Something You Should Know - How Metabolism Really Works & Why Humans Fight and Go to War

Starting point is 00:00:00 As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, what does it take to

Starting point is 00:01:08 be a champion? There is one rule and no champion has ever defied it. Then, what is your metabolism and why do some people gain weight when others don't? A lot of that comes down to the fact that we're really bad at keeping track of the calories we eat. So maybe, you know, your friend at work eats a big lunch and he eats a big lunch every day. And you think, gosh, how did he get away with it? And your other friend who only eats a salad tends to gain weight. But what you don't know is what's going on the other 23 hours of the day. Then there's an often cited study on success that actually never happened. And why do humans fight?

Starting point is 00:01:43 What drives us to go to war? You basically got a whole bunch of drives as humans, right? And two of them are really, really important in this question of why individuals go to war. And those two things are status and belonging. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

Starting point is 00:02:16 and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more

Starting point is 00:02:52 openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello there.

Starting point is 00:03:21 Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, something that I really enjoy is watching great musicians play their instrument or sing who are at the very top of their game, who are the very best of the best, because they make it look so effortless. And I love that. And maybe you've had that same experience of watching an athlete like a tennis player or a gymnast. And it's just amazing what they can do. And it looks like it comes so easy to them. But the fact is that never, ever has there been a champion who didn't practice a lot. Take any musician, athlete or any professional and you will find somebody who spends a lot of time practicing.

Starting point is 00:04:07 And not only is the amount of time that a true champion practices important, it's also how they practice. Researcher Daniel Coyle found that virtually all the people who are the very best in their field practice at the edge of their ability. In other words, they constantly push themselves to the absolute limit, fail, and then learn from that failure. The other important factor is to love what you do. No one has ever gotten to be the best at anything if they didn't love what they were doing. In all the research that's been done on greatness, no one has ever found anyone who could shortcut this route. No matter how much natural talent you have, no champion has ever made it to the top without lots of practice and the love of what they do. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Ask anyone what are the things that are most important if you want to lose weight, and they'll most likely say diet and exercise. And the theory goes that if you reduce the number of calories going in, and you speed up the burning of those calories with exercise, that that will accelerate weight loss. Yet, when you look at the science, the first part of that equation, the eating less, that is true. That does help you lose weight. But the exercise part is a bit of an empty promise. Well, how can that be? If you exercise more, if you expend more energy, which burns more calories, you should lose weight.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Yeah, well, not exactly. Meet Herman Ponzer. He is one of the foremost researchers in human metabolism, and he's author of the book Burn. New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy. Hi, Herman. Thanks for having me. So metabolism is, well I don't really know what it is. I don't think most people really know what metabolism is, so I guess we'll need to understand that here in a moment. But when you say that exercise doesn't help you lose weight, why do so many people believe it does? Those people can be forgiven

Starting point is 00:06:26 because if you look at the public health messaging, you know, how do we fix obesity? How do you take control of your own weight? It's always this double, you know, the two prong approach, diet and exercise. Well, if you, if you accept that, then you think that exercise is at least half the issue. And if you like exercise better than diet in terms of how you want to change things, you know, then you're going to want to do exercise more. And it turns out that that's actually a pretty poor tool for weight loss. You really need to focus on diet for that. So how do you know this? I mean, what's the research? Because for so long, I mean, the medical establishment, doctors, weight loss experts, I mean mean everybody's been saying diet and exercise diet and exercise so why but why if it isn't true as we've seen for that matter as we've seen with covid

Starting point is 00:07:14 recently right you have this health crisis hit people who are in public health doctors and researchers they go oh my gosh we got to help fix this problem. And they start with what they know, right? And what they know is that being overweight, which leads to a lot of these diseases, being overweight is fundamentally about taking more calories than you burn off. And those same researchers know that if you exercise, well, when you're exercising, you're burning lots of calories, you know? So it just makes sense when we're in the fifties and 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and the obesity crisis starts to kick in that people without a lot of great epidemiological data go, look, we need to fix those guys. And here's what we're going to do.

