the village and said, are you friends with each person? So it was the friend's evaluation of their true relationship with you that identifies the number of friends that you as an individual heard. And what they showed very nicely was that

Starting point is 00:17:20 indeed, the number of friends that everybody could claim because these people said, yes, I'm their friend, correlated with the size of these same regions in the brain. So I think that was quite spectacular, really. They were able to do something which nobody else had actually been able to do. What do you think are the most interesting implications of this understanding of how we working groups. These seem to be almost just latent features of our species and of other primates too. Is there something to do with them that you think is the most productive? And or like, did you change your behavior having discovered all this in your own life? What's the news you can use here, in your opinion? You mean, did I look at my friendship circles and go, oh my goodness, I need to

Starting point is 00:18:09 get out more? Something like that. Well, it does happen when you do this kind of research. In the end, what's important about these circles, and here's another interesting feature, actually. This we hadn't quite expected is that it turns out that this relationship between brain size and group size and primates is not a single homogenous set of data. So the data points don't lie on the same line, which is ideally what you want. They scattered quite widely around it. And it's turned out since, we've only recently been able to show this, finally, statistically.

Starting point is 00:18:44 In fact, that relationship consists of four sets of statistical relationships. So they're like four grades. And the grades differ in both group size and cognitive complexity that the animals are using. So these grades have real meaning. It turns out that the layers for our social networks, for these values in this fractal series of 15, 15, 150, 150, 500, actually fall on these grades. beautifully. And we see the same structure in primates and said, this is number four, really. So that was

Starting point is 00:19:20 number three surprise. Number four surprise was to find that this was the same thing was true of primates. The species like chimpanzees and baboons, which have complex multi-level social systems, the layers within their social groups created again by the frequencies which they interact with each other, the strength of the friendship, as if you like, also fall on these layers. So something about these layers, which is these numbers, which is kind of magical in this sense. And so this is a number five surprise, actually. With a bunch of US mathematicians, we were able to show that these numbers, 5, 15, 50, 100, and 5,500 are actually optimal points in the efficiency with which information flows around networks. If whatever your group is hits one of these numbers, then it

Starting point is 00:20:13 works as an integrated group somehow. We didn't quite understand why this happens, but it seems to work in a much more efficient, integrated, cohesive sort of way. But if you're in between, things kind of fall apart. So there are all sorts of implications here for the structure of organisations and businesses in terms of how they organize their departments, how they organize their work groups, for example. You want to hit these numbers. And the numbers and themselves are derivative of the quality of the relationship involved in the emotional fit, if you like, that you have with a person in one of these layers. And one of the implications of that is if you've got a task, develop a bit of code for some

Starting point is 00:21:02 computer program or figure out some processes and allow you to produce a kit of the kind that you make and sell to the public. Maybe it's a service you run for your government department program for running street lightings or something like that. It's best to have a very small group. They will work much faster and much more efficiently, but they need to know each other in the sense that they all come from the same background. So one of the things you mustn't do here is go, oh, we ought to have somebody from

Starting point is 00:21:34 finance and maybe somebody from HR because they'll get sort of very upset if they're not included. And the answer is don't resist the temptation like crazy because what you want at that problem solving thing is for people that don't have to explain everything to each other. So they just know when I say, right, it's what we want to do here. Everybody goes, sure, absolutely. They're all on the same page. They all understand the background and the mechanisms and everything else. Okay, if it's a financial issue, then you want somebody from finance. Maybe if it's a kind of HR type issue, then you want somebody from human resources. But don't include people, which is the temptation we have in organizations,

Starting point is 00:22:20 to add people from different departments in as sort of representative as it were. The answer is don't do it. There is a place for that, and that comes further up the scale. And as you go further up the scale in terms of work group size, you go through different functional things. The 15 layer really works much better for blue skies bandying ideas about. And then it's much better to have a diverse group of people who are coming at the problem with different perspectives, things that another area has already figured out,

Starting point is 00:22:55 be able to sort of look over the parapet and say, oh, because this is how science works. All the big innovations in science have come about by somebody from a completely different discipline, usually poking their nose over the parapet and going, oh, that looks like an interesting. interesting problem, what's it all about? And you explain it to them and they get, oh, that's very like what we have just solved the problem for. We know how that works. Why don't we just apply the same methods or mathematics or whatever it is to your problem

Starting point is 00:23:22 and it might work? And very often it does break a log jam. And likewise, think about the optimal size of boards, for example, it's going to be one of these numbers. It's probably not going to be below 15 because you want a really wider representation. but you certainly probably don't want to go above 50. I looked with horror the size of the committee for climate change, 150 to 200, you think. Nothing's going to get done.

