 academic. So he's the one who came up with the Dunbar number. That is the maximum number of friends that you can have, not maximum number of people who you can realistically maintain in your social circle is 150. And he came out with a book in 2021 for friends understanding the power of our most important relationships. And in the book, he lists the seven pillars of friendship and to boil it down. The more things you have in common, the more likely you will be to have friends. So I notice when I go back to Australia, I feel more in common and I feel more at ease with people than I do in the United States. So it's a more homogeneous society. And people have a similar sense of humor, which is another one of the seven pillars. So similar personality, similar sense of humor, similar ethnic group, similar taste in music. Okay, these are all some of the seven pillars of friendship. And I noticed when I was in Australia for two months, I'd walked down the street, I just felt more in common with people as I just passed them in the street or say good day in the street. It was easy to strike up conversations. So I've lived 90% of my life in the United States. Yet, that early imprinting from nine of my first 11 years being in Australia is still very much in my psychology. On the other hand, when I was at Outback Australia and I had run into a Jew, I would be overjoyed. And I only converted to Judaism at age 27. So that got written into my psychology. So what's so important about friendship, right? And very basic beginning here, we tend to underestimate the significance of psychological well being as the bedrock on which our success in life is founded. So when you're happy or angry or sad or mad, that's going to have a profound effect on how you think about the world. And you see this with the distant right, the despair that pervades many of the people who populate more extreme forms of politics. You see how that despair leads them to feeling alienated from everyone around them, and then to feeling hopeless and to then needing some form of connection with other people. And so if they can't have friendly loving connection, then they want to be noticed. If you can't be noticed, then just become increasingly hateful until people are forced to acknowledge your presence. So if our sense of well being is significantly diminished, we are likely to slide into depression, which leads to a downward spiral into ill health. Our mood is positive and everything is upbeat. We're not only more willing to engage with others socially, but we approach everything we do with optimism and enthusiasm will work harder to get even the most boring tasks done. Isn't hard to see how happiness has a positivity and it can do attitude can spread rapidly through a population. So if you connect with other people so that you create this shared reality, and then you develop an outsider, then we typically feel lonely, agitated, and we actively work to try to remedy the situation. Few of us could cope with living completely isolated on a desert island with no prospect of rescue. So loneliness takes its toll on us. We do our best to look for opportunities to meet people because only once we are part of a group do we usually feel properly human. We feel more relaxed when we know where we belong. We feel more satisfied with life when we know we are wanted. So loneliness may well be an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong. It's a prompt that you need to do something about your life and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated will disrupt your physiology with adverse consequences for your immune system as well as your psychological well being that if unchecked can lead to a downward spiral of early death. Now with all these studies talking about how important friendship is, they don't really take into account genetics. So is it friendship that leads people with more friends to have happier, more fulfilling lives? And the lack of friendship that leads people who are lonely to have lousy lives? Or is it the people with a certain genetic predisposition? The same genetic predisposition that makes people more successful and more socially well adjusted and these people to be more outgoing, to have a more socially effective personality. So to be a little more outgoing than introverted, to be more extroverted than introverted is part of a socially effective personality. To be conscientious, to be low in neuroticism, to have openness to new experience and to have at least a moderate to high amount of wanting to get along with other people, these are all the traits of a socially effective personality. So a personality is largely formed by our genetics. So I would suspect that happy people are genetically predisposed. I'm here to convince the five of you in the audience that aren't actually on Facebook that the whole thing is completely overrated and all your prejudices are correct. Oh my goodness. There are lots of us not on Facebook. Okay, I don't know what the rest of you are going to do for the next 14 minutes, but I guess at some level, I mean this has happened before with email I think back in the early late 80s early 90s and that came but when particularly when Facebook came on stream I think there was a kind of promissory note made on the tin can by the techies that created it which said this is going to open you up to the global village you're going to have hundreds of thousands of friends and all over the world. And the real question is, is that so? The short answer is no. Despite the fact that Facebook allows you to put 5,000 friends up on the can as it were, in fact most people don't and as a result of sort of this discussion about who your friends are on Facebook, Facebook actually starts to look at their own data and when they did an analysis of the entire whatever it is 400 million Facebook users and looked at all the numbers of friends people had, the average was actually about 150. The modal value, the most common value is somewhere between 120 and 130 which I think is about right because you've got to leave a little room before the 150 for Granny who is sort of not really online yet and you know, a few odd people like that. But the key to the issue is really even though you sign up and can sign up lots and lots of people, in fact you spend most of your time talking to only a very few of them. These are Facebook's own data here. Oh, I mean, I just don't think he's he's acquainted with the Luke Ford community where we're filled with love and oh, what is it that I what is it that I put on my Twitter bio? Come on. Oh yeah, my tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love where you sit down and learn Torah with me and learn love. Okay, this is this is a place of radical inclusion and love here. So we're not just not just any ordinary online group, all right. Take things to the to the next level here. Right back to this excellent book by Robin Dunbar. So when we're isolated, our brains simply don't work as well. Right. And short periods of loneliness don't tend to have long term adverse effects but persistent loneliness correlated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease depression and dementia as well as poor sleeping habits which in turn obviously have adverse psychological consequences. So my question is, is it the persistent loneliness causing all these bad things or are all these bad things including loneliness part and parcel of certain genetic predispositions. So the important thing about friends is you need to have them before disaster before you. So I remember when I got really sick in 1988 I was basically bedridden for six years and one psychiatrist later said about 20 years later, oh this was Luke Ford's face saving way of failing. He was failing at life because he didn't have enough friends and this was his face saving way of