Something You Should Know - The Amazing YouTube Success Story & Why We Behave the Way We Do

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Your mother told you not to lie. After all, lying is dishonest. More importantly, it may also be bad for your health. This episode begins by revealing why telling the truth could help prevent you from getting sick. http://research.nd.edu/news/32485-study-telling-fewer-lies-linked-to-better-health-relationships/ How did YouTube go from being a simple dating site to the biggest video sharing service in the world that generates billions of dollars in ad revenue each year? How did it happen that many ordinary people have become wealthy superstars simply by creating and uploading videos to YouTube? Joining me to tell the phenomenal story of YouTube’s rapid growth and financial success is business journalist Mark Bergen author of the book Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination (https://amzn.to/3erOSvM).  What drives your behavior? Is it nature or nurture – or both? Are all your behaviors the result of conscious thought or instinct? What compels you to behave the way you do? Here with some fascinating insight into the origins of our behavior and the behavior of all creatures on earth is Marlene Zuk. Marlene is professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota, and author of the book Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters (https://amzn.to/3cOtTmz).  You likely have some valuables hidden in your home that you hope a burglar will never find. But if you really want to be clever about it, you need to know where burglars look and where they almost never look. Listen as I explain the places burglars say they check first and places in your home they almost never go. https://lifehacker.com/the-best-spot-to-hide-valuables-may-be-your-kids-room-5937620 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! Cancel unnecessary subscriptions with Rocket Money today. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/something . Seriously, it could save you HUNDREDS of dollars per year! Redeem your rewards for cash in any amount, at any time, with Discover Card! Learn more at https://Discover.com/RedeemRewards Download Best Fiends for FREE from the App Store or Google play.. Plus, earn even more with $5 worth of in-game rewards when you reach level 5! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, could lying be bad for your health? Then, all the little strategies and elements that have made YouTube such a phenomenal success for Google. Primary one meaning YouTube was just very simple to use. It was designed with this sensibility that it would be not just for techies, but for everyday people. Google moved in really early knowing that online video was going to be the next wave of the Internet. Then, where's the best place and the worst place to hide valuables in your home

so burglars can't find them? And why do we behave the way we do? Is it our environment or our genetics? Or does it even matter? Oh, I think it matters enormously because I think almost all of our big arguments and our big struggles come from trying to understand where behavior comes from. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome?

Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. 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. Something I wanted to share since I have this podcast and it is heard by well over a million people every month. We have a problem in this country that people don't talk about a lot and that I'm involved in. And the problem is that there are so many kids, particularly teens, who are in need of a loving foster home and adoption. I have an adopted son, and I'm in the middle of helping a homeless teenager get settled in a new home. And if I could convince even just a few people, perhaps you,

to explore the possibility of opening up your home to a child who really needs help and who is in a tough situation through no fault of their own, you will be doing something very amazing. Private foster agencies as well as government-run children's services departments need foster homes to place kids. I invite you to get involved, contact an agency in your community. I promise you it will be one of the most rewarding things you ever do. And if you like, write and tell me your story. First up today, your mother probably told you it's a really bad idea to lie, especially to her. But there's another reason not to lie.

It seems to be bad for your health. Even the little white lies can be bad for us, according to research at the University of Notre Dame. A study revealed that people who rarely lied were actually much healthier than average or problem liars. People who bend the truth, withhold information, or tell the occasional whopper often suffer in several ways. Symptoms ranged from physical problems, such as headaches and sore throats, to some serious emotional problems, including feelings of sadness, stress, and even self-loathing. And that is something you should know.

You may have noticed that YouTube has become this phenomenal presence in the world. It has created stars out of regular people and made them very wealthy. It's created videos and video styles that would have never stood a chance on commercial television, yet are wildly popular on YouTube. You also may not know that YouTube actually started as a dating site. The story of YouTube and its success is amazing, and someone who has studied this story is Mark Bergen. He's a leading business journalist who has reported on Google for many years, and Google owns YouTube.

He's author of a book called Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. Hi, Mark. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So give me a quick snapshot of what YouTube is and what it's become. Yeah, sure. So it is the largest video site on the planet. It has been for a very long time. The stat that the company shared, which is a couple of years stale to this point, is that there are 500 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute. Last year in 2021, YouTube made about $29 billion in advertising revenue.

