YouSaid · the spoken record

Robin Dunbar

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-04-02
most recent: 2024-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“All the food you needed. What you don't have is infinite time. You have to get the food you need to keep yourself alive in within a certain period of time. That's usually a day, obviously. So you've got to keep eating. Small birds and mammals. Diggly in cold climates in the winter. So it's really time that's the problem they have. And that got expanded from the world of animals. There's all sorts of implications for things like conservation and stuff as well. It was the starting point of looking at humans and going, actually, we don't have infinite time. And a lot of the things we do are attempts to cut through time constraints.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually time in many ways, time was the beginning of all this stuff having worked on monkeys and antelope in Africa and Europe in the wild, you begin to realize that what's limiting for animals is not necessarily food. And in fact, ecologists tend to look at the way the world works in terms of food availability. So population die out because there isn't enough food. In the extreme case, that's probably true. But we're talking about the demise of the dinosaurs when everybody dies because everything's been destroyed by some comet coming in or everything has got polluted. So there's no oxygen in the seas, whatever it may be. In the normal course of things, it's not food that really limits them. No matter how bad your quality of your food is, the vegetation order may be, if you had infinite time, you could get all...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever it may be, a family member doesn't matter how they really feel about you, ignore everything they say because words are weasily things and we can misuse them and misunderstand them. Just check how they touch you because that is actually the best. A touch is worth a thousand words any day in this context. You can't lie about how you touch somebody and we're very, very good at recognizing when a touch is meaningful and when it's false.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trustworthiness on their faces, like when they're talking to you. So, what you're doing is you're building a kind of avatar in your mind. Now, this is what we do anyway. When we create a friendship, when we create a romantic relationship, what we initially do is build an avatar in our heads as to who this wonderful person is, but meeting them face to face allows you to sort of knock the rough edges off a little bit and get to know their inner core better. And that's the danger of the internet, I think, is that it just lacks this capacity to be able to sit across the table in a pub or a cafe or a restaurant and stare into the whites of the other person's eyes and reach across the table and at them on the shoulder or something that gives you this sense of who they really are and how honest they really are. So I've often said, you want to know how much somebody actually feels about you, friend or romantic partner.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worry with it though is that you're bonding with something in your head, not with something in the real world. And the problem here is precisely that in real life you might start off in real life by being introduced to somebody by a friend or a relative or something, which is how we used to eat meat most people. But you would be able to get to know them face to face. And so you'd have a kind of ground truth thing that went on where you would kind of evaluate despite all the things they say, is it really true? Do they mean it? We get a lot of cues from people's facial expressions on how honest they're being. Of course, what happens on dating scams or any other financial scams, any of these things is they're very careful not to meet up. They're very careful not to meet up online visually and video. So you can't see what they actually look like. You can't see what the cues of trying to...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you might well think that the world is better off without religions because they have this dreadful tendency to end up fighting each other. The great problem is nothing comes for free in life or biology. There's no such place as Nirvana. There's a downside to everything. So you have to balance the upsides and the downsides to these things. And in some sense, I suppose the internet then has become a little bit of a substitution in a way. And it is very weird stuff, but it is compelling. Go online to look something up. You just want a tiny bit of information for something you're doing. Something else turns up in the feed and you, oh, that looks interesting. Oh, there's a video there of my favorite pop song from 40 years ago. Oh, I just must look at that. And you end up spending the whole evening online. It's very, very engaging. And it probably does trigger a certain sort of bonding by way.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things we really have to look at now in the past, I think a lot of those support networks would have been provided by religion. There's no question in my mind that that's really what the key benefit of religion has been for most societies doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. It's the activities they do and the kind of context they provide. Because all the activities are just the sort of thing that kick in the endorphin system and make you feel good and make you feel very bonded to the community, him singing lots of painful stories in the former sermons and stuff that rouse your emotions kneeling and standing and occasionally stretching yourself out on the ground. All these kind of things that are part of this social toolkit. And of course you don't have that. You're losing somewhat of the skeleton that has kept communities together in the past. The problem is religion is strange stuff.