failing at life. So people are only likely to make the effort to help you if they are already your friend. We're also much less likely to help strangers or people we only know slightly but making friends requires a great deal of effort and time. It's not something you can just magic up over a cup of coffee but at least because everyone else is already embedded in friendship networks of their own and to make time and room for you as a new friend means that they'll have to sacrifice a friendship with someone else. So young people behave like careful shoppers. They're trying to sample as widely as they can among the pool of potential friends available to them to find the best set of life partners and friends so they distribute their time more widely. They're more time available than when they get older so they're often happy to sacrifice a relationship quality for quantity they can sample a larger portion of available population. So people in their teens and twenties they'll often have you know friends with a much wider variety of people than once they settle down with a family. They'll have friendships with people of different religions different ethnic racial groups. They'll try out a much wider sampling of the population. Now you settle down you get married and your free time is decimated by the early years of childcare. You have less time and energy for socializing so people tend to shed their casual friends and concentrate what time mental effort and energy remains on a handful of really important friends. Also people who are introverted tend to have a smaller number of friends but more intense friendships. People who are extroverted have more friends but usually more shallow friendships. In the final phase in human life cycle seems to kick in around the 60s. We start to lose friends through death. We lose friends when we are younger. We anyone sad and they're looking at the number of people just measured in different ways you have you know sort of traffic with that you're talking to and it's sort of divided up between those who have only about 50 friends 150 friends and 500 friends and although the number of friends listed is increasing by an order of magic. Speaking of friends, Leponius is here. Welcome Leponius. Okay so we all tend to have about the same amount of emotional capital. That is the time that we have for spending with people spending with friends. Introverts choose to spread this thickly among just a few people. Extroverts choose to spread this thinly among many people. So extroverts tend to have friendships that are on average much weaker than those of introverts. So someone's willingness to support you is directly related to the time that you spend with them and their perceived emotional closeness to you. So extroverts may be less likely to be supported by their friends. So introverts feel less secure about the social world so they prefer to invest more heavily in a few people who they know really well and they can't rely on. Leponius, you've got a friend. You've got a friend. All right, we've almost got a minion here. Mr. White Mail. Luke, you need an IT guy. I'll move out to LA. That reminds me when I met Dennis Prager in Tampa Bay, Florida and he said, oh, if you move to LA, I might have a job for you. Didn't work out. By a factor of 10. The number of close friends, if you like, that most of your time or Facebook is spent talking to is actually quite small. It's anywhere between three and about 10 or so. And the reason for that is there appears to be a cognitive limit on the number of individuals we can keep in a sort of relationship with us. And this comes off the back of work we were doing on the size of social groups in monkeys and apes. And these are the key data here. This is average group. Okay, this is Robin Dunbar, a great academic expert on friendship and on evolutionary psychology. So he knows that people who tend to not spend much time with their family and relatives tend to spend a lot more time with friends. And people who spend a great deal of time with their family spend obviously less time with friends. So our networks, social networks pretty much limited to about 150 slots. And so we all tend to first slot in our family members. Then if we have any spare slots left, we start filling them with unrelated friends. So friends in this sense are relatively recent phenomenon, probably a consequence of the dramatic reduction in family size that has occurred over the last two centuries, especially in Europe and North America. So none of the six main kinship naming systems in the world have terms for anyone who's less closely related than cousins. So this is the natural limit for human communities. Anyone beyond that magic circle of cousins is a stranger with no particular importance. Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies and I got proof. Oh boy. So in traditional communities, anyone joining the community had to be assigned some kind of fictional kinship or adopted as a son or a brother by someone. And until that happens, they have no place in the community. A little bit like converting to Orthodox Judaism, really have to be adopted into a family into a particular synagogue and to show that you can get along there before you're going to be able to graduate through the whole conversion process. Conversion to Orthodox Judaism is primarily a matter of being able to read and respond appropriately to social cues. So when you're adopted into a community such as Orthodox Judaism, then you're adopting family's kin becomes your kin for the same rights and obligations. That's why we do much the same with adopted children and with very close friends. So we tell our children address them as Auntie Mary or Uncle Jim, even though they're not biological aunts and uncles. So kinship is central, one of the main organizing principles of the human world. We tend to be all things being equal, much more willing to help family and relatives than we are friends. So you can call this the kinship premium. So thank you someone contacts you out of the blue and explains that they are your long lost third cousin that you share a great great grandmother. You might check, see if this is really so, and then you may well offer them a bed for the night and would they like to stay longer. But if the person says they're a friend of a friend of a friend, your response is likely to be, well, why don't you try the days in down the road to see if there's a room available and perhaps, you know, one day you'll pop around for a cup of tea. So the kinship premium derives from one of the most fundamental principles in evolutionary biology, the theory of kin selection, we are more likely to behave altruistically and less likely to maintain friendships than to maintain your ties with your family and relatives. So distant family relations, group size and different species of monkeys and different species of apes. These are chimpanzees, gorillas or gibbons, as it happened, against a measure of brain size. And you can see, particularly for the apes, this is a very clear line. This, this block here turns out to be three separate grades rather than defined grades. Well, my sound problems are coming back. I thought I had them fixed. Hello darkness, my old friend. Come to talk to you again. Oh man. This is embarrassing. I only have one friend look for it. I have thousands of pictures of him on a wall in a secret room at home. I disagree. Look, I have thousands of good friends here on my space. Look, can we get an update video on millennial woes? Your videos on him were hilarious. Yeah, what's going on with millennial woes these days? Even needs to send Luke a new mic. Guess you could reconsider that. I teach you. Man, I thought I had my sound problems fixed. And I don't. Ouch. Okay. So when did I end off? Friendships tend to be much more costly to maintain