The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works

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Today on Something You Should Know, how billboard ads for fast food restaurants influence you more than you realize. Then, what makes someone inspiring and how we can all be more inspirational.
There's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world.
So what are these three universal factors? Also, two little things that can have a huge impact on your relationship. And the rules of how life works and the amazing ways species of all kinds depend on each other.
And one of my favorite examples is the influence of salmon in western rivers on tree growth. And you're like, what? Yes.
Trees need salmon. So who would have thought that? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
You know, I got a cold about three weeks ago, and it still hasn't completely gone. I still cough, like three weeks later.
And I've come to find that so many people have this, whatever this is going around, the cough and cold that will not die. So if my voice sounds a little froggy, that's why, but the show must go on.
And we start today with fast food advertising. I bet you've seen a lot of billboards all over the place for fast food restaurants.
And maybe you've wondered, well, do those ads really work? Well, a UCLA study a few years back found that areas with more outdoor advertising dedicated to fast food and soft drinks were more likely to have overweight residents. Fast food restaurants, after television, fast food restaurants spend a lot of money on billboards, bus ads, and other outside advertising spaces.
And there's more psychology at work here. Wendy's, McDonald's, In-N-Out Burger, Burger King, all have the same basic color scheme.
Why? Because red and yellow make you want to eat more. Red causes you to eat faster and more forcefully, according to a University of Rochester study.
And several studies have found that the color yellow stimulates appetite by causing your

brain to secrete serotonin, the happiness hormone.

And that is something you should know.

In your lifetime, there have been people who have inspired you.

