Something You Should Know - How Your Daily Habits Impact Your Health & Are Humans Inherently Good or Evil?

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

Eating cereal for breakfast is a relatively new concept that really didn’t catch on until the 1940s and 50s. So where did it come from and how did it get so popular? This episode begins by answering these questions and explaining how popcorn was really the first breakfast cereal. Source: David Hoffman, author of The Breakfast Cereal Gourmet (https://amzn.to/35UKIpr)  You make a lot of decisions as you go through the day such as when to have your first cup of coffee, whether to sit or stand, how much water to drink and should you eat breakfast or not. How do you know if you are making the right decisions? Stuart Farrimond, M.D. is here to explain these and other daily decisions that can affect your health. Stuart is the author of Live Your Best Life: 162 Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine (https://amzn.to/2HpS0s0). Is the meat people eat okay to give dogs? After all, a lot of people give their dogs meat. But should you do it or could it cause harm to your dog? Listen as I explore this question as well as explain what your dog thinks about all day long. Source: Paulette Cooper-Noble author of Dog Secrets: Fun & Fascinating Things Your Dogs Wants You To Know (https://amzn.to/2KBskd9) Are humans good or evil? Are we programmed to be kind or are we more likely to act in our own self-interest? Historian Rutger Bregman joins me to take a serious look at human nature and what sets us apart from other animals. Rutger is the author of Humankind: A Hopeful History (https://amzn.to/3fzk09e) and he has some surprising insight into what makes us tick. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! https://monday.com One platform, better teamwork - First 2 weeks free! https://bestfiends.com Download Best Fiends FREE today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! https://www.walgreens.com/topic/promotion/mywalgreens.jsp Shop, Save & Stay Well - Join for free at myWalgreens.com https://deals.dell.com/en-us or 1-800-BUY DELL for the best savings available now! https://www.bluenile.com Use Promo Code: SYSK to get $50 off orders of $500 or more at BlueNile.com! Get great cardio and strength training! Go to JoinFightCamp.com/something for free shipping and a gift worth $109 https://joinfightcamp.com/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Radio&utm_campaign=Something_You_Should_Know&utm_term=know&utm_content= Get 12 weeks of The New Yorker magazine for just $6 and a free tote bag at NewYorker.com/something and use Promo Code: SOMETHING https://subscribe.newyorker.com/subscribe/newyorker/133107?source=cm_paid_other_podcast_12f6_SOMETHING&pos_name=SOMETHING Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

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, a lot of people eat cereal for breakfast, We'll be right back. you sit or stand? When should you have your first cup of coffee? Actually, the first thing in the morning is not the best time to have a coffee. It's best to wait

two to three hours after waking. And the reason for that is that you need to understand how coffee works. Also, why you should never give your dog meat from the table. And are human beings basically good? And if they are, why do we pay so much attention to the bad? I think we simply have to recognize that evil is more powerful than good. The negative just makes a bigger impression on us. The small acts of kindness are often all around us, but then something nasty happens, and that makes a much bigger impression on us. 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, 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 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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Do you like cereal?

I bet you do. 95% of us claim to like cereal. And in fact, one out of two people starts the day with a bowl of cereal. The first breakfast cereal was actually popcorn. Colonial housewives would put it in a bowl with some cream and sugar and serve it as the morning meal. Later, after graham crackers were invented, John Harvey Kellogg served them in a bowl with milk as a morning meal at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Cereal really took off in the 1940s and 50s with the introduction of Sugar Crisp. That was the first pre-sweetened cereal. And of course, TV

advertising really helped. Today, there are over 400 brands of cereal. It's the third most popular item purchased in a supermarket behind milk and soda. And that is something you should know. You have a daily routine, just like everyone else. You get up, you brush your teeth, you have some coffee, you do whatever it is you do, and you think whatever it is you think. But have you ever thought about if there's a better way, or if the way you think is actually the way other people think. We tend not to question our routine or our thought processes, but Stuart Faramond does.

He's looked at the science behind your routine and how you think. Stuart is a medical doctor and author who has been a guest here a few times in the past. He's a frequent guest on television and radio, and his latest book is called Live Your Best Life, 162 Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine. Hey, Stuart, welcome. Hey, Mike. Great to hear from you. So let's start with something I think everybody experiences, that you wake up and you're tired. It's like hard to get going.