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do not only their share of the work but the share of the work that you're not able to do because you're off sick. So they're all getting very worried and investing huge quantities of money in sort of well-being. And the answer is that's expensive stuff. All you need to do is to find friends for people. And you find friends for people by providing them with the opportunity to place, to go to meet. Because friendships are organic. You can't force people to be friends. All you can do is provide the opportunity and the space and hope that they do it. But we're so intensely social, given the opportunity, we will do it. And you can do that very nearly for free. Just put on a choir for people to go and sing. They'll come. You don't need any money. You can even just put out some biscuits and coffee for a negligible amount compared to what you'd be paying for a sort of well-being trainer or something. So those sort of things.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got things to do because they've already got social, they've got families, you're stuck on your own. And this seems to have just got worse and worse and worse. Triggered collapse into depression and indeed physical illness in the end because this is all related to the thing that I mentioned right at the beginning, that the best predictor of your mental health and well-being and your physical health and well-being is the number of close friends you have. And those close friends need to be there. It's no good having them at the end of a telephone line or a computer screen the other side of the country. They've got to be on the block with you so you can at least walk around, knock on the door and say, I feel like rubbish. Can you come out and at least have a coffee or something? Let's go for a walk in the park or something. You have to have that kind of physical context. So this has been a big problem. And I think the issue sort of in the process of overwhelming most organizations of businesses, they're losing huge quantities of time of work with people taking time off work. So it's becoming more inefficient. It's putting much bigger loads on everybody else in the office, whatever it is, because they're now having...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All important, and maybe they're all interrelated actually, but the last one that you mentioned in some ways is perhaps the most worrying one, and this is this tsunami of loneliness that sort of seems to have hit us. It was first noted way back in the 90s, 30 years ago, started to show up. And a lot of this is basically young graduates going away to their first job in the big city. So up till then, your social world has been made for you by home, by university, college, halls of residence, these kind of things. You don't have to sort of do much in the way of going out, finding. Then you go off your first job, the big city in New York or somewhere, and you don't know anybody, you don't know where to go to meet people, and especially you don't know where to go, it's safe to meet people and to meet people with similar interests of yours, to narrow it down even further. The only people you know are the people at work. And of course, five o'clock, they will.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trust is what creates and maintains our relationships with each other. When things fall apart, it's always because trust has broken down.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their job while you concentrate at the top of the pyramid on the kind of strategic stuff and seem to be the charismatic leader, if you like.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. This has kind of implications for management because you can't create time. It is fixed. There is a limit. And you have to do stuff like sleep. And the problem that most CEOs and the like senior management get into is they end up trying to do too much and they don't have the time to do it. So they're trying to be engaging with everybody in a large company from the shop floor worker to the chief finance officer and so on. And you can't do it. Certainly you want to engage and be seen to be engaged with your workforce, not stuck away in some C-suite at the top of the tower. But on the other hand, you've got to find some way of managing your time better and what you don't want to be doing is wasting time on micromanagement. You have to be able to trust the layers below you, the management layers below you, to do that.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A muffle it. Think the same way, know the same stuff, come from the same area, but you kind of don't want that probably on your management board because you want some diversity of input up there. You want to find ways of breaking down the hemophilus effect at the right level. Don't destroy it at the bottom or you'll lose everything. It's important. It really is important. But at the same time, you need to be able to introduce diversity in the right levels and the right places. But it goes back, I think, to this point I made about the Japanese car industry, this sense of I belong to the company. I am a company man. It's creating this sense of being a member of the village. I may be a very humble member of the village. All I do is sweep the yard outside, but I play my bit. So it's not easy and there are no silver bullets.