Starting point is 00:23:53 Part of the problem is feeling that you make a contribution. There's only so much speaking time that's available, unless you're going to sit there for a year, by which time, of course, you've forgotten what the first person said. So you've got to bear in mind that speaking. time is very limited. The issue is that if you have two bigger groups, you end up with people who just sit there and get bored and end up looking at their feeds or their emails on their smartphones. And this is exactly what we found during lockdown, Zoom and teams and people trying to maintain contact with work group or departmental group, whatever it may be. So you'd end up

Starting point is 00:24:32 lots of people on a Zoom meeting. And the problem is, realistically, you can only have four people engaged in the conversation. So it would just get dominated by the four people with the loudest voices. And everybody else would kind of get bored in the background. So they ended up wasting huge quantities of time. You mentioned at the beginning that you were studying primate grooming. And that brings to mind a question about the quality or nature of the time that we spend with the people at these different layers of our social structure. And I'm sure that time is not created equal, like different activities function for different reasons. And I'm really curious what you've learned. about the way that we spend time with each other. What's important? What's surprising? What are

Starting point is 00:25:14 some implications at the different layers? Like, the things we actually do with each other. What have you learned that's most interesting there? This really all goes back to you. I mean, as I intimated several times, the layers are created by essentially the amount of time you spend doing stuff with different people. So obviously, the inner core layer, these layers in your social network have very specific frequencies of interaction you must have to keep the person in that place. So the people in your inner five shoulders to cry on friends layer, you have to see at least once a week. That's the minimum. The people in the 15 sympathy group layer next outside it, you have to see at least once a month. If you see them less, those relationships decay inexorably. It takes about three years for

Starting point is 00:26:01 somebody to go from being a member of your sympathy group, your 15 sympathy group, to falling out of your 150 and joining the layer of acquaintances, which includes your favorite barista that you get your glassy coffee from every morning on the way to work and that kind of thing. So it's someone I once knew, but I don't have a meaningful relationship with them. I wouldn't invite them. And it's very clear that that happens. We can show that actually happening with data from people's networks. So you have to invest time in relationships in proportion to essentially the emotional closeness and it turns out that emotional closeness of a relationship is highly correlated with the time you invest in it.

Starting point is 00:26:46 The question is, what are you doing? Well, we just step back a moment to what monkeys and apes are doing. Monkeys and apes spend a lot of time grooming each other. It turns out this is how they bond their relationships, how they create their social bonds, as it were, the intensity of these relationships, which means they'll stick by each other. they won't allow one person to drift off into the bush where they get lost from the rest of the group and these kind of things. They're keeping it on. What that's involving is an awful lot of time spent grooming. And the amount of times spent grooming correlates with the size of the group

Starting point is 00:27:20 in primates. To the extent that some of the most social species who are typically living in group sizes of about 50 individuals are smaller than us, but it's that second inner layer from the 150, they're spending about 20% of their total available daytime engaged in this one activity, social grooming, partly because of the number of individuals they're grooming with, but actually as their group size increasing, they're spending more time grooming as a whole, but actually what they're doing is devoting more time to each individual. They're not necessarily grooming with more individuals, or at least not proportionately more individual.

Starting point is 00:27:58 They're making those relationships more intensive. And the reason that works is grooming, triggers the endorphin system by a very specialized neural system from the skin, which we all share, and we have it too. This system responds to light, slow stroking only, no other action on the skin. It doesn't respond to temperature or pain or anything like that, just responds to light, slow stroking at around about three centimeters a second, which is the rate during glooming, where they're stroking the fur, parting it, deforming the skin underneath as it when. This is what's triggering the same. system off. If you try stroking someone slower than that or faster than that, there's no response.