They also made an additional amount, which they don't disclose, in people that pay for YouTube subscriptions, their music service, and their over-the-top TV service. So it's a scale that has really never been seen before and just continues to grow. And how old a company is YouTube? YouTube was founded in 2005. Within 18 months, it was sold to Google for $1.6 billion, which was a pretty big acquisition at the time, really unprecedented. And so it's been around now for 17 years. And it started, if I recall, as like a dating site, yes? Yeah, that was one of the iterations. The three founders had worked at PayPal before and were toying around. This was the genesis of video online and flip cameras and sort of accessible digital video.

And they were solving this problem, which is we want to make it easier for people to share video on the internet. And one of the options they thought was, well, the only reason people are going to share video is uh is for online dating but to attend at that point hot or not uh was a really popular site that the founders of youtube liked for its simplicity uh and its popularity uh they tossed that aside i think in part when they discovered that people were willing to to upload and watch uh video footage that wasn't just about sex appeal or or dating and my sense is and i i think a lot of people feel like the rise of YouTube was a lot about the right thing at the right place at the right time, or was it a very calculated rise to the top? I would say it's more of the former. I think they put some pieces in place that were really savvy, both technologically and culturally.

The primary one being YouTube was just very simple to use. It was designed with this sensibility that it would be not just for techies, but for everyday people, both to easily watch footage and then to upload. They hit this stride in this moment where user generated content was just becoming a big commercial opportunity. Google moved in really early knowing that online video was going to be the next wave of the internet. I think they made some key choices since then, obviously, to keep that business afloat. But sometimes the most recent example is podcasting. YouTube is probably the biggest podcasting service right now, in part because so many YouTubers begin starting podcasting channels. Podcasters will put their videos, just put up their clips on YouTube. It's a way to drive audience and traffic. YouTube's really done that without

a lot of effort. The same thing could be said for music, where they've more recently been putting in some actual strategic and oomph behind it. But for a long time, they were just the world's biggest music service without anyone really talking about it and with sort of minimal corporate investment. And there was fairly early on, I mean, people were uploading everything and somebody said, wait, you don't have the right to upload that music. That's not your music to upload. Yeah, this was a really early and fascinating part. But at the time, there was a copyright law, which wasn't very well understood. You had just a few years before YouTube started, Napster was around. And Napster was this file sharing service for music. Napster was quickly swept into the dustbin of history, in part because it violated copyright law.

And YouTube hired savvy lawyers early on to avoid that problem. And what was happening was that there were people that were uploading Family Guy episodes or commercials and just posting them on YouTube. A really interesting phenomenon early on was wrestling. Wrestling became super popular on YouTube. What YouTube leaned into was, hey, if you're a big media company, we actually can build a technology. It's called Content ID. They built this soon after joining Google where they can recognize copyrighted footage and then they can go back to the copyright holder or the media company, TV station or the movie production studio and say,

if you want to keep this up, we'll just give you all the advertising revenue that appears on that video. And this was a pretty genius move that basically enabled YouTube to survive and become financially successful. Well, I have heard that there's a lot of frustration with YouTube. Like YouTube will just take down a video, but they don't explain why. They don't tell the person who posted it why it was taken down. They just take it down. And that's got to be really frustrating to work on something, have it removed, and there's no 800 number to call and find out why. Absolutely, yeah. The history of YouTube is full of not the best support for its creator class.

That has changed more recently, but for a long time, they know, they built this and they built the system where they could, and millions of people were making money off YouTube videos. But there's really, it's sort of an Oz behind the curtain. There's no sense about how decisions are made and when those decisions are made, why. And that could be from the videos being taken down or your video, suddenly one day your video is running advertising and you're getting a nice steady paycheck. And the next day you're not. And that happened again and again and again. And continues to happen. That's right. They have improved in part because of a series of crises that they've gone through.