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a small business, a small organization, or a small village, having a much more integrated, diverse social life, if you like, social network. And the bigger life becomes, the bigger the city, the bigger the organization, the easier it is for silos to form, which is the big problem that large multinationals have is they build up these vice versus them internal structures. And the problem we have both in everyday life, I guess, but also in organizational structures and business and so on, is how to break those down. So you have to kind of think of ways of overcoming the homophily effect. Homopholy is very good for certain things. Back to what I said earlier, if it's a small group with a focus on a specific task that needs to get done, then they all need to be”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becomes important. And at the end of the day, that feeds into the world of work because if two people get on, they're much more likely to work efficiently together, to do each other favors, and favors need to be done rather than saying, oh, come on, you know, we got enough problems of trying to solve at our end of the business. You deal with yours. So Homopholy plays a very, very important role. And it really strongly underpins our friendship. We just do, for better or for worse. But at the end of the day, It does mean you end up in silos. So it's what pushes us to be in silos and echo chambers is the problem. And that's the problem of scale. In a small village, you don't have the freedom to go off and talk with the 50 people who are all interested in shooting ducks. There aren't that many people in the village who actually enjoy shooting ducks just statistically. So you end up having to talk to people who like doing other activities. So you end up”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stressing the friendship. So you can see very quickly that that applies to all these things. So this whole problem really of just engineering the smoothness and reducing the friction involved in relationships that are long lasting becomes very important. And you can see why homophobia then becomes important because the more things you have in common, the fewer occasions you're going to disagree about what to do the fewer occasions you are going to be left stranded and unable to think of anything to talk about, which is a problem you have with a stranger. What do I say now? Well, with somebody who you are well gelled with, that's less likely to happen because you've got the same interest, but also you kind of don't mind if there are silent periods happy to sit there together. So facilitating the kind of flow of the relationship.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be friends of that show. And a lot of these really are about allowing you to come to compromises easily because the big problem is just think of it in terms of extroverts and introverts. Saturday evening, you've got a choice. You can either go clubbing or you can stay in and watch a movie on the TV with a takeaway dinner. Two introverts that both want to stay in and watch. This is Nirvana. You've got two extroverts who want to go clubbing. This is another kind of nirvana. But the last option is you've got one of each. An introvert wants to stay in an extrovert who wants to go clubbing. And now you've got a problem. There's a negotiation that has to go on and somebody has to give way, which means you've either got to sort of agree to alternate, in which case half the time you're bored silly because you'd rather be doing the other thing, but you're sacrificing yourself on the altar of love. But it's still stressing the relationship.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those relationships will last. In addition to that, these are what you might think as the cultural component in the end is the much. But we share homophily with our friends on a lot of other fixed traits that we can't do anything about. So gender is a very, very strong one. 75% of men's social circles, they're 150 are males. 75% of women's social circles are other women. Other 25% in each case is family. And I guess you don't have a lot of choice about that opposite sex, 25%. But there's very, very strong gender defect to social networks. We somehow feel more comfortable working around people of our own gender. Age has a very strong effect. All our friends and preferred family members that we give most time to tend to be around our age. Personality, again, introverts tend to prefer being friends with introverts, extroverts tend to prefer to be.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's what you speak rather than who you are biologically, if you like. It's the cultural elements that define you. It turns out that these have a very, very strong effect on the people we have in our layers. If you look at feel closest to the people in your inner five shoulders to cry on friendship group, you will share six or seven of these dimensions with them. So they're things like sharing the same language because they're rather crucial because it's all about talking to each other, but also where did you grow up? Where did you learn what it is to be a member of the community? What's your career trajectory being? What are your hobbies and interests? What are your moral and political and religious views? What is your preferred musical taste? What's your sense of humor? So the more of these boxes you tick with somebody, the closer in they will be in your inner circles and the more intense and the longer.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the secret ingredient really of our friendship. So it was first discovered by sociologists about 15, 20 years ago, and they noticed that people tended to hang out with people who had very similar kinds of interests. So friends tended to have same political views. They tended to have same religious views, these kind of things. And since then, there's been more and more evidence. In fact, shed loads of evidence showing this effect is extremely strong. And we ask people to fill in big questionnaires about what they shared with their friends in terms of Moffell and did some number crunching and it reduced it really to about seven key dimensions, which we call the seven pillars of friendship. So like a sort of supermarket barcode of who you are as a person, the community essentially you belong to.