than family relationships, right? Friendships, you have to maintain them. Family relationships, you can go years without seeing each other. It was like 10 years. I think between seeing my one time, I went 10 years without seeing my brother. I went about the same time without seeing my father, right? So distant family relationships only need the occasional reminder to keep taking over. Friendships die fast if they are not maintained at the appropriate levels of contact. Emotional closeness with family and relatives hardly budges even if you don't see each other for years. All my family and relatives are in Australia. I only get over to Australia every five, six, 10 years or so. And then there's one group of people who sit uncomfortably between family and friends, and those are the in-laws, relatives by marriage. So in a bonded social group, your friends keep an eye on you and make sure they stay with you, even if you decide to wander off. So this even applies online, right? If you've got friends and you're doing weird, quirky, disturbing stuff online, if you've got real friends, they'll try to rein you in. I think so many people get into trouble in America today because they don't have those friendships and so they don't have that safety net underneath them so that when they go haywire, when they start heading in a wrong direction, then there's no one there to catch them. So brain size positively correlated with the size of a friendship circle. So you can maintain more friendships if you have a bigger brain and also maintaining friendships, developing friendships will also tend to enlarge white matter in your brain. Women tend to have more friends than men. So women who lived in households with more people had a larger amygdala than women who live with fewer individuals. But there's no effect of household size on amygdala size for males. Men in larger households had larger orbital frontal cortices, whereas women exhibited no consistent pattern. Women who expressed greater satisfaction with their relationships and said they had more opportunities to confide in others had larger volumes in these two areas, meaning the amygdala and the orbital frontal cortices. And then there's a poignant moment in a BBC TV documentary on autism where an 11-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome turns to his mother and asks, what is a friend, mummy? Can I have one? Then after a pause playing with his toys, how do I get a friend? So he understood that the children he mixed with caught each other friends. And there seemed to be some mysterious process involved. He did not quite fully understand how do you go about getting a friend? He'd tried asking other children to be his friend, but it didn't seem to work. He didn't really know why and now he is genuinely stumped. So the autistic tend to understand less about what's going on around them than is really there. They're not really seeing the emotional dimension to the interactions around them, while the paranoid tend to read far more into interactions and other people than is really there. So a lot of us are like this autistic boy. We all have moments of puzzlement when our overture is a friendship or rejected a friend lets us down. We don't understand why we all have these moments of social anguish. They're an important aspect of friendship. Friends are not all that easy to acquire and to maintain. Do we really have to refer to it as white matter? That's what it says in the book. Look, you need to become an influencer within your kehila. Most complex social group of all is a honey bee colony says Leponius. There you find hierarchy and respect. So what is going on with millennial words gentlemen? So friendships not easy to acquire and not easy to maintain they require work and it can take months and years for a friendship to blossom and we all vary in our ability to maintain friendships. So one end is this autistic young boy who's completely defeated by their concept of friendship and then at the other is the perfect host such as myself who seems to know by effortless intuition what to say to enliven a social occasion, how to bring the best out in everyone and who would hit it off with whom. Most of us lie somewhere between these two extremes, launching from one social mind field to another relationship catastrophe are just about managing to keep ourselves afloat. Then there are the times when circumstances leave a stranded on a social desert island watching enviously as everyone else seems to be having the social time of their lives. Leponius, I haven't seen you for weeks. What have you been doing, man? Do you have a note from your doctor? I mean, you've gone missing. I hope you've been out there making a lot of money, man. So the human social world is the most complex phenomenon in the observed universe, perhaps far more complex than the mysterious processes that create stars and engineer the orbits of the planets. Social skills that make this world possible are astonishingly sophisticated, yet we take them for granted and hardly ever give them a second thought. So if you want to know how someone really thinks of you, check out how they touch you. There is an honesty about touch that cannot be matched by any other sense, right? The penis never lies. Certainly a great deal more honesty than can be inferred from the words that they may speak to you. A touch is worth a thousand words. A bit like this. But the key thing is if you plug humans into this regression equation and the human brain data are from the same data set as all the primate data, we get a predicted value of the great equation of about 150. That's what's now. Okay, Leponia says that making a living is a demanding mistress. Making a living, earning money, plugs is done legally and ethically. I think it's about the most ennobling thing that you can do. You will tend to meet people, tend to get along with people. You'll be very much ensconced in reality because if you're not in reality, you won't be making a living. You make money by meeting other people's needs. It's good for your mindset. It's good for your social circle. It's good for your bank account. It's good for your self-esteem. The touch is intensely intimate in a way that no other sense is, words are slippery, right? We're all pretty much skewed out lying. But the way someone puts their hand on your shoulder or strokes your arms, there's a great deal more about how they view their friendship with you than anything else that they could do. I remember I met this woman at an Orthodox synagogue and I went out with her and she told me about she got two abortions and then she invited me to a party at, I think, Break the Fast, Break the Yom Kippur Fast at her house. I think I made an inappropriate joke and she explained to the table that Luke likes inappropriate humor. I've never forgotten the feel of her hand. She put her hand on my leg at one point and it was just such a warm, cozy, soft feeling. It was such an intimate, beautiful touch that it made me forget about all the abortions that she'd had. There is an intimacy to touch that the other senses lack, taste and smell, the other two intimate senses can tell me who you are. They cannot tell you how you feel about me. The touch is what makes the border relationships go round. The very intimacy of touch means that we are very sensitive to who touches us and how they do it. So are you a hugger? Press one if you're a hugger. Press two if you hate to be hugged. The being stroked or rocked is calming, creating pleasure and relaxation. The cares of the world slowly drop from your shoulders. We want to be touched by some people, but we shrink from being touched by others. This ambivalence is the bane of our lives. I am willing to stroke you affectionately, but you are not willing to allow me to do it. So we have developed rules that help smooth