Starting point is 00:28:39 But get it right and they get an endorphin hit in the brain. Dorphins are part of the brain's pain management system. They give you a kind of opiate-like eye. If you feel very relaxed and calm and peace with the world and trusting of the person who are doing this activity with, it's highly specialised. We use it all the time. Turns out the inner ear is full of these receptors. This is why we nod our heads when we're listening to music or dancing. This is why we rock babies. If you rock them at around about three centimeters a second speed, they calm down and go to sleep nicely. If you try it slower than that, one centimeter a second or try it faster than that, 30 centimeters a second. It has absolutely no effect. They carry on crying relentlessly.

Starting point is 00:29:26 They have to get it absolutely right. So that's the basic mechanism. We've shown that that still works with us, demonstrably still works with us, that system underpins the quality of our friendships. The problem for us is that, and for primates, actually, monkeys and apes, is grooming because its physical touch. The intimacy of that limits its capacities. So there's a limit to the number of individuals that you can engage with and build relationships with through this mechanism. And that sets an upper limit on group size, actually, at about 50 animals. So the problem we had during the course of our more recent evolution, as if you like trying to increase the size of our groups up to the 150 we have now,

Starting point is 00:30:10 was how to bond these groups, particularly though, okay, you can go around grooming kind of in a core within the 50 layer, but how do you bond the other 100 people that sit in the final 150 layer? The answer is we found lots of ways that allow us to trigger the endorphin system directly without involving physical touch. And these are in order of which they appeared in the course of human evolution. We think laughter, singing, dancing, and then once language evolved, which was probably only with the appearance of our, or at least fully modern language,

Starting point is 00:30:48 with our own species, 200, 250,000 years ago. lots of things derivative of language, including the rituals of religion, feasting, eating together, drinking particularly alcohol together, stringent type things, alcoholic type drinks, trigger the endorphin system big time. And lastly, telling emotional sub-stories, great tragedies. And we've shown with all of these that they trigger the endorphin system and they increase the sense of bonding with the people you actually do the activity with. So it doesn't change your relationships with people who are your best friends who are not there on the day, but it does affect the quality of the relationship you have with a complete stranger who happens to be there.

Starting point is 00:31:31 And we've shown this with neuroimaging experiments, pain threshold tests, with blocker experiments where you're giving people drugs that block the receptors for endorphins in the brain. They do the activity, but they don't get the hit. In all these cases, you can show very nicely there. These peculiar activities, what I call our social toolkit. work extremely well for bonding large groups, and they vary in the size of group that they can bond. Laughter, ironically, is one of the smallest. There is a natural limit on the size of a laughter group at about three, very close to the limit on the side of a conversation group. Still, three is three

Starting point is 00:32:08 time. That means you're bonding three people together at the same time, whereas with grooming and physical touch, if you were just to stroke them physically, you would only be able to bond one person. So already laughter is three times more efficient. Singing is amazing. We call it the icebreaker effect. Community singing around the campfires can turn a group of complete strangers into a group who think they were all at primary school together. They're telling them each other their life stories and great secrets and stuff.

Starting point is 00:32:40 It's just amazing. Singing works minimally for groups of up to 200 people we've done it with. And it was showing no sign of tailing off. still the bigger the group, the better the effect. So you can see a lot of these things kind of part and partial of the things we do every day with our friends. Can I jump to a conclusion that it's an enormous waste of time to just do like a normal run, of course, Zoom meeting all day for work, that Zoom does not create endorphins in the same way that any of the stuff that you've listed. If relationship drives everything, then this seems like a giant

Starting point is 00:33:15 waste of humanity's time. I think the answer has to be. Yes. It can be efficient, clearly. Any of the social media, including the telephone, after all, can be efficient for processing and dealing with some issues at work, and particularly when people are not present. It is sort of okay for bonding people who already know each other well. So this is why we're pretty sure the reason Facebook was so successful is that it allowed people who had now separated. Just remember when it was first set up by Zuckerberg and people that, you know, these were final year kids at college about to disperse all over the United States. They're big buddies for the last three or four years. Suddenly they would not be able to see them easily.