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bump into these same people somewhere else in another company or your company will be trying to make some arrangement with the company they work from and oh hello good to see you again just makes everything go smoother”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've since combined with A and Bev, the big Dutch, I think, brewing giants, something like, I don't know, one in every eight beers poured anywhere in the world is brewed by them. Huge, huge company. But when they first started up, they had the idea of putting a little pub in the entrance foyer of all their factory buildings. So people just called in for a beer on their way home from work, you know, at the end of the day. And Sam, my co-author who worked for them 20 years on, some of the Facebook friendship groups that were set up from those casual beers afterward are still going, even though these people, most of these people no longer work for SAB Miller, are scattered all over the world. The friendships that were built up are still going strong. And of course, what's going to happen sooner or later in this big world of ours, you all...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not complicated, and heaven forfend you might even sign some nice person in finance that you get on really well instead of thinking of them as ogres. In our book, we give several examples. One was just founding a choir. And it's back to this magic of seeing case where a government department set up a choir, they decide amongst themselves to do it, and eventually it changed the atmosphere within the department from a very, very frosty one, which was very fraught because of its history, into a very much bonded and efficient working group through just once a week in a seminar room somewhere. And eventually they ended up, a whole lot of them competing in choir competitions and things like that, or big brewing giant SABs, South African breweries and bought Miller of Miller Light fame, the American.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A casual social context, people from different parts of the company and builders kind of cross departmental links that allow the things to happen efficiently on the bigger scale rather than just everybody getting into their silos within their own little department or group. And there are a number of cases where this has been done and done very successfully. It's not a case that nobody does it. Modern companies today are doing it very, very effectively. I gather with Facebook has a regular Wednesday beer and barbecue event in the sort of space in the center of their campuses, as it were, where people just turn up and have a beer and a burger and stuff and talk to people.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tennis. It's kind of the fashion, and everybody loved it. And I'm sure it had a lot to do with why some of these companies were successful. I think what's happened sort of post the Second World War, the accountants are looking for ways of reducing costs and stuff. Those kind of social things have been thrown out of the window as, well, you can't put them in an income and expenditure ledger very easily. What does it mean? What's your output? How do you measure that? We're not interested. We're just interested in the things that we can show in a Excel sheet have a direct effect on profit line. And I think probably we might just consider taking a leaf out of their book again, going, well, what are the things people would like to do now? Because obviously life is different. You've got to sit back and think, well, what would work? What would attract people come in so that you provide them with the opportunity to meet in”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who founded the big multinationals of today back in Victorian Edwardian times, 50 years ago, because they all recognized that a bonded workforce, happy workforce, was highly beneficial in terms of productivity. So they did things like building social clubs on every factory campus. It famously ones were the railway clubs. They started here in Britain, lots of railways before everybody else did. And every railway station had a railway club. And everywhere in the empire that we built railways, there was the railway club. Everybody who worked at the station was automatically a member of the railway club. It's railway club. They would have social events and dances and there would always be tennis courts because we're talking about the 1890s up through to the 1930s maybe. Everybody played.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think laughing was on their side of the face, not our side of the face, because that made them feel very bonded and committed to the company. And that was real symptom, if you like, of Japanese industry at that time when they were peaking in their productivity, is that every worker from the big boss at the top to the person who swept the belt, they belonged to the company that had this expression. I am a company man. meaning this is my life and my commitment and I think that had a lot to do with these things because what these exercises have been doing is triggering the endorphin system making them feel very cool calm and collected and at peace with their fellow workers and with the company in general so these mechanisms kind of play a role but it's underneath and i think so it's sort of going on below the surface of consciousness and i think in our haste to find efficiencies we've forgotten the lessons actually of the founders the entrepreneurs”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would do with people, certainly with our friendship circles, but we do with people at work, we laugh at them, we have lunch with them, we go out for a beer with them, we tell them all troubles of our lives. And there are rituals as the analogue, as it were, of how religion works. Any organization has its own internal rituals that it does in some form. And if you're in Japanese industry until about 20 years ago, everybody stood by their desks in the morning and did calisthenics for 10 minutes. And I'm absolutely convinced this is why the Japanese car industry ended up being so successful. They've lost their way a bit. But we used to kind of, looking at what Japanese car companies, everybody doing gymnastics and Tai Chi type things in the car park before they went into actually, ha ha ha, you know.