this pathway. A handshake is fine between strangers. Stroke on the back or a kiss is not. Learning these rules takes most of our childhood and adolescence. The yearning to be touched goes unfulfilled. Press three if you yearning to be touched, or we blunder in where we are not welcome. Press four if you're blundering in where you're not welcome. How emotionally close we feel to someone is directly related to how much time we have invested in them. Casual touching has taken a hit with the COVID pandemic. I'm sure it must have happened as I don't think I'm a virgin, but who knows? It says Robert. I cannot recall a woman ever touching me. Two abortions. What happened next? Was she attractive? I didn't know. I think it just kind of put it out from there, but I've never forgotten the feel of her hand on my leg. It's just such a warm touch. And I remember there was this quite plain woman. And I would never, I never would have desired her, but she had this amazing touch. And I always just had the best of intentions. And after a stimulating conversation, I would hug her goodbye and then something about her touch. She'd taken Alexander Technique lessons. And so her touch was just amazing. And I would lose my mind. Or another time, there was this woman who knew my father. And so she, she asked me out and we went for a walk around the German Oaks shopping center. And then we stopped by her place. And she was very plain woman and absolutely no interest in her whatsoever. And she offered me a massage and was like, fine, I'll take a massage. And I still had absolutely no interest in her. And then she flipped me over and she started massaging my chest and my stomach. And then suddenly boing. And so I ended up staying the night. And then next morning I say goodbye like a gentleman and drive off and then get a desperate call. She's been in a car accident and I have to take her to the hospital. So I got caught up in the web. Yeah, sometimes when we touch, the honesty is too much. Yeah, she was attractive, but I didn't find it attractive that she'd had all those abortions. I remember there's another time there was this porn star who was seducing me. And she wanted to take me to the hot tub. But first we were going to meet for dinner. And she ordered a ham salad. And she was like this big breasted porn star who had a degree in English. So she was she was every diet she do English literature. She was funny. She was young. She was hot. She's taking me to the hot tub. But she orders this ham salad and it just completely completely removes any any sexual desire that I have for her. We are much more likely to laugh at something when we are in a group than when we are alone. So remember the going to a movie theater to see Monty Python's 1984 movie, The Meaning of Life. There are only like three people in the theater. And I just didn't find the movie that funny. Then a few months later, I watched it with my brother and friends. And I was just like laughing every every minute. The more energetic the dance moves, the more synchronized the members of the group were, the greater the change in pain, threshold and the more bonded they felt to the group. Right. So you can you can develop ties with the group just through conversation. But if you add in rituals such as marching together, doing yoga together, dovetaining together, dancing together, the more intense, and the more synchronized, more energetic, the ritual and training the more powerful the bond. My wife dumped me recently so I'll probably waste seed pretty often moving forward. Anonymous professor, every seed is sacred. Every sperm is good. Every sperm is needed in your neighborhood. Let the pagans waste theirs on the dusty soil. God will make them pay for each burn that can't be found. So my life dramatically improved when I I enacted a complete cessation of wanking. So I have not had a wank since June of 2013. Like how do you think I became this transcendent spiritual master? No wanking. Like when you meet me, you'll be glad to shake my hand because this is not a hand that is engaged in self abuse for nine years. Right. Nine years I've been wank free. No fap. Right. It's the greatest thing. Like the first couple of weeks were hard, but I felt an increased sense of confidence. And I started seeing things more clearly. And I wasn't like storing up, you know, erotic scenarios that I could use later. And so I was able to start talking to women more like human beings. And I felt that I was master of my own domain. So I felt better about myself. So my self-esteem approved. I felt like I had more discipline. I felt, I just felt better. Like colors were brighter. Everything started going better in my life once I completely seized masturbating. Wasting seeds creates demonic spirits. When did I last kiss a woman on the mouth? Oh, please. I'm a, I'm an old-fashioned gentleman. I'm not the type of bloke who will kiss and tell a beautiful woman is well worth the occasional ham salad. All right. Anonymous professor says it hurts. Yeah, I can imagine losing one spouse, but pain shared is half pain and joy shared is twice the joy. So the number of close friends you have is closely correlated with how engaged you are with your community, the level of trust you have in those among whom you live, your sense of how worthy your life is and how happy you feel. So most of the relationships between these variables work both ways. Increase the sense of community engagement and increases your sense that life is worthwhile. Increase your sense that life is worthwhile. It increases how engaged you become with the community. Right. Do more eating and drinking with other people. You'll feel happier. Social eating tends to influence the number of close friends we have and our sense of life satisfaction. Right. That's probably the most dramatic thing you can do to increase the number of friends you have and your sense of life satisfaction in more eating and drinking with other people. Drinking socially influences our sense of engagement with the community and our trust in its members most directly. So engaging in these activities with others strengthens our membership in the wider community, elevates our general sense of wellbeing and our satisfaction with life and through these our health. There's one behavior without which both the conversation and relationship would be deadly dull. It is surely a smile. Everyone smiles in the same language. So the limit of four for a conversation is a remarkably robust effect. If a fifth person joins the conversation it will split into two separate conversations within as little as half a minute and evenings. Okay. When the sun goes down that seems to enhance our social interactions in a special way. The origins of this are probably quite ancient. You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your neighborhood. Friends are more likely to share the same dopamine receptor gene. Okay. Seven pillars of friendship. Having the same language or dialect growing up in the same location. Having had the same educational and career experiences. So medical people hang out with medical people. Lawyers hang out with lawyers. Having the same hobbies and interests. Having the same worldview which is an amalgam of moral views, religious views and political views. Having the same sense of humor and having the same musical tastes. So the more these boxes you tick with someone the more time you'll be prepared to invest in them and the more emotionally close you will feel towards them. Josh wants to watch me play beer pong. I don't think so. Graduation night of high school I had a little bit of beer and a wine cooler and that was about the only time in my life that I got buzzed. And I remember I got up next morning and my father said that I looked 10 years older. Okay. So the more of these boxes. Seven pillars of friendship. Having