And yet you've just slept for who knows how many hours. So you would think that when you wake up, you'd be all refreshed and ready to go. But that's not the experience for a lot of people. A lot of it is due to your body clock. A lot of what hinges on our well-being and our happiness for the day is about understanding our body clock and that we actually don't call the shots within our brain there's a tiny little um rice-sized grain of bundle of nerves that is our

that is essentially our body clock and that is the orchestrator of pretty much everything that goes on in our body our energy levels when we wake when we sleep and understanding what your body clock is are you a morning lark are you a night owl helps you better understand when is the right time for you to wake up so waking up in the morning is about getting into a routine and understanding when is the best and normal time to to wake up in the morning the other thing is that when you wake up and you feel really sluggish that is called sleep inertia and that basically means that your brain hasn't quite fired up into life and essentially when you look at when you've got that zombie feeling if you if you were to do a

a brain scan or an eeg to look at the activity in your brain then you've noticed that you actually keep falling back into sleep so we're in the morning and you go oh what am i doing again today that is literally your brain is slipping back into sleep and that's called sleep inertia. And so that goes after one to two hours. And I think you just have to appreciate that these things are part of life. So get to know your body, get to know your body clock. So when is the best time to have that first cup of coffee? Because I know most people or many people, you know, that's priority number one. My wife is exactly like that. She won't talk to me in the morning until she's had a coffee but

actually the first thing in the morning is not the best time to have a coffee it's best to wait two to three hours after waking and the reason for that is that you need to understand how coffee works and coffee works by blocking a brain hormone called adenosine and that is a substance in the brain that makes you feel sleepy and over the day it's every passing hour every passing minute adenosine slowly slowly creeps up so it's the thing that in the evening makes you want to go to bed makes you want to sleep and when you wake up in the morning adenosine is at rock bottom it's the lowest point at any point in the day and caffeine works by blocking that

brain hormone that sleep inducing brain hormone so if you're having it when you've got very very low adenosine levels it's basically not doing anything at all it's nothing to block um so that's why you shouldn't have it first in the morning wait two to three hours before the adenosine levels have started to come up a little bit and also at the same time when you first wake up the thing that does get you out of bed is this hormone. It's a stress hormone called cortisol. And that's at very high levels when you first wake up. So cortisol is high, adenosine is low. Actually, use your body's natural energy levels to get you going first thing in the morning and then wait a couple of hours before you have your first strong coffee.

Despite that medically sound advice of putting off your first cup of coffee, how many people like me who rely on that early morning cup, how many people you think minds you're going to change? Not very many. Interestingly, you can get a morning kind of kick out of coffee just by smelling it. There is studies that show that you may well get a bit of that hit just by sniffing it. So that's something that you can try if you want to try and hold off the coffee. Why does everyone's breath smell so bad in the morning? Yeah, a lot of that is because at nighttime, our salivary glands they basically shut off in in the daytime you produce up to about a liter of saliva in the day when you don't notice it because you're constantly

swallowing it but at night time lots of your body shuts down and the same is for saliva production so essentially overnight your your mouth becomes very dry. And saliva has got lots of bug-fighting substances in it. So if overnight, you're not producing the saliva, lots of bugs, lots of bacteria proliferate overnight. And some of these, as they chew on the bits of food left from the previous day, produce lots of malodorous, gassy products, which gives us the bad breath in the morning. What about breath in the morning. What about eating in the morning? Is that important for people to do? There's this thing that's often said is that if you don't eat breakfast, you put on weight. But when you look at studies, that's not necessarily actually true. Unless you're craving food in the

morning and you're really hungry and you're denying yourself and so come lunchtime you may end up overindulging eating more than you would have normally. If it's not in your inclination, in your body clock to actually want to have food first thing in the morning, then there's no point in forcing yourself to eat. I have heard a lot of people say that, you know, the goal should be that you drink enough water every day that your urine is as clear as water what's the science on that there's been a lot of promotion of drinking lots of water and some of that is good some of that is is unfortunately a bit not fully scientific and has been sort of promoted by the bottled water