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a person, but we think that, and the general experience seems to be that if you don't meet up once in a while face to face, nothing on earth or Facebook is going to stop that friendship gradually becoming an acquaintancehip. Yeah, it's just somebody I once knew, haven't seen him for years, don't really know what they're doing. Check their feeds now and again, but I don't waste a lot of time. So there's something about face-to-face interactions that's very important. And the world of business is a village. It works like a village where everybody knows each other. So if as a default, the only way you've got for people to meet up is online, that will kind of do, but it's a bit clunky and it's difficult to see whether it would in the long run work terribly efficiently because you're not able to do all the kinds of casual things.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the answer has to be yes. It can be efficient, clearly, any of the social media, including the telephone after all, can be efficient for processing and dealing with some issues at work, and particularly when people are not present. It is sort of okay for bonding people who already know each other well. So this is why we're pretty sure the reason Facebook was so successful is that it allowed people who had now separated to remember when it was first set up by Zuckerberg people that these were final year kids at college about to disperse all over the United States. They're big buddies for the last three or four years. Suddenly they would not be able to see them easily. How do you keep in touch? Here's your answer. Join Facebook. And we think it worked very well and did because what it's doing was acting like a stigging plaster. It slowed the rate of decay down by allowing you to keep up with.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For groups of up to 200 people we've done it with, and it was showing no sign of tailing off. Still, the bigger the group, the better the effect. So you can see a lot of these things kind of are part and parcel of the things we do every day with our friends.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peculiar activities, what I call our social toolkit, work extremely well for bonding large groups, and they vary in the size of group that they can bond. Laughter, ironically, is one of the smallest. There is a natural limit on the size of a laughter group at about three, very close to the limit on the size of a conversation. But still three is three times. That means you're bonding three people together at the same time, whereas with grooming and physical touch, if you were just to stroke them physically, you would only be able to bond one person. So already laughter is three times more efficient. Singing is amazing. We call it the icebreaker effect, community singing around the campfire, can turn a group of complete strangers into a group who think they were all at primary school together. They're telling each other their life stories and great secrets and stuff. It's just amazing. Singing works minimally.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including the rituals of religion, feasting, eating together, drinking particularly alcohol together, stringent type things, alcoholic type drinks, trigger the endorphin system, big time. And lastly, telling emotional sub stories, great tragedies. And we've shown with all of these that they trigger the endorphin system and they increase the sense of bonding with the people you actually do the activity with. So it doesn't change your relationships with people who are your best friends who are not there on the day, but it does affect the quality of the relationship you have with a complete stranger who happens to be there. And we've shown this with neuroimaging experiments, pain threshold tests, with blocker experiments where you're giving people drugs that block the receptors for endorphins in the brain. They do the activity, but they don't get the hit. And all these cases, you can show very nicely that these”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up a limit on group size actually. Animals. So, the problem we had during the course of our more recent evolution, as we're, if you like, trying to increase the size of our groups up to the 150 we have now was how to bond these groups, particularly though, okay, you can go around grooming kind of inner core within the 50 layer, but how do you bond the other 100 people that sit in the final 150 layer? The answer is we found lots of ways that allow us to trigger the endorphin system directly without involving physical touch. And these are in order with which they appeared in the course of human evolution, we think laughter, singing, dancing, and then once language evolved, which was probably only with the appearance of, at least fully modern language with our own species, 200, 250,000 years ago. Lots of things derivative language.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Receptors. This is why we nod our heads when we're listening to music or dancing. This is why we rock babies. If you rock them at around about three centimeters a second speed, they calm down and go to sleep nicely. If you try it slower than that, one centimeter a second or try it faster than that, Dirty said to me is a second, it has absolutely no effect. They carry on crying relentlessly. So you have to get it absolutely right. So that's the basic mechanism. We've shown that that still works with us, demonstrably still works with us. That system underpins the quality of our friendships. The problem for us is that Anthropics, actually, monkeys and apes is grooming because it's physical touch. The intimacy of that limits its capacities. So there's a limit to the number of individuals that you can engage with and build relationships with through this mechanism. And that sets them.