the same language. Growing up in the same location. Same educational career experiences. Same hobbies and interests. Same worldview. Same sense of humor. Same musical tastes. So the more of these boxes that you tick with someone the more time you'll be prepared to invest in them the more emotionally close you will feel towards them the closer they will lie to you in the layers of your social network. The more willing you will be to help them out when they need it. More likely they will be to help you birds of a feather flock together. You gravitate towards people with whom you have more things in common. You like those people who are most like you. Doesn't seem to matter which one of these seven pillars you share in common. The pillars are substitutable. That anyone is about as good as any other. There's no hierarchy of preference. So a three pillar friend is a three pillar friend irrespective of which pillars you have in common. So when it comes to Robert Prosper we have the same language. We did not grow up in the same location. We haven't had the same educational career experiences. We do have the same hobbies and interests. We have the same worldview. Similar sense of humor. I don't know about his musical taste. So Robert Prosper is a four pillar friend and you don't treat the four pillar friend lightly. Robert says I drink less alcohol than the average Muslim or Mormon. When you first meet someone new you may invest a lot of time in them. You may catapult them into one of your inner circles so that you can evaluate where they lie on the seven pillars. That takes time but once you know where they stand you can then reduce the time you devote to them to a level appropriate to the number of pillars you have in common. So anyone with a seven pillar friendship or even a six pillar friendship, what is that like? As a result they quietly slide back down through the layers to settle out in the layer appropriate to that number. The friendships are born and not made. You just have to find them. So knowing how to recognize a member of your community cuts through the long winter process of getting to know someone by having to spend half a lifetime with them. I know you're a member of my community because I instantly recognize your dialect the moment you speak. When I hear a fellow Aussie it's like oi, oi, oi. You know the same streets and the same pubs I know. You know the same jokes. You belong to the same religion. So any of these is a rough and ready guide to a shared history. Any one of them will mark you out as someone I can trust because I know how you think you grew up in the same place where you absorbed the same morease, same attitudes to life and to the wider world. I don't know if I explain my jokes to you because you get them right away. I don't even have to finish the punchline because you know the same jokes as me. You even know the way the joke is constructed. So this harks back to community we grew up in. That accounts for the extraordinary attachment that many of us feel to home the place where we grew up even decades after we moved away. So you can tell a massive amount about a person from just the first sentence, the timbre of their voice, the confidence or lack thereof in their voice, the dialect, the accent. In Britain we can identify where they come from and which social class they belong to in just one sentence. So all societies are social contracts. So freeloaders who take the benefits of the contract but avoid paying the cost, a road trust and other members of the community. So think of a dialect as a supermarket barcode exhibited on your forehead. Each individual checks out the barcodes of the people they meet and agrees to form relationships their respective barcodes match. Meeting people we don't know, strangers is a fact of life. That is how we make new friends, but we don't want to waste time checking out how they sit on each of the seven pillars of friendship. We did that for each new person we met. There wouldn't be enough time in the day. So we want a simple rubric for deciding whether it's worth investing time and effort getting to know them better. So what's the best criteria? So do we go to shore? Do we work in the same field? Do we come from the same place? We judge strangers based on the seven pillars. We select people on the basis of shared ethnicity, religion, political and moral views and most of all strongest of all musical tastes. But kinship remains the single best cue for trustworthiness because it is reinforced by the family community. Ironically it was so christened on Facebook. And if you were the person who did that and you're here today thank you very much for making my career. Is this really true? Okay so how many pillars do I share with Leponia? So I don't think that we come from the same place. I don't think we speak the same dialect. I don't think we have the same educational and career experiences. I do think we maybe share many interests, have a similar worldview, have the same sense of humor. And do you like air supply? Because that will kind of determine whether or not we've got a three-pillar or a four-pillar friendship. I'd really like, oh scorpions bro. Okay we got a four pillar friendship bro. Four minimum. Like we may have a lot more in common. So four pillar friendship. You don't treat the four pillar friend lightly. Four pillar friendships are kind of what makes life worth living. Okay so let's say you walk five miles on your own. It can be quite arduous. Walk five miles with a one or two pillar friend. Okay but you walk five miles with a four pillar friend. Those miles just fly by. I mean you feel more energized after walking five miles with a four pillar friend than if you just dated home and read a book. So how do we choose a mate by a process of punctuated evaluation? There are a series of decision points separated by periods of stasis. But we pause to decide whether to move on to the next more intimate level or pull out now before we have over committed ourselves. So we begin with distancing signals and slowly but surely circle into ever closer more intimate forms of evaluation begins with what does she look like. How well do they move dance play. They pass this initial test we arrange to spend more time with them successfully successfully successfully evaluating cues based on speech smell and taste. Remember this one woman I was getting increasingly attracted to but I was kind of put off that she she she perspired quite a bit. I just didn't didn't remember this before. I never really romanced a sweater. Like have you ever romanced a woman who perspired above average so that they were like there was a sweat under her arms and coming down her face. It was a little disconcerting. On the other hand she was like the best looking woman that I'd ever dated. So we lasted another year. We broke up five times. She broke up with me five times. And then what finally ended it was that I made a comment on her blog after she complained about me. She said how should I deal. I went out to dinner with this guy. And I wanted them to put my the rest of my desert in the doggy bag but he wanted to leave to get to the movie on time. So I never got my desert. And I just think it was really rude. And so I made a comment on her blog. And that was it. That was it. Scorpion's air supply will pop masters. Absolutely. I'm all out of love. I can't live without you. Brilliant line. How do we get mates to choose us. Watch this show and you live this show. What is a spouse and how do I get one. I'm listening to the blackout album while listening to 40 is better that way. Risk taking and sportiness accused to which women seem to pay more than just casual attention. The young men in particular risk takers adolescent boys take many more risks. So they have much higher mortality rates in their late teens and girls