I think also they've improved because they're just facing new competition. TikTok is both an incredibly popular video service now, and it's a service that's found a way to pay video producers and creators. And that new competition has forced YouTube to be a bit more responsive the ad revenue because they have so many people watching their videos. Who are these people? How do they do it? Give me a little insight into that. Yeah, there's this. I mean, it's a relatively new in that this profession did not

exist 15 years ago. YouTube was the first company to start paying online producers and broadcasters in 2007. There've been, Facebook has tried many different ways. Twitter is trying, you know, now we're seeing attempts from Twitch and Spotify, but YouTube was first and for a long time, the only place where if you want to create media online and you weren't a professional sort of, or connected to a media company, the only option was YouTube. And it was a pretty, it kind of works like the similar way to how Google helped sort of turn on this financial tap for bloggers, right? So like AdSense is a fairly simple system where if you have a website on the line, you

can run banner ads on the internet using Google services. YouTube is effectively the same thing. The company was not expecting this. Like when they started off, they had no sense that they were going to create stars of this size and magnitude. And a lot of new businesses that have appeared, these satellite companies, you know, you have YouTubers that have multimillion dollar businesses sort of circling around them and their own media personalities.

And inside the company, they talk about this as initially they thought it would be like an SNL model where, you know, you have a creator that comes up and is big on YouTube and will jump off in the TV and film. They also talked about an Oprah model, which is they're staying on YouTube. They're building an Oprah's type level of empire where they might go out into merchandise. They might write books, right? They might sell a line of products or any type of way to diversify the revenue. And they're building these businesses on YouTube.

And there are countless examples of that. And many of them for teens and younger people are more popular than Hollywood stars and more recognizable and have been for years. I want to ask you more specifically how some of these YouTube stars do what they do. But first, I'm speaking with Mark Bergen. He is a business journalist and the name of his book is Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. 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 Randolph 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, Mark, explain, pick one maybe, pick one of these YouTube stars and explain how it is they do what they do and they get all these viewers and they make all these millions of dollars. Sure. A good one now. I think he's probably certainly the most ascendant and rising star and one of the most popular in the world. His name is Mr. Beast. It's his YouTube channel. Jimmy is his name. He is based in North Carolina. He's been on YouTube, I believe, since he was 12. I think he's in his early 20s now. And he started off like many YouTubers, posting video games. Mr. Beast has now crossed 100 million YouTube subscribers. And he makes primarily the YouTubers like him make money

from the ad split that they get with the company. So every time you see an ad on YouTube, the marketer is paying for that every dollar that they spend with Google, which is YouTube's parent. YouTube keeps 45% of that and then gives the remaining 55% to the creator. And so that's a primary way that most people make money on YouTube. Mr. Beast, he's branched out into, I think he's selling hamburgers, he's selling chocolate bars. He's really this fascinating example where he's branched out into, I think he's selling hamburgers, he's selling chocolate bars. He's really this fascinating example where he's branched out into new lines, basically, of becoming a consumer product company. A lot of YouTubers will, they'll sell t-shirts that they

make, they'll do branded deals, which is where a company pays them to name or site. I'm sure anytime a lot of people who watch YouTube will see this. This has been more recently as YouTube's gone through some advertising problems, a lot of creators have turned to things like a sponsorship deal to make money. A small number percentage-wise of the YouTubers on the site are making a lot of money. Most of them are making some money and maybe six figures. And then a lot of them are not. Doesn't it make you wonder what it is about the guys that do that make this huge amount of money? What do they have that other people can't seem to figure out? Yeah, that's super fascinating about YouTube is that, they, the company was built to sort of,

they said that they don't have a gatekeeper like Hollywood. There's no agent, there's no producer that's green lighting a show. You know, if you want to go on tomorrow and upload your video, it's sort of up to you. If you're, you have an audience and you get millions of views, that's something that you've done. You know. YouTube is the first company to do this sort of mass scale programming via algorithms. Its recommendation engine drives a lot of the views you'll see when you click go on YouTube.com or you open up the app. The related videos, which is I think 70% or more of the video traffic comes from those. There are, so a lot of the successful creators have developed these relationships with their fans, whether they're doing these,

some of them, Mr. Beast will do pretty elaborate shows that are sort of similar to TV and have like TV level budgets and production quality. But he also connects with his viewers in a way that it feels like if you're a Mr. Beast fan,