Starting point is 00:07:58 We're going to do diet and we're going to do exercise. And that's going to be the way we, that we move forward. And it makes all kinds of sense. And people do get healthier from exercising. So that seems to make sense. And it all kind of, it sort of grows into this dogma that we all know, quote unquote, know that diet and exercise are these two pieces that you need to have together for weight loss. The science has caught up with that. And just like the science, the directives on how to stay healthy and protect against COVID changed first, very early on, they didn't think masks mattered, but then they realized, oh, actually masks do matter. Do this and don't do that. And just like that, messaging changed, not because people changed their minds, but because better information came in and people changed.

Starting point is 00:08:41 I think now it's time to use the better information that we have on obesity and begin to update those public health messages. So what changed? How did this new evidence come to light? And I know you were in part responsible for some of this new evidence that exercise is not the way to lose weight. So explain that. Well, I want to tell you sort of how I got into this. As an anthropologist, I study human evolution and anthropology and physiology. And I wanted to know how many calories you burn if you live in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, right? Because that's what all humans were doing the last 2 million years or so. And I knew, just like everybody knew, quote-unquote, 10 or so years ago before we did this, this, that because hunter gatherers are so physically active, they're going to burn tons more calories than everybody else does here in the sedentary, you know, West. And so with a couple of colleagues, I went and I worked with this living, you know, modern hunter gatherer group in Northern Tanzania, and they are incredibly physically active.

Starting point is 00:09:43 They get more exercise. Well, they wouldn't call it exercise. They get more exercise. Well, they wouldn't call it exercise. They get more activity in a day than most Americans get in a week. And we measured their energy expenditures with this really sophisticated isotope tracking technique and the gold standard for how you measure calories burned outside of a laboratory. And when the results came back, it was shocking because even though they are five to 10 times more active than we are in the West, the total number of calories are burning every day is the same. So that really blew our minds. And, um, that has led to sort of this, this body of work that's come out that says, yes, as you do more and more physical activity, rather than

Starting point is 00:10:25 ramping up how many calories you burn every day, your body is turning the knobs down, as you say, on other tasks and kind of making room for that exercise, making room for that physical activity so that the top line number, the total calories you burn every day actually doesn't change even, you know, between really different lifestyles. Isn't that interesting? Because it flies in the face of seeming logic, but it also flies in the face of what everybody believes. Yeah, we got a lot of pushback from that, as you can imagine, because it just seemed really hard to accept. I should say we've done it in other groups now and shown the same result. We can do it in other species and show the same results. So this is a really widespread phenomenon

Starting point is 00:11:08 and it kind of blew people's minds. And it's one of these things where the evidence was there in pieces in earlier work that other labs had done, but we were sort of the first to really show it in a strong way and put the evidence together. And it does, it's just so counterintuitive until, and again, I think this is such an important perspective to take, until you think about us as an evolved organism, right? And well, what should any organism do? It should take advantage of all the energy it has available in its environment, but not anymore, right? You can't go over. It's like blackjack. If you go over, right, you bust. So if you go over, if you spend too many calories,

Starting point is 00:11:50 more than you take in, then now you're losing weight and you're starving. And so your body is built, it seems, to burn a kind of a very narrow range of calories to kind of keep that energy per day in a pretty narrow range. And to spend it as sort of smartly as you can. So if you spend a lot on exercise, it'll spend less on other stuff.

Starting point is 00:12:09 If you spend less on exercise, it'll spend more on other stuff. And that's the new logic, I think, that we have to accept for how our bodies burn calories. What's the other stuff? What is it turning down the knobs on when I do half an hour on the treadmill? What's it turning off? Yeah. Yeah. So that's the really exciting work we're doing now. We're sort of tracking down all the things that it turns off or turns it down, I should say.