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neural system from the skin, which we all share. We have it too. This system responds to light, slow stroking only, no other action on the skin. It doesn't respond to temperature or athing like that. It just responds to light slow stroking at around about three centimeters a second, which is the rate during glooming where they're stroking the fur, parting it, deforming the skin underneath as it went. This is what's triggering the system off. If you try stroking someone slower than that or faster than that, there's no response. But get it right and they get an endorphin hit in the brain. Dorphins are part of the brain's pain management system. They give you a kind of opiate-like eye. Feel very relaxed and calm and peace with the world and trusting of the person you're doing this activity with. It's highly specialized. We use it all the time. Turns out the inner ear is full of the...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The group and these kind of things, they're keeping it on what that's involving is an awful lot of time spent grooming and the amount of time spent grooming correlates with the size of the group in primates to the extent that some of the most social species who are typically living in group sizes of about 50 individuals are smaller than us but it's that second inner layer from the 150 they're spending about 20 of their total available daytime engaged in this one activity social grooming, partly because of the number of individuals they're grooming with but actually as their group size increasing they're spending more time grooming as a whole but actually what they're doing is devoting more time to each individual they're not necessarily grooming with more individuals or at least not proportionately more individual they're making those relationships more intensive and the reason that works is grooming triggers the endorphin system by a very specialized”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coffee from every morning on the way to work, and that kind of thing. So it's someone I once knew, but I don't have a meaningful relationship with. I wouldn't invite them. And it's very clear that that happens. We can show that actually happening with data from people's networks. So you have to invest time in relationships, in proportion to essentially the emotional closeness. And it turns out that emotional closeness of relationship is highly correlated with the time you invest in it. Question is, what are you doing? Well, we just step back a moment to what monkeys and apes are doing. Monkeys and apes spend a lot of time grooming each other, and it turns out this is how they bond their relationships, how they create their social bonds, as it were, the intensity of these relationships, which mean they'll stick by each other. They won't allow one person to drift off into the bush where they get lost from the rest.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This really all goes back to. I mean, there's like intimated several times, the layers are created by essentially the amount of time you spend doing stuff with different people. So obviously the inner core layer, these layers in your social network have very specific frequencies of interaction you must have to keep the person in that layer. So the people in your inner five shoulders to cry on friends layer, you have to see at least once a week. That's the minimum. The people in the 15 sympathy group layer next outside it, you have to see at least once a month. If you see them less, those relationships decay inexorably. It takes about three years for somebody to go from being a member of your sympathy group, your 15 sympathy group, to falling out of your 150 and joining the layer of acquaintances, which includes your favorite barista that you get your glass egg.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make a commit contribution. If there's only so much speaking time that's available, unless you're going to sit there for a year, by which time, of course, you've forgotten what the first person said. So you've got to bear in mind that speaking time is very limited. The issue is that if you have two bigger groups, you end up with people who just sit there and get bored and end up looking at their feeds or their emails on their smartphones. And this is exactly what we found during lockdown. Zoom and teams and people trying to maintain contact with work group or departmental group or whatever it may be. So you'd end up lots of people on a Zoom meeting. And the problem is realistically you can only have four people engaged in a conversation. So it would just get dominated by the four people with the loudest voices. And everybody else would kind of get bored in the background. So they ended up wasting huge time.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And likewise, think about the optimal size of boards, for example, it's going to be one of these numbers. It's probably not going to be below 15 because you want a really wider representation, but you certainly probably don't want to go above 50. Looked with horror, the size of the committee for climate change, 150 to 200, you think. Nothing's going to get done. Part of the problem is feeling that you...”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better to have a diverse group of people who are coming at the problem with different perspectives, things that another area has already figured out, being able to sort of look over the parapet and say, oh, because this is how science worked. All the big innovations in science have come about by somebody from a completely different discipline, usually poking their nose over the parapet and going, well, that looks like an interesting problem. What's it all about? And you explain it to them. And they go, oh, that's very like what we have just solved the problem for. We know how that works. Why don't we just apply the same methods or mathematics or whatever it is to your problem? And it might work. And very often it does break a logjam.