it feels like you know him personally. And I think that's something that's really unique about YouTube is that it was the first place to birth this influencer celebrity that you and I will not know, but we will follow them and have a lot of fans will have this dedicated relationship and then feel personally aggrieved if something is wrong with that creator and feel invested in their success as well. One thing I find really interesting about YouTube is it has created styles of videos that you've never seen before. That now there are videos, very popular videos, that are just people playing video games. So people are watching other people play video games. And these are very popular

videos. And that was never a thing before. This has been a phenomenon. Let's Play is the name that came up with it for more than a decade. One of the major reasons why this became a huge category is because in 2012, YouTube started to prioritize in its ranking system. So the videos that you see in recommendations or on search, we're going to prioritize in its ranking system. So the videos that you see in recommendations are on search. We're going to prioritize the videos that get the most watch time, the people who watch the longest. And what video game streaming is, it's pretty cheap relative. You don't need a green screen. You don't need cameras necessarily. You just have a webcam and you can upload it a lot of minutes up to YouTube.

And so that was one of the categories, beauty gurus of mostly women giving makeup tips also became a huge category of vlogging, podcasts. These relatively inexpensive media production replaced early YouTube, which I think was a lot more inventive and sort of making short films. And so this is a way where the company had this unintended consequence in really shaping our culture

because of the way that they sort systems with their algorithms. What's another example of a style of video that YouTube created that no one really saw coming? Toy unboxing. It started out with videos that just showed people very meticulously unboxing a toy, and these became phenomenally popular with kids. And this was a space that YouTube, unlike television, was just not regulated in the same way. So there was no regulation about, you know,

television has rules in place about educational programming, about how much commercial content there could be relative to educational programming. YouTube and the internet had none of this. And so you saw these toy unboxing videos that were very compelling, something that never existed really on TV, that were effectively 20 minute long commercials. At least that's what YouTube's critics have pointed out. And then the company is eventually regulated in part because of that. Since theoretically anyone can create and post a video on YouTube, I've always wondered why. Because when you watch YouTube, you can pretty much be sure that you're not going to stumble into something completely inappropriate like pornography or beheadings or something like that. What keeps that from happening?

What keeps those kind of videos off of YouTube? It's very difficult to do early on. This was in 2005. There was no machine learning systems that we have today that can automatically detect the presence of what they would describe as graphic porn or sex. So YouTube hired people. They hired moderators and screeners.

They built sort of a rudimentary machine system that can identify when these images appeared. They had some really early problems with this. This is a hard problem, especially at the size, even early on, that YouTube was. There's been this one executive and describes the, it's almost like velociraptors at the gate, like Jurassic Park, that YouTubers would then kind of go up to the line of the rules sometimes

and see how far they could get. And YouTube had a hard time. These are in their, you know, I'm not defending the company, but these are extraordinarily difficult decisions, not just identifying what is graphic sex, but what is hate speech, right? What is misinformation? What is harassment? And so, and you mentioned beheadings. This was a problem that they had with ISIS in 2013 and 2014, where ISIS was uploading very graphic videos. The company

worked, they've since contracted the thousands of moderators they have across the globe to have this 24-7 operation. It's impossible to watch all of YouTube. The company once in, they were called the four regulators in Europe and they described that it was,

it'd be the same like screening a phone call before it's made, right? And it's sort of the way they built it. It just can't screen at all. And, but they, they have Google is the world's leading computer science and artificial intelligence company. And they built these systems to identify skin detection algorithms to sort of identify automatically remove pornography detection algorithms that can sort of remove what the signs of, of hate speech and graphic violence. It is not a problem that's solved and arguably something that they can never solve. So what's next for YouTube?

What's the future? That's a really good question. Um, I do think they're going to be responding to TikTok a lot more with shorts. They've talked a lot about YouTube. Their advertising model that they have is under threat right now. It's still very strong and not going away. But there's privacy regulation. There's all sorts of regulation around Google. And the way that digital advertising has worked in the past 20 years just no longer will work anymore, in part because these tech companies are facing more scrutiny. So YouTube has to lean into commerce.