industry and essentially we can get a lot of our we get about a third of our water possibly even more from of our water from the food that we eat so when people say you need to eat two liters of water a day or eight eight glasses a day depending on what you know people say different things then actually that's probably overdoing it a bit. And this idea that you've got to have completely clear urine is a bit of a myth, because if it's you should have some color in your urine, you probably all see in those charts where you have the different stripes of kind of yellowish and brown. So they're called Armstrong charts. And ideally, you should have it on the paler side. If you go completely clear, which is what some people think, they think I've got to keep drinking until I've gone completely clear. That actually means that you've got too much water in your system and your kidneys are trying to get rid of the excess water.

It's normal to have some color in your in your wee. But it can be if it's very dark, then it's a good indicator that perhaps you're not drinking enough and especially children and the elderly uh not as aware of your of your thirst drive for most of us um if you just listen to your body and when you're thirsty and you drink when you drink when you're thirsty you drink regularly throughout the day then that's generally a good guy we've got uh these bodies that have um evolved over millions of years to know when we're thirsty when to drink so i don't think you need to really force yourself to drink based on the color of your i have heard i'm sure everyone has heard this slogan that gets tossed out around now that sitting is the new smoking is sitting really the new smoking sitting yes it's not a good thing to do uh within a few

minutes of sitting down your your metabolism slows down and over over days and weeks of of basically being sedentary it sort of sometimes it messes up our whole body internal system it causes blood pressure to rise our arteries to slowly clog up essentially our bodies are built to move uh we're designed to to move and if we're sitting down particularly sitting down in in a seat if you're if you're sort of crouching on the floor that doesn't seem to have the same the same negative impacts it's the sort of the sitting down with all your muscles completely relaxed your body's internal chemistry doesn't seem to have the same negative impacts. It's the sort of sitting down with all your muscles completely relaxed. Your body's internal chemistry doesn't like it. It predisposes you to getting diabetes. And basically all the maladies of the modern world of obesity and diabetes and

high blood pressure, many of these things are contributed to by the fact that we sit down the whole time. So it's a serious thing and we all need to sort of move a bit more and just even just walk around for five minutes every hour. That makes a big difference in keeping the blood flowing cleanly through your arteries, through your veins and keeping you well, keeping your mood lifted. So yeah, it's very bad, but it's not as bad as smoking. I'm talking with Stuart Faramond. He is a medical doctor and author, and his latest book is called Live Your Best Life, 162 Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. 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. 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, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Stuart, what's going on when, you know those times when you're trying to think of something and it's right on the tip of your tongue you know you know it but somehow you just you just can't pull it out and say it what is that in our brain our brain stores different pieces of information in different areas so where you saw the names of things um is is often in a very different part of the brain to where you store the image of a memory of something. And so the different facts that you have about something are stored in different parts of the brain. And sometimes those aren't linked up. So you may remember a feature about a word like the letter it begins with.

An example I give in the book is what's the name of an animal that's like a llama that begins with an a and you can kind of think oh what is it and because maybe it was something that you did when you were you were a kid at school you've not been to a farm recently you're trying to think what is it and you can kind of imagine what it is and but you can't quite work out what the word is and you have to basically form like little breadcrumbs you have to make connections between things in your between these two silos if you like of of information in your brain and you've got to sort of join them together and if you've never made that connection before then it's very difficult to form that bridge between between the two things and once you've

found it you know the answer to the question is it's an alpaca but once you've found it, the answer to the question is it's an alpaca. But once you've found it, you need to strengthen that link between the two. Well, it's always been interesting to me how when you're trying to think of alpaca and you can't pull it out, the harder you try, the further away it gets but as soon as you stop trying or when you stop trying and you're just walking down the street boom it just pops into your head because you're not trying exactly and it's because you need to essentially stop trying and if you've come to an incorrect answer so i get this with crosswords sometimes is that i think is it this word but it's not that word but i can't get it out of my head it just sort of keeps going around that wrong answer and so you need to go away go into the default mode network let your let all the cards be thrown on the on the table so to speak and then you can look at them afresh another one of those weird i guess you'd call it a like a mental stumble that I think everybody's had is you go into a room to get something.