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything to each other. So they just know when I say, right, this is what we want to do here, everybody goes, sure, absolutely. They're all on the same page. They all understand deep background and the mechanisms and everything else. Okay, if it's a financial issue, then you want somebody from finance. Maybe if it's a kind of HR type issue, then you want somebody from human resources. But don't include people, which is the temptation we have in organizations, to add people from different departments in as sort of representatives. The answer is don't do it. There is a place for that, and that comes further up the scale. And as you go further up the scale in terms of work group size, you go through different functional things. So the 15 layer really works much better for blue skies banding ideas about. And then it's much.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is if you've got a task develop a bit of code for some computer program or figure out some processes and allow you to produce a kit of the kind that you make and sell to the public. Maybe it's a service you run for your government department program for running street lightings or something like that. It's best to have a very small group. They will work much faster and much more efficiently, but they need to know each other in the sense that they all come from the same background. So one of the things you mustn't do here is go, oh, we ought to have somebody from finance and maybe somebody from HR because they'll get sort of very upset if they're not included. And the answer is don't resist the temptation like crazy because what you want at that problem solving thing is for people that don't have to expect.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“500 are actually optimal points in the efficiency with which information flows around networks. Whatever your group is, hits one of these numbers, then it works as an integrated group somehow. We don't quite understand why this happens, but it seems to work in a much more efficient integrated cohesive sort of way. But if you're in between, things kind of fall apart. So there are all sorts of implications here for the structure of organizations and businesses in terms of how they organize their departments, how they organize their work groups, for example, you want to hit these numbers. And the numbers themselves are derivative of the quality of the relationship involved in the emotional fit, if you like, that you have with a person in one of these layers. And one of the implications.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this fractal series of 50, 15, 50, 150, 500, 150, 100 actually fall on these grades beautifully. And we see the same structure in primates. And so this is number four, Rick. So that was number three, surprise. Number four surprise was to find that this was the same thing was true of primates, a species like chimpanzees and baboons, which have complex multi-level social systems, the layers within their social groups created again by the frequency of which they interact with each other, the strength of the friendships, if you like, also fall on these layers. So something about these layers, which is these numbers, which is kind of magical in this sense. And so this is number five surprise, actually, with a bunch of US mathematicians. We were able to show that these numbers, 5, 15, 500,”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it does happen when you do this kind of research. In the end, what's important about these circles, and here's another interesting feature, actually, this we hadn't quite expected, is that it turns out that this relationship between brain size and group size and primates is not a single homogenous set of data. So the data points don't lie on the same line, which is ideally what you want. scattered quite widely around it. And it's turned out since we've only recently been able to show this finally statistically. In fact, that relationship consists of four sets of statistical relationships. So they're like four grades. And the grades differ in both group size and cognitive complexity that the animals are using. So these grades have real meaning. And it turns out that the layers for our social networks, for these values,”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could claim because these people said, Yes, I'm their friend, correlated with the size of these same regions in the brain. So I think that was quite spectacular. They were able to do something which nobody else had actually been able to do.”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nosed and convincing, but you know, there may be people that actually have close relationships with that I don't film because they kind of live next door or in the same house. I don't bother to phone them. And if I ask people just who are your friends, famously if you ask sort of kindergarten and primary school kids who are your friends, they'll say, you know, Jimmy, Susanna, Penelope, and then you go to Jimmy Susanna and ask them, are you friends with Santa? And I would say, what? Never. So who knows if the data we have is really reflective of the relationships. And what these Korean guys did is they went to everybody else in the village and said, are you friends with each person? So it was the friends evaluation of their true relationship with you that identifies the number of friends that you as an individual had. And what they showed very nicely was that indeed the number of friends that everybody”
2024-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source