So you might see a lot more opportunities to do direct shopping on YouTube videos, whether that's buying merchandise from a creator, buying actual items directly, a link from directly inside a video. That's something that YouTube has been talking about and planning on much more aggressively. It's also something that Instagram and tech talk are doing. We've talked about YouTube TV. They are both be pushing that product. They have YouTube TV, and they also want to push you just watching YouTube more on your television. If you have a smart, smart TV, YouTube has been making a lot of investment. They started off on the small screen, but they've always desired to get that time, the sort of four to five hours a day that Americans watch television. That's time that YouTube thinks, wow, we should be occupying a lot more of that. I seem to recall hearing that a lot

of the viewing on YouTube is by kids, young kids. They watch YouTube. If you go on now and you look at some statistics about the top performing YouTube videos by volume of traffic, by views, by the currency that YouTube cares about, it is all videos made for toddlers, made for very young kids. Cocomelon. YouTube for a long time didn't acknowledge this part of their operations because of children's privacy laws online that say, you know, if you're a website,

you can't serve targeted advertising to anyone under 13. And so YouTube just said, our site in the terms of service, the fine print that no one really reads, it says you must be 13 or over to watch, or if not, you're sort of watching with adult supervision. 2019, the Federal Trade Commission actually fines YouTube for violating that law. They've made a lot of significant changes. They have an app called YouTube Kids designed for children. I think that'll be another opportunity where we'll see how it goes in the future. But so much of, I mean, if anyone has a young kid at home, they entirely understand kids do not watch television. They watch YouTube.

Well, listening to you tell the story, it is amazing how so many parts of the YouTube success story were kind of by accident or, you know, no one saw it coming, and yet it turned into this just phenomenal success story. I've been talking with Mark Bergen. He is a business journalist, and his book is called Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. And there's a link to the book in the show notes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks so much, Mike.

It's been a pleasure. I really appreciated it. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure 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. 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 get your podcasts. When I say the word behavior, you know exactly what I mean. People behave in a certain way. But what determines how we behave? Is animal instinct? Is that behavior or is that just instinct? Does behavior require advanced thought or not? Do plants behave or is what they do, is that something else? Why we and every other creature behave the way we do is something Marlene Zuck has been studying for a long time. Marlene is Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior

at the University of Minnesota, and she's author of a book called Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, How Behavior Evolves and why it matters. Hi Marlene, welcome back to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So as I said, everybody has a sense of what behavior is. When you say the word behavior, I know what you mean, but you say that it's a difficult

word to define. So why is it a difficult word to define? Okay, well, let me ask you something. So let's say you are really into things like Venus fly traps and other carnivorous plants. If a fly flies into the trap of a Venus fly trap and the trap closes, is the plant behaving? Well, I guess so. I mean, it's behaving like a plant. It's doing what plants do, or it's doing what that plant is supposed to do. There you go. Is that behaving? Is just doing what things do behaving? I mean, rocks fall downhill. Are they behaving? I will tell you that I often show people videos of things, and I'll show them a common set is I'll show them lion roaring and I'll show them

the Venus flytrap because there are some great videos that you can find on YouTube that are accompanied by like suspenseful music and the whole thing. And then the flytrap closes and the fly struggles and you know, all of that. And then the third one is a video of white blood cells consuming bacteria. So they're rushing around in a Petri dish or on whatever it is they're on and consuming a pathogen. And they sure look like they're, you know, running around, but they're cells. So which of those three things, the lion, the cells and the Venus flytrap is behaving. And if they're all behaving, then I don't know, I think we have a problem because we can't, then behavior is so general a thing that we can't even talk about it. And I'd kind of like to know what I mean by it.

And yet you don't. Well, and yet part of what I think is so fascinating about this is that I think I do, but I also think the boundaries are fuzzy. And I think that the reason it's interesting to have the boundaries fuzzy is that it means that we can't really talk about behavior as being different from a lot of other characteristics that animals have. So a lot of times when people talk about, you know, oh, how do things evolve? They're okay with how physical things evolve. They think, okay, giraffes have long necks because giraffes with slightly longer necks had more babies because they could get more food because they could reach the leaves higher on the trees or what have you. And so you get a longer neck and that all totally makes sense. Or you have teeth that allow you to tear meat if you're a carnivore, because again, that

helps you eat more. And so you get all these weird adaptations in teeth. But behavior, you say something like, oh, okay, is something like the way we act to our friends or the way we take care of our children or our intelligence. Well, those are all behaviors. How did that evolve? And I think that behavior evolves pretty much the same way that physical characteristics do. And that opens up a whole world for us to be able to study the way behavior evolves, because we're not setting it apart as though it's some weird, strange, inexplicable, spiritual, you know, gooey thing.