A parent, a teacher, a boss, a co-worker, someone who has made you feel inspired, giving you that sense that you're worthy, appreciated, competent, capable, and can do so much more. So what makes a person inspiring? Do inspiring people deliberately try to inspire others, or is that just the kind of person they are? Do inspiring people inspire everyone? Are they always inspiring? How can you be more inspiring? That's what Adam Galinsky is here to talk about.
Adam is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. He's author of a book called Inspire, the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others.
Hey, Adam, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much.
I'm so thrilled to be here. So I love this topic because I've often thought about what makes somebody inspiring, and I think everybody has seen somebody, met somebody who they thought was inspiring, but I don't know that I've ever thought of, why is that? What is it that makes them inspiring? I just know they are.
And then I wonder, well, are they inspiring just to me or are they inspiring to the world? So what is it? What is that thing? It's a great question, you know. And I, you know, about 20 years ago, I had an experience where I was teaching the FBI.
And one of the agents started talking about a leader of his that inspired him. And it was such a remarkable moment for me because I saw everything about his body change, right? His eyes light up.
He smiled. He looked wistfully and all.
And you could tell that this leader, for whatever they did, changed that person inside, they created that sense of wellspring of hope and possibility. And so at that moment, I decided I wanted to study what was it about that person or about people in general that inspire others.
So what I started a a decade long journey in which I've asked thousands and probably tens of thousands of people, a very simple question, which is, tell me about someone that inspired you, right? And I asked them to be like a scientist. What was it about that person that filled you with that ineffable feeling? Which I imagine most of us have felt, right? I mean, most of us have somebody in our life that inspired us to create those feelings.
And so, what did you find? What I've discovered with these thousands and thousands of examples is it turns out that there are three universal characteristics or factors that really distinguish between these people that changes inside positively. And another type of leader, I call them the inferiority leader, that create these sort of seething cauldrons of rage and resentment inside of us.
And so it actually turns out it's pretty, it's A, systematic, and B, universal. So there's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent.
Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. So what are these three universal factors? Well, the first one is how we kind of look at the world, how we conceive and perceive the world.
And I call that being visionary. The second factor is how we kind of stand in the world, our presence, how we are in the world.
And I call that being an exemplar of desired behavior. And the third factor is how we interact with others in the world.
And I call that sort of being a great mentor. And so these are the three universal factors, being visionary, being an exemplar, and being a mentor.
You know, I often wonder that the people that I find inspiring, I wonder how often, how much of the time are they inspiring? Because it would seem that it would be hard to burn that flame continuously to always be inspiring. That doesn't seem possible.
So, right? It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. You may be inspiring today, but infuriating tomorrow, right? What you do today is not going to protect you from falling to the other end of the continuum.
And so we're never going to be inspiring all the time. We're never going to reach this apotheosis of inspiring perfection.
But we can strive to be more inspiring tomorrow than we were today, right? And that is, I think, the fundamental, most important insight of my research. And so what does it mean to try to be inspiring? Because you do things like what that you may not be doing now? Well, so I think one of the other key things that my research has shown is that one of the foundational elements for being more inspiring today than you were yesterday is the power of reflection, reflecting on our experiences, reflecting on important aspects of ourselves.
And so I actually can go through and I can give you what is the key reflection that allows us to be more visionary or more exemplary or a better mentor. Because I think these provide profound insights for how we can become more inspiring.
So let me tell you about a study that we did, which I think is going to have a big impact on listeners. So if any of you out there have ever lost a job, you know how demoralizing it is, how humiliating it is.
I lost my first post-college job three months after being hired. I was fired, right? And I was just so demoralized.
So we did this study with the Swiss government. We went into an employment agency where everyone has to register in order to get unemployment benefits in Switzerland.
And we gave half of these people coming into the employment agency a little 15-minute reflection task. We said, I want you to think about your values.
What are your top five values? Now put them in a hierarchy. What's your most important value, right? What's the one that animates the others? Just put them in a little hierarchy.
Now I want you to think about why are those values important to you? And then finally, think about times when you've demonstrated those values recently in your own behavior. Two months later, we found that people were given this values recall intervention, this reflection task, were twice as likely to have a job than people in our control condition.
In fact, the effect was so strong, we stopped the study and gave everybody the values reflection intervention. Now, what's going on there? There's something, again, getting back to that need for meaning and understanding.
There's something about our reflecting on our values that centers us, that gives us a little bit of optimism, a little bit of agency, and allows us to overcome all those psychological deprivations that occur when we lose a job. So what does it mean? Give me, if you could, an example, like a person or maybe yourself or someone you know, what that reflection process goes like.
I don't know what it really means to reflect on my values other than to think about them. I don't know what the difference is.
Yeah. So for me, I've done this task myself.
We actually give it to every single MBA student walking into Columbia Business School. And so, you just start thinking about it.
Now, one of the things we do is we give people a link to a list of values because it's hard to create them off the top of your head. It's a Google sheet.
And I started just thinking about values and I'd put some down and then I realized I'd found another one that was more meaningful toward me. And then I started, I had a particular ranking and then I changed it.
And so for me, my single top value is generosity. And it's not just generosity financially, it's generosity in spirit and in thought.
being generous in trying to give people the best interpretation for their behavior, right? Trying to contextualize why someone did something, giving people the benefit of the doubt. My second, you know, important thing is what I call positive energy, right? Optimism, humor, good naturedness, right? You know, another value of mine is creativity.
How do we be creative and solve the problems that we have in unique and creative ways? Another one is what I call kaizen. Now, my wife spent time in Japan, and they have a word for continued improvement, which is kind of the heart of inspire and how to inspire others.
And so that, to to me is really important. How I want to always be striving to be better at everything I do.
Every time I do a podcast, I want to do it better the next time, for example. And so then you can start to think about why do those values matter so much to me? Well, you know, I want to always be improving.
I love creative solutions. You know, I love humor.
Every birthday I go see stand-up comedy, it's really important to me. But generosity is the one that drives them all because that's what I want to be in the world.
I want to be a generous person, always trying to give people what they need, giving them the benefit of the doubt. And then I can think about times recently where I could have blown up at someone, but I thought about the fact that they were going through a really rough time.
And I gave them, you know, a little serenity for that. Or a time where I screwed something up, but the next time I did it better.
And I had that continued improvement. And that's it? That's it.
You know, 15 minutes. I mean, this thing is like we don't really know what the secret sauce is yet because we collect lots of measures to say, what is it that's transforming people to getting jobs? Jeff Cohen of Stanford University, he did a study with at-risk middle school students.
He gave them this values reflection eight times over two years to some group of students. Five years later, they were more likely to graduate high school and go to college.
There's something powerful. our values like we have one of the most