Starting point is 00:34:03 How do you keep in touch? Here's your answer. Join Facebook. And we think it worked very well and did because what it's doing was acting like a stinging plaster. It slowed the rate of decay down by allowing you to keep up with the person. But we think that, and the general experience seems to be, that if you don't meet up once in a while face-to-face, nothing on earth or face-plice going to stop, that friendship gradually becoming an acquaintanceship. Yeah, it's just somebody I once knew,

Starting point is 00:34:35 haven't seen for years, don't really know what they're doing, check their feeds now and again, but I don't waste a lot of time. So there's something about face-to-face interactions that's very important. And the world of business is a village. It works best. It works like a village where everybody knows each other. So if as a default, the only way you've got for people to meet up is online, that will kind of do, but it's a bit clunky. And it's never

Starting point is 00:35:02 to see whether it would, in the long run, work terribly efficiently because you're not able to do all the kinds of casual things we would do with people, certainly with our friendship. circles, but we do with people at work. We laugh at them. We have lunch with them. We go out for a beer with them. We tell them all our troubles of our lives. And there are rituals, as the analog, as it were, of how religion works. Any organization has its own internal rituals that it does in some form. And if you're in Japanese industry until about 20 years ago, everybody stood by their desks in the morning and did calisthenics for 10 minutes. And I'm absolutely convinced this is why the Japanese car industry ended up being so successful. They've lost their way a bit. But we used to kind

Starting point is 00:35:54 of looking at what Japanese car companies, everybody is doing gymnastics and Tai Chi type things in the car park before they went into it and say ha ha ha, ha, you know. Well, I think laughing was on their side of the face, not us at the face. Because that made them feel very bonded and committed to the company. And that was real symptom, if you like, of Japanese industry at that time when they were peaking in their productivity is that every worker from the big boss at the top to the person who swept the belt, they belonged to the company. They had this expression.

Starting point is 00:36:31 I am a company man, meaning this is my life and my commitment. And I think they had a lot to do with these things because what these exercises have been doing is triggering the endorphin system, making them. feel very cool, calm and collected and at peace with their fellow workers and with the company in general. So these mechanisms kind of play a role, but it's underneath. And I think it's sort of going on below the surface of consciousness. And I think in our haste to find efficiencies, we've forgotten the lessons actually of the founders, the entrepreneurs who founded the big multinationals of today back in Victorian-Nedwardian times 150 years ago, because they all

Starting point is 00:37:10 recognized that a bonded workforce, happy workforce, was highly beneficial in terms of productivity. So they did things like building social clubs on every factory campus. The famous ones were the railway clubs. They started here in Britain, lots of railways before everybody else did. And every railway station had a railway club. And everywhere in the empire that we built railways, there was a lot. railway club. Everybody who worked at the station was automatically a member of the railway club. It's railway club. They would have social events and dancers and there would always be tennis

Starting point is 00:37:49 because we're talking about the 1890s, up through to 1930s maybe. Everybody played tennis. It's kind of the fashion and everybody loved it. And I'm sure it had a lot to do with why these companies were successful. I think what's happened post the Second World War, the accountants are looking for ways of reducing costs and stuff. Those, Those kind of social things have been thrown out of the window as, well, you can't put them in an income and expenditure, let's it mean. What's your output? How do you measure that?

Starting point is 00:38:21 So we're not interested in. We're just interested in the things that we can show in an Excel sheet to have a direct effect on profit lines. And I think probably we might just consider taking a leaf out of their book again, going, well, what are the things people would like to do now? because obviously life is different. You've got to sit back and think, well, what would work? What would attract people come in so that you provide them with the opportunity to meet in a casual social context,

Starting point is 00:38:52 people from different parts of the company and build those kind of cross departmental links that allow the things to happen efficiently on the bigger scale rather than just everybody getting into their silos within their own little department or group? And there are a number of cases where this has been done and done very successfully. It's not a case that nobody does it. Modern companies today are doing it very, very effectively. I gather Facebook has a regular Wednesday beer and barbecue event in the sort of space in the center of their campuses, as it were, where people just turn up and have a beer and

Starting point is 00:39:30 a burger and stuff and talk to people. Not that complicated. It's not complicated. And heaven full fend, you might even sign something. some nice person in finance that you get on really well instead of thinking with them as ogres. In our book, we give several examples. One was just founding a choir. It's back to this magic of singing.