And so give me an example of behavior evolving. Sure. Fruit flies that we, I'm picking an example that scientists have known about for a super long time, but you could pick, you know, lots of other behaviors too, that fruit flies have this very stereotyped set of behaviors that they perform when they're going to mate. And so males will tap with their antennae and they'll flutter their wings and do various other things. And so people have studied this. You take a population of fruit flies and you say, okay, they vary in how much they do that. Some of them are real big wing flutterers and some of them barely move their wings at all. And it turns out that female fruit flies respond more to the ones that flap their wings a lot.

And so then wing flapping ends up meaning that males that do it have more babies than males that don't. And so you end up with a population eventually of wing fluttering Drosophila. So it's really not any different than the way other things evolve. So what's the difference between behavior and instinct? So people talk about an instinctive behavior as being something that you can't change. So there's a maternal instinct. And it means that mothers just automatically know how to take care of their children or their puppies or their baby whatever's because of something that they inherit. It's not something that they need to learn. But that dichotomy between something we need to learn and something

that we get from our genes or that we inherit or that's hardwired is really a silly one that doesn't make any sense when you think about it. And it's actually a silly one when it comes to physical traits too, because there's no trait that you can think of that isn't also affected by the environment as well as genes. And people somehow have an easier time with this with physical characteristics. So, you know, bad nutrition, then you're going to be shorter than if you had good nutrition. Okay. It's a combination of both. That's good.

That's fine. That's how it works. That's how it works for everything. There's no trait in the whole world that's just from your genes or just from your environment. And that includes behavior. So I have a behavior that i do every day okay after the sun goes down i get tired and i go to bed and sleep right is that a behavior because everybody does that you have to do that or you'll die right that feels more like instinct than

behavior okay but certainly the way you go to sleep you know certainly the body sleeps and and that's why I say the boundaries are fuzzy because you also digest your food and so you know well that's automatic and you know people wouldn't probably not call digesting your food a behavior but in some way sleep is kind of analogous to that. So the way you go to sleep and how... I mean, ask any parent with a newborn, sleep is not automatic, right? There's a lot of stuff that goes into how organisms go to sleep, when they go to sleep,

what cues they use to go to sleep. I have insomnia, so sometimes I think, why is this not more automatic? When you start thinking about it, it is a behavior and it involves your body. And so it's physiological, but there's also some aspects to it that are clearly learned. And also you can make yourself stay awake, right? Easily. Not forever. If you don't sleep. Well, obviously not forever, but sure. You can modify it pretty much. It's just like the same thing with your height. You can modify it some by how much that we do things because we decide to do them, not because we've evolved to do them. So here's a way to think about it. I often talk to people about this with an example of dogs.

So people are totally happy with the idea that Great Danes and Chihuahuas look super different from each other, right? You get your really big dogs, you get your little tiny dogs, and that all goes fine. And people are, you know, yep, that's how it worked. And then you start talking about behavior. And on the one hand, people are fine with the idea that behavior must have changed through a similar process because we call Labrador Retrieversvers retrievers because of what they do, not because of how they look. So we must have changed their behavior somehow. But then we have this funny idea that, well, but they're all like wolves inside. And every dog food commercial

portrays all this inner wolf thing. And you've got to feed your dog as if it was a wolf inside and there's this alpha dog thing and et cetera, et cetera. So people are kind of conflicted about it, but honestly, behavior evolves the same way that physical characteristics do, that you get variation and then individuals with certain variants end up having or not having more offspring. And there you go. Well, you asked at the beginning of our conversation, if plants, what plants do is behavior. Well, what do you think? Based on what you've said, it is the Venus fly trap. When it traps a fly, is that behavior? Do plants exhibit what you call behavior? I mean, plants move. They certainly change their orientation.