Starting point is 00:12:37 The things that it's turning down are really good for your health. Let me rephrase that the things that is turning down that reduction has really important benefits for you in terms of your health so it's turning down things like inflammation it's turning down things like how much you respond to stress cortisol and adrenaline right um it's turning down sort of sky high reproductive hormone levels and getting them back in a level that we'd see in a physically active population. And so, you know, lower inflammation, lower stress reactivity, sort of normalized hormone levels, reproductive hormone levels. These are all really immensely importantly good things that exercise is doing for you.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And it's because of that metabolic management. That's really interesting that, and it, and it sort of makes sense, you know, it's, it, and I guess that's why people who are fit live longer and seem healthier because they're doing that. They're turning those things down. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, one of the things that we got pushed, you know, when we first came back with this hunter gatherer data and said, guys, we need to rethink this because we have this really physically active population and they're not burning more calories

Starting point is 00:13:59 than everybody else. And people thought that was really interesting. But one of the things people pushed back with was, well, wait, wait, wait, are you telling me then that I don't need to bother exercising? And, you know, the, the plot twist here is that actually this is why you need to exercise, right? The, the fact that you're not increasing total energy a day, and instead you're changing the way your body burns calories. that's one of the big reasons exercise is so good for you. There's other reasons too that don't have to do with calories. It makes your heart stronger and your brain sharper. So there are lots of good reasons to exercise, not just the metabolic reasons.

Starting point is 00:14:40 But in terms of the calories of exercise, the calories burned in exercise, it's not the calories that it adds to your total for the day that's important. It's the calories that it's taking away from other activities that actually aren't very good for you. So it brings up the question then, can you be fat and also be healthy? This is a big question right now. And the answer is yes. However, we don't know how long that lasts. And so we know we get people in research studies, we get people showing up with their doctor's offices that are, you know, carrying more body fat than would be recommended. And maybe their BMI, which is a problematic measure, but your BMI might classify them as

Starting point is 00:15:22 overweight or obese, But by all the measures of blood pressure, blood sugar levels, all the heart function, all these things, they're actually, they look really, really healthy. And that's great. And that's, you should focus on those numbers in terms of your health rather than the number on the bathroom scale. All I would say is that it does seem when we look at a population of people that being overweight, being obese does track you. It's, you know, this is a probabilistic thing. This is a risk. We're talking risks now, not certainties, but it does seem to increase your risk of developing health issues later.

Starting point is 00:15:58 So if you're healthy now and a little bit heavier than we recommend, that's great that you're healthy. You still might think about getting your weight to where we, you know, would be considered a more healthy level. It might not be the most important thing on your plate, but it might be something you want to consider. I'm speaking with Herman Ponser. He is an anthropologist and one of the foremost researchers in human metabolism, and the name of his book is

Starting point is 00:16:25 Burn. New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of

Starting point is 00:17:05 kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

Starting point is 00:17:55 She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

Starting point is 00:18:32 or wherever you get your podcasts. So Herman, these two things, diet and exercise, they don't really intersect. In other words, exercising, you know the old phrase, you can't outrun a bad diet. Exercise is great and it's doing what it's doing, but it doesn't mitigate a bad diet. And eating healthy won't make you fit.

Starting point is 00:18:55 It'll just make you thin. That's exactly right. You got it. I wish you could write the public health recommendations. We'd be done with this in short order. Diet and exercise are two different tools for two different jobs. Diet is going to be the tool you use for weight, exercise for just about every other aspect of your health. And if you can kind of internalize that two tools approach, you'll be better off. When you looked at the benefits of exercise, is it any exercise or is weight training better than aerobic training or just exercise is exercise?