profound to graduate high school and go to college, right? There's something powerful. You know, our values, like we have an inherent, one of the most profound truths about humans is that we have a clarion call, a need for a sense of meaning and higher purpose.
And our values in a sense give us that sense of meaning and higher purpose. It's why being visionary is one of the three fundamental dimensions of being an inspiring person.
We're talking about what makes inspiring people so inspiring and how you can be more inspiring. My guest is Adam Galinsky.
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So Adam, those three universal factors you mentioned, being a visionary, being an exemplar, and being a mentor, it's kind of hard for me to get my head around exactly what you mean. So could you attach those three things to some real people who exhibit those, who illustrate those, so I can get a better sense? Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think that, you know, I'll tell you a story about a remarkable pilot that I think really captures that, right? Is Tammy Jo Schultz was flying Southwest Airlines 1380 from LaGuardia to Dallas when the left engine exploded and literally tore a hole in the side of her plane, right? One passenger was sucked into that hole and didn't survive. It was fatal.
But she miraculously and remarkably landed the plane with no further injuries. And we can see these three elements come into bear.
The first thing that she recognized was, as she described it, she said the plane wanted to descend, so we let it do what it wanted to do when we descend it. Now, that's fine.
That's great. She's a great pilot.

But she recognized that when there's a hole in a plane and you're descending, the passengers probably think that plane is going down. And so she got on the intercom and she gave them what I call an optimistic why, this vision for what was happening.
And she said 10 simple words. And the passengers commented afterwards that it literally transformed the entire cabin from just abject fear to hope and possibility.
She said, we are not going down. We're going to Philly.
Right. And so she gave them a why and aware and where they're headed.
Now, if you listen to her on the intercom, she is the most calm.

They're like, is your plane on fire? She's like, no, but there is a hole in it. It's pretty damaged,

just very matter of fact. And when she landed, she was immediately evaluated by EMTs.
And one of them said to her, how did you get through security? And she looked at him puzzled, like,

what are you talking about? He said, how did your nerves of steel not set off the security alarms? You're completely calm, right? Your heart rate is normal. Your physiology is normal, right? So she was that exemplar of desired behavior.
She was a calm, the eye of the hurricane, but courageous protector, right, of the people on that passenger. And then before she left the plane, she walked row by row and looked every passenger in the eye and made sure they were okay.
And afterwards, she commented, she's like, I'm still surprised that more reporters have commented on what I did after the plane landed, going row by row, than what it took to fly this crippled plane. And that shows that she was this inspiring mentor, she was empathizing and taking care of the people and encouraging them and making sure that they were okay.
And so, these are these three elements about how to do that. That's a great story.
That's a, and a great example of those three things that I think people can get a better sense of what that is. But you had said a few minutes ago that you can be inspiring one day and, and infuriating the next day.
And, but I, when I think of inspiring people, while I'm sure that's true of them, it doesn't seem like it's true a lot of, like, it isn't, they seem, there's something about their character, the way they carry themselves, that seems inspiring much of the time. It isn't like it's on and off a lot.
I think that's also true, right?

And I think that one of the things that I've discovered about inspiring leaders, people who are more inspiring more of the time, not always inspiring, they're occasionally infuriating, is that they've really set up practices or habits for how to be a better person, essentially.

And so they've tried to embed them into their daily lives. Let me give you just sort of one example of this, which is one of the things that we can do to really lift people into the clouds is that especially when we're in positions of leadership, because I've actually coined a phrase that's called the leader amplification effect, that everything we do as a leader, good and bad, small and big, gets amplified, and then its impact is intensified on us.
So a frown from a leader is like a knife in your heart, but a compliment can lift you into the clouds. And there was someone that I was talking to, president of a bank, 1,400 employees.
And he said, here's what I do every single morning. Over my cup of coffee, I send a birthday greeting to every one of my employees.
And it's pretty simple, right? He showed me an example. It's like, hey, Mike, I hope you have a great birthday.

How was bowling and jogging this weekend?

He can pump five of these out a day in less than 10 to 15 minutes, but then he showed

me the responses he gets back.

It's like, oh, my God, I had such a great weekend.

This is what we did in bowling.

It's like a novel that comes back.

He said that he realized that he says, sending those birthday messages, they put a skip in their step. But they also put a skip in my step, right? They come back to me and they make me feel good by their responses.
And I think that is something that goes back to the Bible. Reap what you sow, right? If we send out infuriating signals into the world, we're going to get infuriating signals back.
But when we plant the seeds of inspiration, right, we spread those seeds, but we also get the blooming flowers of inspiration coming back to us. And so that's a great example.
He had a daily habit of sending these messages right forward, right? You could do that yourself. Every morning you could wake up, have a cup of coffee, and just say something positive, constructive, complimentary, expressing gratitude to someone in your orbit.
And you're going to put a skip in their step, and they're going to put a skip in your step when they reply. When you talk to inspiring people, people who are considered by others to be inspiring, do they say typically, yes, I work at this.
This is what I try to do. Or do they say, you know, I don't, it's a gift.
I couldn't tell you how I do it. I think there's two different aspects of it, I think, are really important there.