They follow the sun. They can close in response to stimuli. With the Venus flytrap thing, there was even a really cool story a number of years ago, pointing out that they could count, or at least according to some definitions, they could count. So a Venus flytrap has a problem, which is that it doesn't want to just close every time a breeze blows by. It only wants to close when there's actually a prey item in it. But how do you know when there's a prey item in it? And notice I'm colloquially using the word no, even though I don't really think the plants know anything.

The answer is that there's these sensory cells inside the trap, and you have to trip three of them, not one, not two, not four, but three, and then the plant will close. I don't know. You want to call that counting? It's kind of counting. Somebody who was analyzing this a while ago pointed out that children can't do this until they're, I think it's 18 months. I can't remember. It's something like 18 months, two years, something like that, when children can actually count to three. And parents are like, woohoo, this is exciting. And they don't say, oh, thank God, you've gotten to the stage of being like a Venus flytrap, right? Yeah. So why does this matter?

I mean, this is an interesting conversation, but so what? I mean, and the title of your book is Why It Matters. So why does it matter? Oh, I think it matters enormously because I think almost all of our big arguments and our big struggles come from trying to understand where behavior comes from. And this idea that I think, you know, that we deal with about whether it's coming from our environment, whether it's coming from our genes. So I started really writing the book in earnest as the Me Too movement was coming to the fore. And it's like the Me Too movement is essentially about the evolution of behavior. It is about whether or not you have gender differences that are so hardwired, again, to use a term I don't like, that we're never going to be able to overcome this and we're

never going to be able to have equity or and we're never going to be able to have equity or whether, oh no, it's all due to the environment. And so what we need to do is make sure that people have the appropriate education or the appropriate whatever. It's almost all of our big arguments, you know, where is intelligence coming from? Sexual orientation, you know, like I said, gender differences, all of this centers around where do, you know, where are we getting our behavior from? Where does it come from? There was an article in the New York Times that talked about the inherent brutality of the male libido. And basically the message was, look, we're never going to be able to solve this because

the male sex drive or whatever, however you want to put it, is just inherently brutal. And men are just always going to want to take advantage of women. And that is just the way it is. And it's kind of a, you know, sorry, ladies. It was a really, it was really interesting because of course, within hours, you know, like there were literally thousands of comments on all sides of the spectrum. So I think it matters enormously. But even though there's behavior, there's also learning. I mean, you learn behaviors by watching, you learn behaviors because you see someone do it and say, I'd like to do that. And that example of the male libido, well, it doesn't apply to everybody.

I know lots of men who aren't brutal. But where does it come from? So the idea that it comes entirely from the environment, entirely from learning, is hard to defend for behavior because why would behavior be so different than everything else? Again, go back to the height thing. It's everything is a combination of input from the genes and input from the environment. But that doesn't mean that the genes determine or hardwire or code for everything that you do. But it makes you wonder why some people have a certain behavior and others don't. I mean, you talked about men being brutal, but not all men are brutal.

But you don't often hear about women being brutal. Or here's an example. Okay, so spiders, I don't know if it's the male or the female or both, but spiders weave webs. And they weave like beautiful webs. And I've never seen like a really crappy web. Like they, that's a behavior that they all seem to do really well. And, and maybe that's just my perception, but I'll ask you, I mean, do all spiders weave beautiful webs or are there some guys, you know, do they say, well, you know, Bob's not such a great, he doesn't weave as good

as some of the other guys, but you know, he weaves a web and it's okay, but it's not like, you know, do they say, well, you know, Bob's not such a great, he doesn't weave as good as some of the other guys, but you know, he weaves a web and it's okay, but it's not like, you know, a masterpiece or is everybody's beautiful. See, it's like, I think that's a super, it's a super good question. And the answer is it's like everything else that variation exists in pretty much everything. And if variants confer an advantage, then they're going to persist. And if they confer a disadvantage, then they're going to get selected out. And if they're neutral, then they're just going to stay. And where variation comes from is one of the biggest questions that evolutionary biologists ask.