Starting point is 00:19:35 From my point of view, any exercise is good and more exercise is better. You know, if you look at what most Americans are doing, it's nobody's getting close to the amount of exercise they should be getting every day. And so, you know, I think as soon as you start saying, well, you better do it this way or do it that way, people feel compelled to constrain their choices to those best options. And I don't think there are best options. I think all the options are good for most of us that just want to be healthy and happy and live a long, healthy life, just get out and move. So what is metabolism? Because people throw that word around a lot. Oh, I have a slow metabolism or, you know, eat this, it'll speed up your metabolism. And I don't think anybody really knows what the word means. Your metabolism is all the work that all your cells are doing all day,

Starting point is 00:20:28 right? So you got 37 trillion cells. They're all cranking away, doing all their various tasks and all of that work requires energy, right? Any work takes energy. And so, you know, as you're sitting here, you and I are sitting here having this conversation, our brains are burning tons of energy. In fact, every fourth breath you take is just the oxygen to feed your brain. Our livers are cooking away, our spleens, immune systems, digestive systems, everything. It's all your systems going on all the time simultaneously. So that's right. It's all the work your body's doing. And so when people say I have a slow metabolism or, you know, this will speed up your metabolism, what are they saying? And is that nonsense or what? Yeah, that's a tricky one

Starting point is 00:21:13 because so metabolism, the amount of calories you burn every day, it's like any other measure of, you know, people like height. Some people are taller, some people are shorter. Metabolism is the same way. Some people burn more calories, some people burn fewer. So slow and fast metabolism is a real thing. But as it happens, whether you have a fast or slow metabolism doesn't actually correspond to whether you feel like you have a fast or slow metabolism. So when people say, I have a fast metabolism, usually that means I can eat whatever I feel like I want to eat. And I don't seem to gain weight. People say I have a slow metabolism. Usually that means I feel like no matter what I do, you know, I watch what I eat, but I'm still gaining weight. And that's a different thing that has to do with the way

Starting point is 00:21:58 your brain is wired and how you sort of respond to the reward of food and how you feel hungry versus full. And so, you know, so these are two different issues, actually, how fast your metabolism is and how fast you feel it is. And so that experience that people often have, I know people who seemingly can eat a lot and eat junk and they never gain weight. And then there are people who seemingly can't. So what is that? Why can two people seemingly, you know, same age, same size, roughly, some people get fat and some people don't. It seems to defy logic. A lot of that comes down to the fact that we're really bad at keeping track

Starting point is 00:22:39 of the calories we eat. So maybe, you know, your friend at work eats a big lunch and he eats a big lunch every day. And you think, gosh, how does he get away with it? You know, cause he's, he's not overweight. And your other friend who only eats a salad tends to gain weight and always has a hard time. But what you don't know is what's going on the other 23 hours of the day. Right. And we know that if we ask people to keep track of what they eat every day, they miss about 30% of the calories they eat.

Starting point is 00:23:02 Right. That's almost, that's like a meal a day that people just have a really hard time keeping track of. And so that's really what's going on. There's no magic here, right? You know, if you're eating those calories, then you have to burn them off or add them as weight. And if, you know, so the algebra doesn't change, the math doesn't change. It's all calories in calories out. But the way that feels is going to be different for different people. And so when people say they want to lose weight, what is the best way to lose weight? It seems like it means you need to eat less. Yeah, you do. And so then the question becomes, how do you eat less? And if you've tried to lose weight with diet before, you know, that's a real challenge and into that void, right. Into that gap in, in what we know we need to do and what we feel we can do there, jump in all the fad diets, you know, keto or whatever it is these days.

Starting point is 00:23:58 And all of those diets are really about one thing, which is getting you to where you eat fewer calories, but feel full, right? getting you to where you eat fewer calories, but feel full, right? Because if you feel hungry all the time, then that feeling of hunger is always going to win, right? Feeling hungry will push you into a pride alliance if you need to. It'll certainly push you into the refrigerator. And so the trick is how do you find a diet that works for you and the way that your brain is wired that makes you feel full on fewer calories. And the answer is? Well, what I can tell you is what the principles are. And these are tried and true from decades of research.