And then as soon as you get in the room, you forget why you were there. Why is that? It's called the doorway effect. And the reason is that, uh, we essentially evolved in the Savannah, uh, you know, in the planes and we didn't have rooms and you know our brain has a limited capacity to store between three and seven discrete pieces of information so for us today it would be things on a shopping list we can only remember five six or seven things at most which is why you need to take a shopping list and why shops will try to distract you

soon as you go in so that you've forgotten what those things are uh if you get forgotten a couple of things are you'll just see something and buy something else and you'll have forgotten the reason why you went into the shop the same thing happens when you go through a doorway essentially your brain is going right i'm in a different location now that means i can free up some from some headspace because i've only got uh five or six chunks of information i can store so it thinks you've moved into a new location that old information is no longer relevant so you lose that information and even if you do this in virtual reality you put a headset on and you go from one virtual room to another you still you have this same effect this bizarre thing of your brain

assumes that that information is no longer relevant so it drops a couple of things off off the list thinking it needs to make space for more but obviously when you're walking around the house you go from one room to another go why did i walk upstairs again but if you if you retrace your steps or you mentally go back to that room that you were in and think, what was I was thinking at that time? You can then get that, retrieve that thing that was lost. It seems to be very human for people today who drive to think that they're a very good driver and to think that other people are very lousy drivers. And why is that? Because we can't all be good and we can't all be lousy so why that

perception part of that is a phenomenon called the dunning-kruger effect which is this belief we generally look favorably on ourselves so we tend to think that i didn't do too bad in that you know we tend to overstate our abilities and this is true in many walks of life not for everybody some people have have very kind of self-confidence issues and they they think they can't do anything very well but for most people um we think that in the driving situation the majority of people think that they're better than average drivers which is completely impossible because half of people must be better than average for other half to be lower than average. So half of people should say I'm better than average, but most people say that they believe they're a better than average driver. So part of that is that because we think we're better than average, this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, that we are oblivious that we're actually not as good as we think we are that we think other

drivers are worse than us we overlook our own mistakes we assume that we have this thing called attribution bias where think when we make a mistake we tend to blame it on something else oh my alarm didn't go off this morning oh the weather was bad or something like that we give ourselves an excuse whereas when somebody else makes a mistake we blame it on them as as a character flaw they're such an inconsiderate person they're a road hog you know i i heard someone uh say in in talking about this and other things about why other people don't seem to be as good as we are is that they said well it's because we judge ourselves by our intentions we judge other people by their actions yes very

true and the other the other interesting thing about the um this whole kind of uh we're not very good at assessing our own abilities the one way to find out if you are a good driver or not is go on like an advanced driving course or or retake your retake a test or something and then you'll know actually how good are you get somebody to critique you because the people the only people that are very that actually are too harsh on this on themselves they're the they're very top experts because it's only when we're really really expert in something that we realize actually we don't know we don't know everything and so when you've got say the top surgeons the top whatever it is the top pilots they'll actually probably be quite humble about their abilities whereas it is the top pilots they'll actually probably be quite

humble about their abilities whereas it's the people who aren't quite as good and actually the worse you are at something essentially the more oblivious you are to how bad you are at something and so the more you you overestimate your ability so yeah we just have a very quirky way of of of how we see ourselves and i think that's just part of our sort of self-preservation. A common experience for people is, you know, being in a bad mood. And it's very often hard to shake it, to get out of a bad mood, even if there isn't necessarily something particular that's causing it. It's hard to shake. So what works? What can people do to get out of a bad mood? One of the things that i really want to convey is to empower people to understand what's going on and if you understand the science behind it

then you can actually make actions that will help so when you're in a bad mood for example what's our emotions our emotions aren't something that just sort of happens to us so if i wasn't enjoying this interview mike and i felt quite grumpy i couldn't it would i couldn't say to you mike made me feel cross mike made me feel grumpy it's my own choice to respond to the situation and to feel those emotions and those emotions are birthed from an internal sensation inside us called interoception and essentially you can think of it like you've got an internal eye inside your body that's surveying what's your internal status like what's your heart rate doing what's your blood pressure doing what your internal organs are doing and you're completely oblivious to a lot of this to most of it but from those internal bodily sensations you your body forms this sort of