Starting point is 00:39:52 Case where a government department set up a choir, or they decided amongst themselves to do it. And eventually it changed the atmosphere within the department from a very, very frosty one, which was very fraught because of its history. into a very much bonded and efficient working group. Just once a week they sang in a seminar room somewhere. And eventually they ended up, a lot of them, competing in choir competitions and things like that.

Starting point is 00:40:22 Or big brewing giant, SAB's South African breweries, and bought Miller of Miller-Light fame, the American Brewers. They've since combined with A&B, the big Dutch, I think, brewing giants, something like, I don't know, one in every eight beers poured anywhere in the world is brewed by them. Huge, huge, huge company. But when they first started up, they had the idea of putting a little pub in the entrance foyer of all their factory buildings. So people just called in for a beer on their way home from work at the end of the day. And Sam, I co-authored who worked for them. 20 years on, some of the Facebook friendship groups that were set up from those casual beers after work are still going,

Starting point is 00:41:11 even though most of these people no longer work for SAB Miller are scattered all over the world. The friendships that were built up are still going strong. And of course, what's going to happen sooner or later in this big world of ours, you all bump into these same people somewhere else in another company. or your company will be trying to make some arrangement with the company they work from. And oh, hello, good to see you again. Just makes everything go smoother. Can you explain the concept of homophily? This is the secret ingredient, really, of our friendship.

Starting point is 00:41:46 So it was first discovered by sociologists about 15, 20 years ago. And they noticed that people tended to hang out with people who had very similar kinds of interests. So friends tend to have same political views, they tend to have same religious views, these kind of things. And since then, there's been more and more evidence, in fact, shed loads of evidence showing this effect is extremely strong. And we asked people to fill in big questionnaires about what they shared with their friends in terms of Moffley and did some number crunching. and it reduced it really to about seven key dimensions, which we called the seven pillars of friendship. So like a sort of supermarket barcode of who you are as a person,

Starting point is 00:42:34 the community you essentially belong to. But it's what you speak rather than who you are, biologically, if you like. It's the cultural elements that define you. It turns out that these have a very, very strong effect on the people we have in our layers. If you look at feel closest to the people, in your inner five shoulders to cry on friendship group, you will share six or seven of these

Starting point is 00:43:00 dimensions with them. So they're things like sharing the same language, because they're rather crucial because it's all about talking to each other, but also where did you grow up, where did you learn what it is to be a member of the community, what's your career trajectory being what are your hobbies and interests, what are your moral and political and religious views, what is your preferred musical taste, what's your sense of humor? So the more of these boxes you tick with somebody, the closer in, they will be in your inner circles. And the more intense than the longer those relationships will last. In addition to that, these are what you might think is the cultural component in the end is the

Starting point is 00:43:39 much. But we share homophily with our friends on a lot of other fixed traits that we can't do anything about. So gender is a very, very strong one. 75% of men's social circles, their 150 are males. 75% of women's social circles are other women. Other 25% in each case is family. And I guess you don't have a lot of choice about that.

Starting point is 00:44:03 Opposite sex, 25%. But there's a very, very strong gender defect to social networks. Somehow feel more comfortable working around people of our own gender. Age has a very strong effect, all our friends, and preferred family members that we give most time to tend to be around our age. Personality, again, introverts tend to prefer being friends with introverts, extroverts tend to prefer to be friends with extroverts. And a lot of these really are about allowing you to come to compromises easily,