do. So risk taking signals gene quality. So the risk taker says watch me. I can afford to take risk because my genes are so good. I'll get away with it. The women prefer brave risk prone males compared with altruistic risk averse males as short term mating partners. OK. There's Alpha Fox. But they prefer altruistic males as long term partners. So they go for the altruistic. They go for the Alpha Fox and the beta box. So they prefer to get their genes from males who have proven genetic quality and then rely on a safe pair of hands to see you through the long fall of childcare. The tricky bit is persuading the beta male to take the risk of being a cock old. So homophily. That means the more you have in common with someone underpin successful romantic relationships as much as it does successful friendships. Men will drop their standards of mate choice as the sex ratio becomes increasingly male biased. And they will raise their standards least for long term mates when the sex ratio becomes more female bias when men are in short supply. Men switch to more casual sex when they are in the minority when women are forced to compete for men and can exert less power over them. When there are fewer women available and men are forced to compete for women men become more willing to accept committed relationships. Wealth and status tend to placement at an advantage compared with their competitors decision on whom to choose lies with the women. So how do the two sexes allocate their phone calls to the two people they call most often. So in early adolescence a woman's best friend is likely to be another female but after age 18 switches to become increasingly male reaching a peak in the early 20s then remain relatively stable until age 40 after which it falls rapidly. To become female again around age 55 then remains consistently female biased into old age. Men follow a reciprocal but slightly different pattern after a male bias preference during adolescence a male's main core partner becomes increasingly female biased up to the age of 30 after which it declines steadily towards a low level of female bias similar to that exhibited by females. So the female curve hits its peak about seven years earlier than the males does age 23 compared to 30 and the female peak of talking to men first remains much longer until about age 45 versus age 35 in males. So women tend to maintain a focus on their partner or spouse for about three times longer than men do for about 21 years compared to at most seven years for men. So women typically make a very early decision on which male to go for and they stick with it and they constantly contact him until even the dullest male finally realizes and caves looks like it takes the male around five years to wake up and respond reciprocally. Now once a relationship has been established it seems that men lose interest long before the women do their focus on the female partner last only a few years and then it declines steadily down to a token level by middle age. More someone idealizes their partner and switches off their reality check for the outside of the relationship the longer they continue to be satisfied with the relationship. I noticed this I had a friend who just just idolized his partner and I mean they were married for about 30 years and he just still had this complete idealization of his wife. The more this is reciprocated the longer the relationship will last. The moment reality strikes and you begin to see your partner for what she is there's a slow but steady erosion in relationship satisfaction that can only ever have one outcome. The answer is yes. I mean here's a bunch of casual examples of human organizations that have that sort of size somewhere between 100 and 200. These are our attempts really to look at real human relationships if you like in this context. These are the census sizes for hunter-gatherer groups and so hunting all human societies are multi-layered so these are a sort of series of grouping layers community layers we've got and it's this one here the red dots which are the key they're all the same type of cluster of community and they cluster very nicely around the value of 150 which is the blue light and the red. Okay when and why do friendships die when people are not concerned enough committed enough to maintain the relationship at its formal level emotional intimacy when neither can muster the energy to do anything about it so these relationships tend to feed quickly almost by accident. Road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again but somehow never comes because too many other priorities intervene. Family relationships can weather the social equivalent of being be calmed in the mid-Atlantic because of the pull of family the kinship premium and because the closely integrated network of family relationships means that people don't lose track of you completely so the kin keepers bridge the divide keeping everyone up to date with everyone else's doing so you can never quite escape. Family tends to be more forgiving than friends not just of those repeated failures to contact them but also the trickle of small breaches of trust that inevitably occur along the way. Tending a stable relationship. Sending up for the friend in their absence sharing important news with the friend providing emotional support when it is needed trusting and confiding in each other volunteering help when it's required making it an effort to make the other person happy. Break these rules is likely to weaken the relationship and can lead to complete relationship breakdown. When friendships break down people are much more likely to attribute negative behaviors to the other person and positive ones to themselves. A classic form of the attribution error can't be me that is wrong so it must be you. Young people attach more significance to public criticism than older people do. Women place more importance on failure to a portion time equally and to give positive regard and emotional support. Men place a greater emphasis on negative events like being the target of jokes or public displays of teaching to men are less able to cope with taunting than women because reputation seemed to mean more to men than they do to women. Women are more socially proactive than men so men often end up with a social network dominated by their wives friends simply because the wives arranged the social events and the husbands just go along with it. Wives often encourage their husbands to contact old male friends only to be greeted by a frustrating shrug of the shoulders. The men risk ending up with no social network other than their own family after a divorce or the death of a spouse. There's a stronger tendency for women's breakups to remain unreconciled longer than men's. Women are less forgiving than men. Women's relationships are more fragile than men's because they are much more intimate and emotionally charged. The red dotted lines of the confidence intervals around that they all fit really quite nicely within it and this was our attempt first very first attempt to look at what it meant for you as an individual and we asked people to tell us who they were sending Christmas cards to not the number of cards they were sending but who were in the household the total number of people in the household that turns out to be very close to 150 the average in this state is that was 154 there's a lot of variability around that. Okay great news old age brings a downward spiral all the odds are stacked against you you find it hard to make new friends as your old ones die or move away you have less in common with the young folk now make up the bulk of the population your declining energy makes you less willing to go out as often you're less able to take part in physical activities your feeling cognition makes it harder to respond wittly or as engagingly as you