this vague image of what what you should be feeling are you stimulated are you relaxed are you are you very sedated what is it that's going on inside your body and from that emotions are birthed so if my if my heart is you can do it with experiments with tests if you give people uh a drug to make their heart race uh and to set off the whole kind of fight or flight response in them they will uh and you ask them are you feeling angry they will say yes i'm feeling quite angry quite uptight and that's just because their brain is trying to make sense of what's going on in their body so if you're feeling in a low mood then feel inside your body because your body is probably uh feeling sluggish maybe

maybe there's pain and you're and essentially part of your mood part of your emotion is being birthed from your body itself and so by doing simple things like for example getting up and exercising doing something getting out being creative with your hands speaking seeing other people socializing all these things give a little hit of of the feel good hormone dopamine and that can sort of lift the mood, and it can also change your internal chemistry so that you're not feeling so low. One thing everyone has witnessed that I know you talk about is the bystander effect, and I think it's really interesting. So talk about that. So if you're in a city, one thing that you often find, and you hear this, is that people are so rude, so they're so unfriendly in a city.

And there's an effect called the bystander effect. So if somebody were to have fallen in the street on the city, you've probably seen this on TV before. They do experiments and you see that most people just walk past and ignore the person. The more people there are in a situation and there seems to be somebody who needs help the less likely there is that somebody will go to help so if there's if there's just two or three people there then there's an over 80 chance that one of those people will go to help but the more and more people that there are there when it gets to about six people it goes down to about 30 and as it gets more the the percentages uh get lower and lower

and this is the strange thing that we're not being rude we're not being inconsiderate necessarily but it's actually because we're a large group of people we think somebody else is looking after the situation but conversely we have the power to to make a positive step so you see this in where somebody is in need if one person goes along and makes you know steps forward and says are you okay then other people follow suit and it shows that just what five percent of a crowd do controls the what the rest do so i find that really encouraging that you know if you go to help somebody if you go to say donate some money to charity then you can have a huge positive

impact on the other people around you. Well, this has really been interesting because, as I said in the beginning, you know, we do our daily routine. We think the way we think and we don't analyze it. We don't look at critically at why we do what we do or think what we think. And it's pretty interesting to, you know, pull back the covers and take a deeper look. Stuart Faramond has been my guest. Stuart is a medical doctor and author. He's a frequent guest on radio and TV. And his latest book is called Live Your Best Life, 162 Reasons to Rethink Your Daily Routine. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Stuart. Thanks for being on Something You Should Know. Nice one, Mike. Great to chat with you.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong.

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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 get your podcasts. When you look at human beings as a group, are you inclined to think that we are generally pretty good, that we're mostly honest and caring, or are we generally pretty selfish and, if left to our own devices,

maybe not so good, perhaps even evil in our own self-interest? This, of course, is a question that has long been debated. Are human beings good or evil? Rutger Bregman is a historian and writer who explores this in his latest book called Humankind, A Hopeful History. Hey, Rutger, welcome. Thanks for having me. So, what is your premise here? You think people are basically good or basically not so good?

So the simple idea is that most people deep down are pretty decent. Yeah, well, I would agree with that. I've always felt that people are basically pretty decent. But I guess when you say most people, I guess that's part of the question. 51% is most people. I mean, what is, in your view, what is most people? Well, I would say around 99%, like the vast, vast majority. And that's sort of the deeper fundamental reason for this

is that it's the secret of our success. So if you ask the question, why have we humans conquered the globe? Why not the Bonobos? Why not the Neanderthals? Why are we the ones who built pyramids and cathedrals and spaceships and you name it? What makes us so special? Well, for a long time, we like to believe that we're really smart. And indeed, there's some evidence for that. We have relatively large brains. What really distinguishes humans from other species is that we can cooperate on a skill

that no other animal can. And you can really see this in our evolution as well. So if we look at our own bodies today, we see some peculiar things, such as our unique ability to blush. I thought that was a really fascinating thing to discover. You know, we are pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom that blushes. We involuntarily give away our feelings to establish trust. Also, our eyes are totally unique among primates.