Starting point is 00:44:33 because the big problem is, just think of it in terms of extroverts and introverts. Saturday evening, you've got a choice. You can either go clubbing or you can stay in and watch a movie on the TV with a take, takeaway dinner, two introverts that both want to stay in and watch it. This is Nirvana. You've got two extroverts who want to go clubbing. This is another kind of Nirvana. But the last option is you've got one of each, an introvert wants to stay and an extrovert who wants to go clubbing. And now you've got a problem. There's a negotiation that has to go on. And somebody has to give away, which means you've either got to sort of agree to alternate,

Starting point is 00:45:12 in which case half the time you're bored silly because you'd rather be doing the other thing, but you're sacrificing yourself on the altar of love. But it's still stressing the relationship, stressing the friendship. So you can see very quickly that that applies to all these things. So this whole problem really of just engineering, the smoothness and reducing the friction involved in relationships that are long-lasting becomes very important.

Starting point is 00:45:40 And you can see why homophily then becomes important because the more things you have in common, the fewer occasions you're going to disagree about what to do, the fewer occasions you are going to be left stranded and unable to think of anything to talk about, which is a problem you have with a stranger. What do I say now? Well, with somebody who you were well geled with, that's less likely to happen because you've got the same interests, but also you kind of don't mind if there are silent periods.

Starting point is 00:46:11 You're happy to sit there together. So facilitating the kind of flow of the relationship becomes important. And at the end of the day, that feeds into the world of work, because if two people get on, they're much more likely to work efficiently together to do each other favors when favors need to be done rather than saying, oh, come on, you know, we've got enough problems of trying to solve at our end of the business. You deal with yours. So homophily plays a very, very important role.

Starting point is 00:46:38 And it really strongly underpins our friendship. We just do. for better or for worse, but at the end of the day, it does mean you end up in silos. It's what pushes us to be in silos, Necker Chambers, is the problem. And that's the problem with scale. You know, in a small village, you don't have the freedom to go off and talk with the 50 people who are all interested in shooting ducks. There aren't that many people in the village who actually enjoy shooting ducks, just statistically.

Starting point is 00:47:07 So you end up having to talk to people who like doing other activities. So you end up in a small business, a small organization or a small village, having a much more integrated, diverse social life, if you like, social network. And the bigger life becomes, the bigger the city, the bigger the organization, the easier it is for silos to form, which is the big problem that large multinationals have is they build up these thus versus them internal structures. And the problem we have both in everyday life, I guess, but also in particular organizational structures and business and so on, is how to break those down. So you have to kind of think of ways of overcoming the homophily effect. Homophily is very good for certain things. Back to what I said earlier, if it's a small group with a focus on a specific task that

Starting point is 00:48:03 needs to get done, then they all need to be homophilus. think the same way, know the same stuff, come from the same area. But you kind of don't want that probably on your management board because you want some diversity of input up there. You've got to find ways of breaking down the homophilus effect at the right level. Don't destroy it at the bottom or you'll lose everything. It's important. It really is important.

Starting point is 00:48:30 But at the same time, you need to be able to introduce diversity in the right levels and the right places. But it goes back, I think, to this point I made about the Japanese car industry, this sense of, I belong to the company. I am a company man. It's creating this sense of being a member of the village. I may be a very humble member of the village. All I do is sweetly art outside, but I play my bit. So it's not easy, and there are no silver bullets. I'm so fascinated that I think in your research you show 60% of people's time, they spend with maybe 40% with the closest five and another 20 with the next 10. Time, it just strikes me, is the resource. It's the resource that we have to allocate thoughtfully and building those groups.

Starting point is 00:49:18 Time is the only way to do it. Conversation and activity. Yeah. Yep. This has kind of implications for management because you can't create time. It is fixed. There is a limit. And you have to do stuff like sleep. And the problem that most CEOs and the like senior management get into is they end up trying to do too much. And they don't have the night to do it. So they're trying to be engaging with everybody in a large company from the shop floor worker to their chief finance officer and so on. And you can't do it. Certainly you want to engage and be seen to be engaged with your workforce, not stuck away in some C-suite at the top of the tower. But on the other hand, you've got to find somewhere

Starting point is 00:50:05 managing your time better. And what you don't want to be doing is wasting time on micromanagement. You have to be able to trust the layers below you, the management layers below you, to do their job while you concentrate at the top of the pyramid on the kind of strategic stuff and seem to be the charismatic leader, if you like.