You know, how do you end up with so much variation in the natural world? It's one of the most remarkable things about nature is that, you know, they're not all alike. You know, every spider might look alike, every web might look alike, and then you start looking at it and it's like, oh, geez, no, they're very, very different. Although I would also like to point out that it's probably not going to be Bob because most of the web spinning ones, the males often travel around and the females are the ones that hang out and do the webs. And so a lot of times when you see those big orb weaving spiders, it's usually a female. Since the title of your book is about dancing cockatoos and the dead man's test, can you explain those things briefly? Sure. So the dancing cockatoo is from something

that was super popular on YouTube a number of years ago, which is Snowball, the dancing cockatoo. And so if you have never seen Snowball, the dancing cockatoo, you are in for, and even if you have, you should look at it, you should look at him again. So Snowball is a sulfur crested cockatoo. They are originally from Australia, but they're often kept as pets. And Snowball has the amazing ability to dance to music and keep the beat. And so there was a hysterical article in The Guardian that was explaining about this, and it said, it all started as something's must with the Backstreet Boys. And so Snowball, if you play music, will move his body in rhythm. And some of it's fairly elaborate. He's got, I think it's like 18 different movements of... The authors of the paper say that he mostly bobs his head and sways back and forth, which they say a little disparagingly. And when I read that, I thought, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've seen a lot of people dance and that's pretty much how most people dance, too, is they bob their head and sway back and forth. But anyway, so Snowball can do this and he'll keep to rhythm of different songs and, you know, do all this stuff. And so that led to a lot of speculation about, well, does this reflect intelligence? Does it reflect something special that an animal can do? You know, what does it

mean to have a dancing cockatoo? And so, you know, I think that when people get captivated by animal behavior, it's an interesting question to ask of, well, what does this mean if animals can do these really special things? But I do, you know, really words cannot do it justice. There's a lot of cool videos out there on Snowball the Cockatoo. The dead man test goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, which is what is behavior. And so I'm not the only person that points out that it's hard to define behavior and that we need to have a way to do it unambiguously.

There's a subspecialty of psychology called behavior analysis or behavior analysts. And they work in a way that actually draws very heavily on B.F. Skinner and the idea that behavior, if you reinforce behavior, you can shape it. And if you don't reinforce it, then it'll go away and so forth. And so it's a relatively old thing of psychology. But anyway, the behavior analysts have a thing that they call the dead man test, which is that if a dead man can do it, then it's not behavior. And if a dead man can't do it, then it might be behavior. And so they literally call this the dead man test, although they are a little bit tongue in cheek about it. And there was this really funny paper talking about how the psychologist observed sarcophagus in the Egyptian Museum and found that it did not exhibit any behavior so that they

looked at whether it could pass the dead man test. And so there you go. Well, I think there is a tendency when you talk about a behavior to ask, is this genetic or is this learned? Is this nature or nurture? That it has to be either or, but as you've been explaining, most of the time it's probably both. I really think we need to let this go. I just, I wish that people would stop doing it. It seems like, you know, every time we say, oh, yes, yes, we understand it, then it just pops right back up. That's one of the first questions that I get when I talk about animal behaviors. People say, oh, but is that genetic or is that something that the animal learned? And all traits are both. All traits are both. And I think that's the takeaway from this

whole conversation. Marlene Zook has been my guest. She's a professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota. And the name of her book, her latest book is Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Marlene. Good to have you back. All right.

Thanks for having me again. If you'd like a really good hiding place in your home for your valuables, just ask a burglar. They would know. So Reader's Digest did just that, and they got some pretty good advice from burglars. The burglars said, hide stuff in your kid's room, because burglars admit they rarely go in there. If you do have kids, don't advertise it by leaving toys and sporting equipment visible in the yard or driveway. That's a dead giveaway to burglars that there are probably some valuable gaming systems and electronics inside.

If you're wondering where the worst place is to hide jewelry and cash, that would be the dresser drawer, the bedside table, and the medicine cabinet. That's where burglars check first. And if you have a safe in your home that's not bolted down, make sure there's nothing in there you really care about because well-prepared burglars plan to take it with them. And that is something you should know. The growth of this podcast, which is pretty impressive, is really due to you. People telling other people to give this show a listen,

and then they like it and tell their friends. So please tell someone you know about this podcast. 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, 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 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. We'll see you next time.