So all the other primates have dark color around their irises. So you can't really track their gazes. You can't really see what they're looking at. Well, we just have white around our eyes. So it's very easy to see what we are looking at and to look one another in the eye, which also establishes trust. Now, biologists have come to believe

that this is no accident, but that it's actually been selected for over thousands of years. That for thousands of years it was actually the friendliest and most empathetic among us who had the most kids and so the biggest pants of the chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. And this is as I said what they call survival of the friendliest. and it's pretty much the opposite of what I used to believe for a long time let's talk about because I think people generally are decent kind nice people for the most part but when you look at history and the events that changed history it's a lot of times people not being very kind uh protesting disrupting uh going against the grain and that's what has

shaped a lot of our culture absolutely and you know this is the big question that hangs over my work how can you ever argue that people have evolved to be friendly if we all know that we're also the cruelest species in the animal kingdom which i mean that's clearly true we do things that no other animal will think of doing i've never heard of a penguin that says well let's lock up another group of penguins and exterminate them all you know these are singularly human crimes wars genocides ethnic cleansing. So the standard explanation for this, the most popular explanation for it in Western culture is what scientists call veneer theory. Veneer theory is this idea that our civilization is only a thin layer, only a thin veneer. And that as soon as something happens,

say a natural disaster or scarcity or a pandemic or something like that, that people revert to their true selves, which is very nasty, that we start looting, plundering and become very violent. Now, what I tried to show that actually pretty much the opposite happens, that in times of crises, people actually start collaborating and there's also often this explosion of altruism. But then that leaves me with the question you know how can people still be horrible now obviously i can't give a sort of

one minute explanation of all the atrocities in world war ii but there's one key thing to keep in mind here which is that very often we do the most horrible things in the name of the good. So when you look at wars or genocides, for example, they're almost never motivated by sadism, by people who just enjoy being violent or something like that, or by pure selfishness. No, very often they're actually highly moral phenomena where people do horrible things in the name of friendship, in the name of loyalty, and in the name of friendship, in the name

of loyalty, and in the name of comradeship, because they don't want to let their own group down. And I guess this is the dark side of our friendliness. We humans, we just want to be liked. You know, we just want to be part of a group. And that is exactly the problem so often. Well, it also seems that self-preservation is in the mix here, that, you know, I'm nice and kind to everybody unless I'm feeling threatened and my family is feeling threatened, then I put them first. Doesn't necessarily mean I'm being cruel to other people, but it may come off that way because self-preservation is now front and center. I used to believe that as well, you know. I really used to believe that. I remember a couple of years ago when I had written an article about what happens after natural disasters. And I had looked into, you know, quite a bit of the sociological evidence and discovered that we now have more than 700 case studies after an earthquake or tsunami or something like that. And what researchers have

found is pretty much the opposite of what you find in the press or in the Hollywood disaster movies. After a terrible disaster, what you see is this explosion of altruism where people from the left to the right, rich, poor, young, old, all start working together and try to save as many lives as possible. And mostly all the stories that you hear about, you know, the looting, the plundering. I mean, we all remember Katrina, for example, where the press absolutely went nuts with talking about spreading all these rumors. What happens every time is that when the researchers come in and do the actual you know proper research they found that these were just rumors and that on the ground something very different was happening so i had written that article and i received an email from a dutch professor in sociology and he said that he always started class with a simple question to his first year students he said imagine that you're in an airplane and the

airplane crashes and it breaks in two parts now on planet a everyone panics goes nuts you know people trample over each other and you know only the people who are strong and powerful get out of the plane and the vulnerable and elderly are left behind. On planet B, people stay relatively calm and they help one another. And those who are old or disabled, they are helped out of the plane first. Now, the question is, on which planet do we live? And this professor taught me that almost every single time, you know, the vast majority of students said that they believe we live on planet A, the selfish planet. And then that professor would go on and explain that actually we have got massive empirical evidence that in reality, we live on planet B.

So that is sort of the thing I wanted to get across to readers because it really changes the way you look at life, that once you know that people in these kind of situations behave in a very different way than what we're always been told well it always seems to me that and this has been true in you know it's true in a classroom it's true in a family it's true at a workplace that the single disruptor makes a lot of noise and affects a lot of people, even though most people are going along with the crowd. It doesn't take many to screw it up. I would agree with that. I would agree with that.