Starting point is 00:50:24 Trust is so important. It's a word we haven't said much about, but so much of this is just establishment and maintenance of trust. Trust is what creates and maintains our relationships with each other. When things fall apart, it's always because trust has broken down. I'd love to ask about a couple big secular trends, like inhumanity and how it affects all this.

Starting point is 00:50:45 So the ones that come to mind are technology, the rise of all sorts of technology. We're talking not long after the Apple Vision Pro comes out or there's always something new that seems important for how we spend our time. The second is the secular decline in religious beliefs. Maybe that's changing a little bit very recently, but over the long term it's been in decline. And then the last one is the rise of psychological mental health problems, you know, unhappiness, mental disorders, etc. These seem like three important trends related to your ideas.

Starting point is 00:51:17 You can pick one or all of them. And I'm just really curious to hear your reaction to those three big trends. They're all important. And maybe they're all interrelated, actually. But the last one that you mentioned in some ways is perhaps the most worrying one. And this is this tsunami of loneliness that sort of seems to hit us. It was first noticed. Way back in the 90s, 30 years ago, started to show up.

Starting point is 00:51:42 And a lot of this is basically young graduates going away to their first job in the big city. So up till then, your social world has been made for you by home, by university, college, halls of residence, these kind of things. You don't have to sort of do much in the way of going out, then you go off your first job, the big city in New York or somewhere, and you don't know anybody, you don't know where to get to meet people,

Starting point is 00:52:07 and especially you don't know where to go that's safe to meet people, and to meet people with similar interests of yours, to narrow it down even further. But the only people you know are the people at work, and of course, five o'clock, they've all got things to do because they've already got social,

Starting point is 00:52:21 they've got families, and you're stuck on your own, And this seems to have just got worse and worse and worse and triggered collapse into depression and indeed physical illness. Because this is all related to the thing that I mentioned right at the beginning, the best predictor of your mental health and well-being and your physical health and well-being is a number of close friends you have. And those close friends need to be there.

Starting point is 00:52:45 It's no good having them at the end of a telephone line or a computer screen, the other side of the country. They've got to be on the block with you so you can at least. walk around, knock on the door and say, I feel like rubbish. Can you come out, at least have a coffee or something? Let's go for a walk in the park or something. You have to have that kind of physical context. So this has been a big problem. And I think the issue sort of in the process of overwhelming most organizations of businesses, they're losing huge quantities of time of work. With people taking time of work, it's becoming more inefficient. It's putting much bigger loads

Starting point is 00:53:19 on everybody else in the office, whatever it is, because they're now having to do not only their share of the work, but the share of the work that you're not able to do because you're off sick. So they're all getting very worried and investing huge quantities of money and sort of well-being. And the answer is it's expensive stuff. What you need to do is to find friends for people. And you find friends for people by providing them with the opportunity, the place to go to meet. Because friendships are organic. You can't force people to be friends. All you can do is provide the opportunity and the space and hope that they do it. But we're so intensely social, given the opportunity, we will do it. And you can do that very nearly for free. Just put on a choir

Starting point is 00:54:02 for people to go and sing. They'll come. You don't need any money. You can even just put out some biscuits and coffee, a negligible amount, compared to what you'd be paying for a sort of well-being trainer or something. So those sort of things are things we really have to look at. Now, in the past, I think a lot of those support networks would have been provided by religion. There's no question in my mind that that's really what the key benefit of religion has been for most societies. It doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. It's the activities they do in the kind of context they provide. Because all the activities are just the sort of thing that kick in the endorphin system and make you feel kind of.

Starting point is 00:54:44 and make you feel very bonded to the community, him singing, lots of painful stories in the form of sermons and stuff that rouse your emotions, kneeling and standing, occasionally stretching yourself out on the ground and all these kind of things that are part of this social toolkit. And of course, you don't have that. You're losing somewhat of the skeleton that has kept communities together in the past.