once did in conversation making you less interesting as a social companion because you're not familiar with the topics that interest people now because you have not kept up with social and political developments or the jokes of the later stand-ups having an impoverished social life has adverse consequences for your cognitive well-being as well as your physical health this increases the risk of dementia as well as physical illnesses that require hospitalization physical mobility lack there are causes our withdrawal from social interaction in old age you just find it harder to get to places where people gather socially you eventually become housebound and then we turn to the internet. Some of us incredibly mean and don't send any cards at all some people send them to their butcher and their baker and their lawyer and you know all those kind of important people but the key is that it's you know nicely peaked here around 150 it turns out that the reason for that is it's a problem with your brain and we've been able to show with neuroimaging studies and a series of neuroimaging studies and these are now being replicated by other people so the effect really is quite robust is that the number of friends you have is essentially a function of the size of this bit of the brain up here right above the eyes that's the bit that's hugely important in in managing social interactions it turns out. Yeah I noticed double people tend to have fewer friends it's not it's not an exact correlation but generally speaking at every level of IQ the more intelligent you are the less likely you are to be subverted by various mental health maladies. The other bits the bits that are critical along the temporal lobe here just sort of behind the ear as you know inside the skull from the ear and it's the sort of circuitry between these two that makes up this kind of social cognition circuit. Okay let's learn about laughter love social cohesion. It's been a day of storytelling today basically different kinds of stories personal stories fictional stories and so on I see myself as a storyteller but my subject in my story is really something rather different it's about how the world works or at least how we think at the moment the world works and how we think at the world the moment the way the world works is a built of my research so I talked mostly about my research and my research is really about the world in which we live and the virtual world in which we live so I my most of my research is actually on the nature of relationships which is obviously relationships with real people out there but actually we build relationships inside our heads in a kind of virtual reality so biology was way ahead of technology it's been doing virtual reality for okay so Ricardo is in the house Ricardo the topic is the seven pillars of friendship which are shared ethnicity shared religion shared language and dialogue dialect growing up in the same location having similar educational and career experiences having similar hobbies and interests having a similar worldview having the same sense of humor and having the same musical tastes and so any of these pillars is substitutable for any other so recognize that with Loponius and with Robert Prosper for example we were a four pillar friendship we have four pillars which are pretty good friendship so with Ricardo we don't have the same dialect we did not grow up in the same location I don't think we've had the same educational and career experiences we do I suspect we have many similar hobbies and interests we have a similar worldview have a similar sense of humor and I'm not sure about musical tastes so if we share musical tastes then I got a four pillar friendship with Ricardo if not it's a three pillar friendship probably two or three million years I'm going to talk about a particular aspect of it I brought my research team along with me to help out you'll notice we're wearing our usual clothes that we wear when we do research I'm still waiting for somebody to tell me who they are anyway what I'm going to talk about in particular is laughter and the role it plays in our lives and if you like why we do it it's a very very odd thing in the form in which we do it it really is unique to humans it's an absolute human universal absolutely without exceptional cultures all the way around the world laugh you can see you know sort of history right so the more intense the emotional experiences you share with other people then the closer you're you will bond with them so if it's intense exercise intense laughter intense dance intense ritual having a good meal good drink the more intense the more loaded the interactions the more intimacy you'll jokes and people in the past laugh at the same kinds of things but laughing itself is very contagious it's extraordinary contagious if somebody else if other people laugh it's very difficult not to laugh with them it's so instinctive I remember I went to a Prometheus books event and Steve Allen the guy who was used to be on tv and he wrote books about the bible and other things he got up and he was denouncing shock jock Howard Stern and he mentioned an example of you know horrible thing that Howard Stern said that he didn't understand why the Columbine killers didn't have sex with the girls before they killed them and when when Steve Allen read that out loud I was the only person in the room to laugh like I just burst out laughing you know 200 people in the room I laughed only one no one else joined me but someone came up to me and said oh I really you know respected your courage for you know you found that joke funny and you weren't going to be intimidated in that sense we actually get it from a perfectly normal vocalization and visual gestural signal that is common both in the monkeys but particularly in the great eights so here's a chimpanzee and a young orangutan the young orangutan is actually being tickled they're both laughing and this so-called wrong or round open mouth face is very characteristic of this the difference between great ape laughter and our own laughter is the great ape laughter is a series of exhalations inhalation so they go ha ha ha ha I said well like that whereas for us we've shifted it slightly and we just give a series of exhalations ha ha ha ha ha and it becomes very exhausting because we're emptying the lungs and that's going to become important to this story but here's some evidence on how contagious it is this is some of our research on the these people are watching videos the people on the group on the left are watching neutral videos which clearly nobody laughs at it's the amount of laughter given by each individual the average amount of laughter given by each individual doing this the people in the middle are watching a comedy video stand-up comedy but they're doing it on their own and then the people on the right are watching video in a group and you can see this huge effect the same video the same stand-up comedy video the huge effect that doing it in a group has on laughter somebody laughs it triggers laughter and every other person in the group we laugh even when we the joke's in Italian and we don't understand the joke if everybody else is re re-listing to the great new book the extended brain and we think we do some thinking much more effectively when we with a group we do other thinking much more effectively when we get out and walk we do other thinking more effectively when we are enclosed behind walls so that we have privacy so the mind is incredibly influenced by the people and the situation around us I was laughing we can't help it okay here's an indication of just how important laughter is in the sense of your relationship the interaction as it were and Elliott Blatt says how does group sex affect friendship it tends to tends to blow things up not many people in the porn industry