And I think that history is often determined by relatively small groups of quite fanatical people, whether they're on the left or on the right, whether they're progressive activists or a small group of people who want to overthrow democracy or whatever. It's indeed the vast majority of people that, you know, get swayed by the small groups of more fanatical people. But things don't change much when, you know, I can't remember who said it, but, you know, there's no book called Great Moderates in History because moderation doesn't move much.

Everybody's just getting along and being cooperative with each other. And it takes disruptors to change things, sometimes for the worse, but sometimes change is good, but it's still disruptive and upsets a lot of people one of my favorite philosophers is a philosopher named burton drussell you know is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century and he once said that the whole problem with this world is that the fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves while the wise are full of doubt and that's indeed that you something that you see quite a lot in what we call the public debate. Now, when we talk sort of about good versus evil,

I think we simply have to recognize that evil is more powerful than good. You know, it is. There's something in psychology that we call the negativity bias. And psychologists, for them, it's a concept that describes that the negative just makes a bigger impression on us than the positive. Sort of the small acts of kindness are often all around us. It's just the water that we swim in, but then something nasty happens, and that makes a much bigger impression on us. So how can the good still win? Well,

only with an overwhelming majority. That's the only way it can win. And that's what you see happening. So if you, for example, study the sociology of protest movements, then you see that peaceful protest movements are actually more effective in overthrowing autocratic regimes than violent protest movements. Now, how could this be if sort of violence is more powerful than peace or evil stronger than good? Well, the answer is because peaceful protest movements attract on average more than 10 times as many people than violent protest movements do because not only young men with too much testosterone join but also you know women uh young old left wing right wing rich poor you name it these are these massive movements and they win just because they are have a huge

huge majority so that's um yeah sort of a general principle to keep in mind when you worry about the state of the world is that indeed evil is stronger than good it's undeniable but the good can still win with the overwhelming majority when you look at the people who fall into the category of evil throughout history do you think they think they're evil or do you think they think or thought they're doing good so in the batman movies you have this this figure of of the joker right and the joker just wants to watch the world burn he just enjoys violence violence. He is a pure sadist. Now, I'm not saying those people do not exist. I would say they're very, very rare, though. And in history, most of the atrocities are not perpetrated by pure sadists. Actually, what you find is that,

as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, I know you talk about, I think it's really interesting in World War II, we have in this country this image of German soldiers fighting fiercely to the end of World War II because they so believed in their cause. And you say, well, not necessarily. And so explain that. Because in 1944, 1945, the Allied psychologists were really wondering how it was possible that the Germans were still fighting so hard. You know, the German army was much more effective than the Allied army. On average, they inflicted 50% more casualties. And then the question was, why were they still fighting so hard, even even in 1945 when it was absolutely clear they were going to lose the

war and for a long time the psychologists believed that they must have been brainwashed or they must have been in the influence of some bizarre drug or something like that but then they started interviewing prisoners of war and they discovered that the main ingredient, the main motivational force was what we call in German, kameradschaft, comradeship. You know, these soldiers just didn't want to let their friends down. They weren't fighting, or at least most of them weren't fighting because they were so ideologically motivated. Obviously, they were anti-Semitic, and obviously, you know, they were nationalistic, but the main motivational force was really comradeship, and that they didn't want to let their friends down.

And the German army command knew this. They made very sure that they would never separate friends, you know, when they would deploy troops in other places, etc. It was very important to them that they kept these friends together. And that was one of the reasons why they kept fighting. So, this is an example of how this yearning for friendship and loyalty can actually be abused. And so, it does seem to me, I mean, just my observation is that people are basically good. They want to help others. They want to help others. They want to help pull others up who are down.

But we've set the, at least in this country, we've set the culture up in a way that it's sometimes hard to do that. We have here a horrible homeless problem in a lot of major cities, and I think people feel horrible about it, but they don't know what to do. I mean, you could write a check to a charity, but those homeless people are going to be there tomorrow. It doesn't fix anything. And so there's a frustration of wanting to do good and not feeling like you're making much of a difference. So you could argue that distance is at the heart of all of these problems.