Starting point is 00:55:11 The problem is religion is strange stuff, So you might well think the world is better off without religions because they have this dreadful tendency to end up fighting each other. The great problem is nothing comes for free in life or biology. There's no such place as Nirvana. There's a downside to everything. So you have to balance the upsides and the downsides of these things. And in some sense, I suppose, the internet then has become a little bit of a substitute in a way. And it is very weird stuff, but it is compelling.

Starting point is 00:55:42 and go online to look something up. You just want a tiny bit of information for something you're doing. If something else turns up in the feeding, oh, that looks interesting. Oh, there's a video there of my favorite pop song from 40 years ago. I just must look at that. And you end up spending the whole evening online. It's very, very engaging. And it probably does trigger a certain sort of bonding.

Starting point is 00:56:08 My worry with it, though, is that you're bonding with something in the way. your head, not with something in the real world. And the problem here is precisely that in real life, you might start off in real life by being introduced to somebody by a friend or a relative or something, which is how we used to eat to meet most people. But you would be able to get to know them face to face. And so you'd have a kind of ground truth thing that went on, where you would kind of evaluate, despite all the things they say, is it really true? Do they mean it? We You get a lot of cues from people's facial expressions on how honest they're being. Of course, what happens on dating scams or any other financial scams, any of these things

Starting point is 00:56:52 is they're very careful not to meet up. They're very careful not to meet up online visually and video. So you can't see what they actually look like. You can't see what the cues of trustworthiness on their faces like when they're talking to you. So what you're doing is you're building a kind of avatar in your mind. Now, this is what we do anyway when we create a friendship, when we create a romantic relationship. What we initially do is build an avatar in our heads as to who this wonderful person is. But meeting them face to face allows you to sort of knock the rough edges off a little bit

Starting point is 00:57:25 and get to know their inner core better. And that's the danger of the internet, I think, is that it just lacks this capacity to be able to sit across the table in a pub or a cafe or a restaurant. and stare into the whites of the other person's eyes and reach across the table and pat them on the shoulder or something that gives you this sense of who they really are and how honest they really are. So I've often said, you want to know

Starting point is 00:57:54 how much somebody actually feels about you, friend or romantic partner, whatever it may be, a family member doesn't matter, how they really feel about you. Ignore everything they say because words are weasily things and we can misuse them and misunderstand them, Just check how they touch you, because that is actually the best. A touch is worth a thousand words any day in this context.

Starting point is 00:58:18 You can't lie about how you touch somebody, and we're very, very good at recognizing when a touch is meaningful and when it's false. If you think about everything you've studied across your life so much, you've been a prolific writer and researcher. If you set aside the social brain research and homophily and things like that, what idea or idea, is do you find the most energizing or interesting across your whole career of study? It's actually time. In many ways, time was the beginning of all this stuff. Having worked on monkeys and antelope in Africa and Europe in the wild, you begin to realize that what's limiting for animals is not necessarily food. In fact, ecologists tend to look at the way the world works in terms of food availability.

Starting point is 00:59:10 So population die out because there isn't enough food. In the extreme case, that's probably true. But we're talking about the demise of the dinosaurs when everybody dies because everything has been destroyed by some comet coming in or everything's got polluted, so there's no oxygen in the seas, whatever it may be. In the normal course of things, it's not food that really limits them.

Starting point is 00:59:35 No matter how bad your quality of your food is, vegetation or maybe. If you had infinite time, you can get all the food you needed. What you don't have is infinite time. You have to get the food you need to keep yourself alive in within a certain period of time. That's usually a day, obviously. So you've got to keep eating. Small birds and mammals literally keel over and die if they don't eat their body-wasting food a day, particularly in cold climates in the winter. So it's really time that's the problem they have. And that got expanded from the world of animals. There's all sorts of implications for things like conservation and stuff as well.

Starting point is 01:00:15 It was the starting point of looking at humans and going, actually, we don't have infinite time. A lot of things we do are attempts to cut through time constraints. Fascinating application of the ideas. Robin, thanks for doing this. I've so appreciated everything you've written and sharing so much here with us today. I learned so much. Thank you so much for your time. If you enjoy this episode, check out join colossus.com.

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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367]

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