Starting point is 00:24:33 One thing is you can look for foods that are high in protein and high in fiber because those will make you feel full on less. And the other thing you can do is avoid ultra processed foods because we know from a lot of really cool work, but some really interesting work recently, uh, out of the NIH, that if you eat an ultra processed diet, the stuff that comes in a package and has a mascot on the front and an ad campaign that will push you to overeat because those foods are engineered literally to be over-consumed. So, you know, eat proteins and fiber, avoid ultra-processed foods. Those are the principles you need to stick to. Why do you think that it's really been in the last, I don't know, what, 50 years or so that this has become a problem. If you look back at pictures of people in the forties and the fifties and even the sixties,

Starting point is 00:25:27 you know, at just main street USA, you don't see a lot of heavy people necessarily in that picture. Now you do. Yeah. Well, this is the million dollar question, the trillion dollar question globally,

Starting point is 00:25:39 right? Why is it that obesity has become this worldwide crisis? And, you know, again, that the public health messaging on this is always, well, it's diet and exercise. Well, they're right about one thing, you know, obesity comes down to this balance of how many calories we bring in and our

Starting point is 00:25:54 food and how many calories we burn off. And so, you know, if you're not burning those calories off, they add up as fat and, and there's your obesity crisis. So is it the energy coming in or the energy going out the calories we eat or the calories we burn off? Um, we've done a lot of work that shows that it can't be the calories you burn off. Cause that's actually really hard to move. And we even have a really good data since about the eighties, we don't have it going back as far as the forties, but if you measure how many calories people burn, that hasn't changed at all

Starting point is 00:26:24 in the last three or four decades. But what has changed then is how much measure how many calories people burn, that hasn't changed at all in the last three or four decades. But what has changed then is how many calories people are eating. And there's lots of good data that show that that's the case. So not only are the total number of calories that we consume as a nation per capita increasing, but, and I think this is really critical, the amount of food in our diets that's coming from these really processed sources, you know, canned foods, packaged foods, ready to eat stuff, that's all been increasing every decade since the obesity crisis started. And so I think if you had to point to one thing, it would be processed foods. And, you know, don't forget those, it actually is, you know, since the 40s, since that World War II, that's when processed foods really took off, right? Canned foods and some of that was for the war effort and everything else. But, you know, those technologies really haven't been around since before then.

Starting point is 00:27:14 And guess what? Neither was obesity. I have heard that exercise is good at maintaining weight. Is that true? Or is it just that it's part of a healthier life and you just kind of overall, if you're going to exercise, you're probably watching your diet better and it's all feeding into the same thing? Or does it really? Well, no, that's interesting. That is a little piece of the puzzle here that exercise does seem to shine. If you've managed to lose weight, and usually people are losing that weight through dietary change, keeping it off exercise seems to be a big help there. And we don't know if that's

Starting point is 00:27:50 because it helps regulate intake and expenditure signals in your brain. A lot of the work that I've done suggests that the amount of calories that your body burns every day is sort of kept within a really narrow range. And so it could be that if you lose weight, well, now your body's burning fewer calories because you're smaller, but it wants to burn that higher calorie number. And so by getting your energy expenditure back up with exercise, you're able to kind of get back to where you were and, and, and, you know, keep your body within that same set point that you're built to have. Um, that's, we're not sure yet exactly how that works out, but it's definitely true that the

Starting point is 00:28:26 observation that people who exercise have a better time keeping weight off. Well, I think for a lot of people listening, myself included, what you've been talking about comes as news, interesting news, particularly about exercise and weight loss, but everything you've been discussing about how the body works, metabolism, and all that is probably more than I, certainly more than I ever knew about it. And it's really interesting to hear. Herman Ponzer has been my guest. He is a researcher in human metabolism and author of the book Burn.