were able to sustain their relationships so I'm not sure sharing double penetration is going to be a secret to building lasting friendships with other bloats but feel free to share your experiences that you're having with somebody so this is a study we did in which we asked people at the end of each day to rate on a very kind of simple happiness scale a standard happiness scale from psychology ecology how satisfied you are how contented you were with that particular right if you're laughing with someone then you're in a good place with them but if there's no laughter between you then your relationship is probably in trouble that's my experience interaction with one of your five closest friends and to specify whether you did it uh uh or which oops we've slipped which take Josh Randall says I'm an island of consciousness I need no one to be fully realized you're missing out Josh you're missing out we need other people we need community we need a dance partners we need prayer partners we need bible study partners we need recovery partners need exercise partners technology as it were you used whether it was face-to-face interaction uh an interaction by skype an interaction on the phone uh an interaction by instant messaging or by texting or by email uh and with the same group of people right but it all we also asked them to to separate out those in which laughter had occurred either real laughter or virtual laughter in the form of an emoticon or an lol right so the amount of laughter you have in your relationship is a pretty good interaction pretty good measure of the the health of that interaction so when I started out in relationships we've been laughing and laughing and laughing but then as we start running into problems the the laugh diseases and I have found when and the laugh diseases in my relationships the the relationship's gonna end fairly quickly laugh out loud um uh and when you separate out the data just look what a difference laughter has on your interaction if you laugh somehow it makes the interaction much warmer and you're much happier about it your feelings towards that person are kind of much elevated so laughter is very important right so I mean that's true for live streaming if you're joining a channel and you're able to get some laughs out of it you'll feel much more positively towards the host even if you don't agree with him on all sorts of theological and political and moral issues so we're here to have a chuckle we're having a chuckle then we're doing a good thing uh in the context of our everyday interactions we don't choose our friends yeah we don't choose our friends we we discover them right friends are born and not made you know our health is largely the product of our genetics our career and social and sexual success again largely a product of our genetics friends our friends are made for us this has turned out to be one of the surprises in a way of our the work we've done on friendship it turns out that the quality of friendship you have is determined by how much you share in common with that person already so what seems to happen is you meet somebody you invite them into your inner circle for a little bit you go and have a few beers of them perhaps you go out once or twice in the cinema or something and you kind of synthesize them up and then depending on how many things you share in common determines whether that friendship will survive and romantic friendships are developed on a similar basis so there's famous saying opposites attract but generally speaking the more you have in common with a romantic partner as long as you're not directly related to her the better for the health of your relationship live or whether it'll grow and among the many things all of which are actually cultural purely cultural and no personality effects anything like that they're purely cultural one of the most important of these is sharing the same sense of humor okay so these things that he says are just purely cultural there's a substantial genetic this is a little study we did on the internet in fact we got a whole bunch of people gave them a set of jokes and asked them just to rate them did they think them funny or not simple yes or no that gave them a kind of humor profile all right so that's your humor signature and then two weeks later we emailed them back and we said here's another person's humor profile what sort of person you know is it the sort of person you might think would make a good friend this is we're not interested in a romantic relationship or anything just you know a good friend is it the sort of person you'd be happy to spend time around with and so on what we didn't tell them was that the humor profile that we sent them for this virtual person was actually their own profile but varied according to the number of jokes shared in common so they either had two out of 16 jokes so mentalizing is something that only humans do animals don't do it and it's your ability to put yourself in in someone else's space but understand what's what's going on with somebody else so mentalizing underpins our ability to handle metaphor and conversation jokes depend heavily on metaphorical use of language so jokes tend to consist of three or five mind states okay counting the mind states the audience member and the comedian has two of these only a handful of jokes have six or seven mind states so here is a second order joke meaning there are no mind states in it other than the comedians and the audience right at the airport they asked me if anybody i didn't know gave me anything even the people i know don't give me anything right that is a second order joke now here's a fifth order joke a young boy enters a barbershop and the barber whispers to his customer this is the dumbest kid in the world watch while i prove it to you the barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other and calls the boy over and asks which do you want son the boy takes the quarters and leaves what did i tell you said the barber that kid never learns later when the customer leaves sees the same boy coming out of the ice cream store hey son may ask you a question why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill the boy licked his ice cream cone and replied because the day i take the dollar the game is over so when we ask people to rate these jokes for fun in us the ratings increased with the number of mind states so jokes that involve several protagonists are funnier than those that involve only one up to a level of five mind states after that they quickly become less and less funny so when there are more than five minds involved people just cannot get their head around the point of the joke the same uh six out sorry 18 six out of 18 jokes the same 12 out of 18 jokes the same or 16 out of 18 jokes the same and these are their ratings on a simple affiliation index you know how likely would you be to see them as a possible friend of these virtual individuals and just look at the increase in yes this is a really nice person i could make a friend here as a consequence of just sharing the same sense of humor that's the only thing they know about this person they don't even know that it's male or female right so friendship also sorry the the extent to which you have that sharing of this particular trait this sense of humor also in terms of effects not only whether you uh think they might make a good friend but also how generous you are so we also ask them you know would you lend this person a thousand pounds if if push came to shove and they suddenly had a uh a medical problem would you be prepared to uh uh give them a kidney for example and you see pretty much the same kind of effect in other words the people that we're most generous to the people we fear feel share we share uh most in common with okay i think that would do it for tonight take care bye bye