You know, we humans are a fundamentally physical species, and we've evolved for face-to-face contact. I mean, we especially experience this right now in the middle of a pandemic, just how much we need to actually see each other, feel each other, smell each other, touch each other. And when that goes away, when the distance between people's between people increase then others become abstract i think this is really interesting by the way if you look at the history and the psychology of violence so if you watch a series

like game of thrones then you might get the impression that violence is something that is pretty easy. If you would send an average person, draft that person and send them to a war, then that person would easily shoot to kill because that is just in our nature. Well, what history actually shows us, and there are many case studies that now have proven this, is that actually most people can't do that. We know that the vast majority of soldiers who were drafted to go to the Second World War actually didn't even manage to fire their guns. They couldn't do it because they hadn't been conditioned enough and didn't have enough brainwashing and boot camps, etc. You need to really do your best as an army to make average

people actually capable of violence. Now, how can we do that? We can do it by increasing the distance, both the physical distance and the psychological distance. So the history of warfare basically is all about this. We go from bows and arrows to cannons to artillery. If you look at the great battles of the 19th and the 20th century, think about the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, the vast majority of casualties were committed or were caused by artillery because it's relatively easy to push a button

and then have an explosion fire away. While it's very difficult to use a bayonet and shove it down someone, most people are psychologically incapable of that. And if we're capable of it, then it's only after a long process in which we've increased the psychological distance with other people. This is what psychologists call dehumanization, where we look at other people and we don't really see people anymore. And that's the way I think many of us deal with the homeless. We just pass them by on the street and too often we forget that they're people, just like us, who were born and loved once and now have been cast aside. Well, you started this conversation by talking about how one of the things that makes

humans human is their ability to cooperate and to help each other. And you talk about the prisons in Norway. So tell that story. So normally, when we think about a prison, we think about this warehouse where people basically have to pay for their crimes. They really need to have a bad time and suffer while we lock them up. Now, in Norway, they still lock people up, but then they think these people need to return to society someday. Most of them will have to return to society, and then they're going to be someone's neighbor. So do we want to send criminals taking time bombs into society? Or do we want to send people who've actually been able to improve their lives and who will be law-abiding, taxpaying citizens?

Well, obviously the latter. But then how you do that? Well, you don't really improve someone by punishing that person. You've got to give someone opportunities. So that's what they do in norway you've got prisons where you know the the prisoners can follow all kinds of courses where they go to the library to the cinema where they can make their own music you know there's one prison that has its own music studio and its own music label which is called criminal records um and you look at it and at first you think well this is crazy you know these norians have gone nuts. But then you look at the scientific results and you look at what criminologists call the recidivism rate,

the chance that someone will commit another crime once he or she gets out of prison. And it turns out that Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in the whole world. So these prisons that don't look like prisons at all are actually the most effective prisons out there. It's just an example of what happens once you change your way of looking at other people and move to a more hopeful view of human nature. Well, yeah. Well, I like that view of human nature, and it's good to know that it is shared by many, many other people. Rutger Bregman's been my guest. He is an historian and writer, and his book is called Humankind, A Hopeful History. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Rutger. Thanks, man.

Most dogs love to eat and often aren't very picky about what they eat. My dog Taffy, who's sitting right here, is not especially picky about what she eats. But according to research, the two favorite flavors that dogs like the most are liver and chicken. Now, you've probably heard that you're not supposed to give chocolate to dogs, which is true, but you should also not give dog meat from the table. The fat content in the meat we eat could give a dog a fatal attack of pancreatitis. Chicken, turkey, bacon, any kind of meat that is for human beings is usually a bad idea for dogs. Have you ever wondered what your dog thinks about all day?

Well, like many humans, your dog mostly thinks about food and romance. Dogs cannot think about the future, they do not dwell on the past, and they don't know that they're going to die one day. So what's left to think about?

And that is something you should know. The goal of this podcast, and I imagine the goal of every podcast, is to grow the audience. The way our audience grows is word of mouth. People like you telling other people who you think would enjoy this podcast. So please share this podcast with someone you know. I'm Mike Carruthers. 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. 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. 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, this is Rob Benedict.

And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors,

and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type." With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes, so please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.