Starting point is 00:28:58 New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Herman. Thanks, Mike. Always good to join you. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you

Starting point is 00:29:40 get your podcasts. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. As you look back through human history, one thing that's pretty constant, as far back as we can see, is war, fighting. And groups fighting in wars against other groups has resulted in major changes.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Wars change the course of humanity. But have you ever stopped to wonder, why does it take a war to change things? Why do people fight with other people? What is it that for centuries has caused humans to fight and try to destroy other humans for some cause or some gain? It seems barbaric. And yet some people willingly go to war and willingly die for some cause or some gain. It seems barbaric, and yet some people willingly go to war

Starting point is 00:31:07 and willingly die for their cause, which seems to fly in the face of self-preservation. So why do humans fight this way? Well, someone who has studied this is Mike Martin. He's a visiting research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King's College in London. He served as a British Army officer in Afghanistan, and he is author of the book, Why We Fight. Hey, Mike, so you've had some really up-close and personal experience with fighting and war, which is what led you to explore this topic. So let's start there. Explain that. I spent about six years in the British Army. Two years of that I spent in southern Afghanistan. And it seemed to me, it was really obvious to me that the reasons that we spoke about why we go to

Starting point is 00:31:59 war, those things that you were talking about, why is it that we do this? And often we talk about religion or ideology or perhaps we're trying to make the world a better place they didn't match what i saw in front of me where most of the people fighting were fighting for really personal reasons either over land or honor or perhaps their own status and so that, really, that dissonance led me to, well, kind of embark on a decade of living and working in different conflict zones and studying and really trying to grapple with this problem of why it is that we fight and go to war. Well, you've described it as a problem just then. Is it a problem or is it just human nature? This

Starting point is 00:32:42 is what people do. It's definitely human nature. We've also built these cultures around war as well, right? That reinforce that nature. But it's not a problem because in the sense that war actually does tremendous things, it is a force in human society. And so we have great leaps in technology, wars help us build bigger societies and so on and so forth. But what i think is a problem is that we don't really even now in 2021 when we can develop a vaccine for covid in nine months and then get it to market in 12 months when we can do that but we can't answer this fundamental question about humanity which is is why we fight. And I'll explain really clearly what the problem is. In evolution, the aim is to survive and reproduce, right? And humans are

Starting point is 00:33:32 animals. So therefore, we have to obey the laws of evolution. So the question is, why do people go and fight in wars when they as individuals are dying for perhaps an abstract ideal or certainly the wider group. That makes no sense in evolutionary terms. And we have to try and understand why that is. Yeah. Well, why is that? Because it does seem to defy common sense and, as you say, the laws of evolution. You basically got a whole bunch of drives as humans, right? And two of them, I think, are really, really important in this question of why individuals go to war and at the extreme, why they sacrifice themselves to groups. And those two things are status and belonging. So seeking status, so a higher position within your social group, and then belonging, so belonging to a

Starting point is 00:34:26 coherent social group. And, you know, as befits these mechanisms that have evolved, we've got bits of our brain that handle that. And we've got hormonal pathways that drive us to seek those things. And, you know, testosterone helps us seek status and oxytocin is the hormonal pathway that helps us or drives us towards belonging in groups. And I argue that it's actually those two things that drive us to fight in wars. And the other things that perhaps more traditionally we thought drove us to fight in wars like religion, perhaps ideology. And this is not just wars as in the Second World War. This is also all kinds of group violence. So terrorism would be an example. And we're aware of all the debates around the role that ideology plays in terrorism. But I argue that it's those drives towards status and belonging rather than these more abstract things like ideologies, like religion or jihadism that drive people to commit group violence? Well, I've certainly heard that the desire and the need to join and belong to a group

Starting point is 00:35:29 is very much human nature because as humans, we're social and we can't really survive as well or at all by ourselves. But as part of a group we can thrive so you're saying that that drive to be part of that group is what sends us to war because of the huge advantages to humans and other mammals of living in groups we've we've developed these strong drives towards living in groups whether it's tribes chiefdom ships nation states singing inirs. All of these are kind of group activities that we're driven to do because we feel safe in groups and we're able to use resources and we're able to find mating partners. Now, actually, that mechanism that creates in groups is the same

Starting point is 00:36:18 mechanism that creates outgroups. You can't have in groups without outgroups. It's not possible. They're both tied together. And so what that means is that when you feel strong feelings about your out-group, you naturally feel negative towards out-groups. And so when you are receiving antagonism from another group, that causes you to tighten your in-group and become, you feel closer, you trust more, you work together with, you strengthen your in-group. And that, because it's the same mechanism, causes you to project more antagonism towards out-groups. So what you see is these two groups that are fighting each other, and you get a kind of ratchet between the two belonging oxytocin mechanisms, where they tend to each trigger the other's

Starting point is 00:37:17 in-group, out-group mechanism. Well, that's interesting. so what you're saying is that the more that we identify with a group, the more antagonistic we feel towards other groups that antagonize our group. And the more antagonized we feel, the more we identify with our own group, which it's like a cycle that eventually, I guess, sends us off to war. But that decision to fight for one group to go to war with another group doesn't seem all that rational. And certainly now, in modern times, it would seem that, you know, there are other options. There are other things that can be done besides killing each other. Hey, look, Mike, I think there's an assumption that humans are rational. Against all the evidence, I think that's a kind of implicit

Starting point is 00:38:11 assumption. And the rational conscious brain often plays second fiddle, I think, to the unconscious brain. So looking at war, rationally, it makes no sense. On average, the vast majority of people who go to war and fight in wars and countries that fight in wars don't benefit from them. There's a massive destruction of property and capital and people die. And France in the First World War lost 30 percent of its men between the ages of 16 and 35. I mean, that's that's just incalculable loss. The U.S. Civil War, which if we projected it to today's population sizes of the U.S. would would be a five million person loss. I mean, it's unbelievable. So, you know, you say we sort of jump to fighting,

Starting point is 00:39:08 but I think the reason we do that is because we are guided by our emotions. That's what guides our decision-making, and our conscious brain tends to come along slightly later and justify to other people why we've taken particular action so when we're going to war you know we're driven by these subconscious emotions very strong emotions towards status which is really vitally important in an evolutionary sense towards belonging which is in an evolutionary terms whether you belong to a social group or not if you think back to the you know the environment that we did most of our cognitive evolution in the plains, the savannas of Africa, whether

Starting point is 00:39:49 you belong to a group or not is a question of survival or not. So we're really strongly driven to fight in groups, to live and belong and fight in groups. So if you look back, at least through popular culture, and that's, I guess, the only lens I can look back through, you see that in the past, World War I, World War II, and earlier, that people gladly went off to war. But in the Vietnam era, that seemed to change. Is that perception that people gladly went off to war baloney or did people gladly go off to war no i think they did um i think there's overwhelming historical evidence that people went to the first world war i mean again in britain we had this phenomenon in the first world there was no conscription we had this this phenomenon of PALS battalions.

Starting point is 00:40:55 So everyone in a in a factory or a mine would sign up and the supervisors would become the non-commissioned officers. The owners of the mine would become, you know, the officers of that regiment and the coal miners would become the soldiers. And speaks to this sense of belonging. And the British Army recognised this. They very clearly were organised and continue to organise themselves along those lines. And so when those battalions went to the front and, you know, it was a great adventure, it was a great way to demonstrate your group membership, they went as, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:25 the 14th Manchester Rifles, brackets, you know, Manchester coal mines or whatever, you know, because they had that sense of identity and belonging. And so absolutely, I think they, you know, the system was very cleverly organised to speak to higher values of nationalism and patriotism. You know, are you a member of this group or not is effectively what the government said. Absolutely, people went gladly to fight those wars. And I think Vietnam was a bit different in the sense that it was more abstract.

Starting point is 00:41:59 It was further away. It was also, you know, 50 years further on with, you know, mass media penetration. And so there was I think there was a society was different then. So perhaps we felt differently about war. So I think there are a number of differences. But, you know, we have a number of examples throughout history where people have gladly gone to war. And I think this speaks to this idea that we've been speaking about today, where people are driven by these very strong subconscious urges to fight in wars. So we've heard it said, people have stated the opinion that, you know, if women ran the world, we wouldn't have this testosterone driven war type mentality. What do you think? If women ran the world, would we have fewer wars? So look, men and women are different and we need both sets of skills and

Starting point is 00:42:54 abilities and drives to make the world work. But in short, I do think that we need more women in positions of leadership. If you look at peace agreements, right, at the end of conflicts, and I'm talking about, you know, since World War Two, we haven't had any really major conflicts. I mean, we've had a couple of big ones, but there have been lots and lots of insurgencies and civil wars. And, you know, the Cold War was was replete with them. But even since the Cold War, we've had lots of internal wars. And what the data tell us about those wars is that if women are involved in the peace negotiations and the peace agreements as not just observers, but actually at the negotiating table, what we find is that it's 30%, 30% to 40% more likely that those peace agreements will hold over the long term, so up to 15 years. So this is non-trivial.

Starting point is 00:43:57 This is really, really, really important. If we're interested in peace, then we have to include women in the negotiations. Do you think we will soon come to a day where people look at war and go, you know, this is the stupidest thing in the world and we really need to stop this? Well, we haven't come to that realization yet. And we actually exist in probably the most peaceable period of time um yet you know you as an individual an average individual on the planet is less likely to die

Starting point is 00:44:33 from war or be murdered than any other time in history so i don't think we're going to come to that realization i think we're driven by our unconsciouses and I think one of the things, we haven't touched on it fully here, but one of the things that reduces levels of violence is our ability to build groups and to build bigger groups. And that's because groups by definition are internally non-violent. There's lots of problems in the world today that sit between the national level and the global level so climate change data taxation maritime ecosystems you know desertification etc etc etc and we don't have sufficiently robust international agreements to deal with those problems and when groups stop solving problems they tend to end up in war they tend to regress

Starting point is 00:45:26 that upward movement into bigger and bigger groups which has happened throughout human history tends to reverse and they tend to splinter and go into smaller groups and so i i think there's probably a 50 50 chance that this decade will end up in a fairly major global war. It's not a great message to have to deliver, but when I look around at some of the trends like demography, like shifts in economic power, unless some of those trends go in other directions, I think that we are going to be in trouble. Well, tough message to end it on, but I think this is really insightful to help people understand why, as you look back through history, humanity has been plagued by war. And it's really helpful to get an understanding as to why we do that. My guest has been Mike Martin. He is a visiting research fellow at the Department of War Studies

Starting point is 00:46:27 at King's College in London. And the name of his book is Why We Fight. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Mike. If you read any book on personal success,

Starting point is 00:46:42 or you could just Google personal success stories on Google, you are bound to come across the famous 1953 Yale University study on goal setting. In this study, researchers surveyed Yale's 1953 graduating seniors to determine how many of them had specific written goals for their future. The answer was 3%. 20 years later, researchers polled the surviving members of the class of 53 and found that the 3% with goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth

Starting point is 00:47:19 than the other 97% of the class combined. Wow, that's pretty incredible. The only problem is, the study never happened. Tony Robbins, the guru of personal achievement, mentions the study in his book Unlimited Power. When he was asked where he heard about it, he said he heard it from fellow guru Zig Ziglar. When Ziglar was asked where he heard it, he said he heard it from fellow guru Zig Ziglar. When Ziglar was asked where he heard it, he said he heard it from Tony Robbins. According to Yale University, and they've been asked this several times, the whole thing is a myth. It was all made up. And that is something you should know. I'm always interested in what you think of this podcast.

Starting point is 00:48:05 You can email me or leave a review. A rating and review is always appreciated on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Starting point is 00:48:40 Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

Starting point is 00:48:56 But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce

Starting point is 00:49:22 a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - How Metabolism Really Works & Why Humans Fight and Go to War

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