The first is, I don't know if they would say I'm inspiring, because many of the people who are truly inspiring also tend to be humble people, and so wouldn't identify themselves as inspiring. But they certainly recognize that they work on one of these three universal features.
So, for example, one person might talk about how, yeah, I work really hard on making sure I see the big picture, I communicate it, I make sure that we all are going in an opposite, you know, an optimistic direction, I find ways to simplify it so that people can understand that. Or someone else is like, yeah, I really practice at being calm in a crisis, right? I know how important that is.
I know, because of later amplification effect, that my anxiety will become their anxiety. But if I'm calm, they're going to be calm.
Or they say, yeah, I work really hard at trying to meet the needs of other people, being that good mentor. They might not use those words, but they recognize the power.
But here's the one element that I think characterizes every person that we might describe as inspiring. And it goes back to one of the things that we've already talked about is, again, the power of reflection.
The people that are truly inspiring reflect on their experience. They reflect on the things they did good that day, and they work on how they might continue them.
But they also reflect on the times

when they didn't see the big picture

or they lost their temper

or they were anxious in a crisis.

And they think about how they could be better the next time.

And I think that is really so profoundly fundamental.

You know, people say the reflected life,

you know, is worth,

only the reflected life is worth living.

But it's the reflective life is what allows us to be the best possible version of ourselves. And when you look at people who are considered inspiring, do they have other things in common that aren't necessarily related to the inspiration, but they tend to be, I don't know, they tend to be men or they tend to be women or they tend to be older, they tend to be younger.
Are there any like demographic-y kind of similarities or it's all over the map? There are not. And I think that's, again, gets back to this idea that leaders aren't born, that they're made.
But I will say that there's, you know, one thing that I think does really help people be more inspiring, and why it's so important to be inspiring yourself, is that it's a heck of a lot easier to be inspiring, if you had inspiring people as your mentors, as your parents, right, as your leaders, right, because one of the things that we know is that we tend to perpetuate, right, the receive ourselves. I discovered this self as a father.
My dad had this volcanic rage that would come out for spilling milk. Just ridiculous.
But it tortured and terrorized me. And I even had nightmares with my dad chasing me in my dreams.
My dad was a wonderful person. He's probably the most inspiring person in my life.
But he had this one infuriating flaw, right? And early on, as a parent, two little boys, I, they would spill milk, and I would explode in rage, just like, it's like, I felt like I'd become my dad, right? You know, and I saw the effect on them, the immediate impact, like the sense of like that fugue state of like panic that they experienced when that rage came out. And I had to train myself, right, to not be my dad and to be a different type of father, to have all of his inspiring traits, but not take on that one furrating flaw.
And that's, again, gets back to the power of reflection, right? I could reflect on my experience. I could reflect from where it came from, but I could also then plan and make commitments and put in practices in place to prevent them from happening in the future.
Well, this is great insight into what makes someone inspiring and information I think we could all use in our lives. I've been speaking with Adam Galinsky.
He is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. And the name of his book is Inspire, The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others.
There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Adam, thanks.
It's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much, Mike.
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Nature has rules and ways of enforcing them. In fact, everything in nature is regulated.
And it is those regulations that allow all the creatures and other forms of life to exist on planet Earth. Those rules essentially explain how life works.
And here to discuss this is Sean B. Carroll.
He's an award-winning scientist who is vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's author of a book called The Serengeti Rules, The Quest to Discover How Life and why it matters hi sean thanks for coming on today hi mike thanks for having me so to help us all understand what we're talking about here let's start out with one of those rules one of the rules that explains how life works well let's start with one rule which is really some animals are more important than others, or if you want to use the Orwell saying, are more equal than others.

There's sort of a poetic description sometimes of nature that, you know, everything matters and everything has its role. But it turns out that some creatures have a really outsized role in the diversity and stability of their ecosystems.
And when ecologists started to discover this, it was even to their own surprise.

Well, the consequences are great. So that if you think about, for example, people may be familiar with the story of both the eradication and then the later reintroduction of wolves in the Yellowstone ecosystem.
So in the early part of the 20th century, there was a great effort to eliminate wolves virtually everywhere in the lower 48 states, you know, because they were disliked by humans, their effect on livestock, they were scary, etc, etc. What we didn't understand, what we're doing was we're taking a creature that had a really outsized impact on the stability and diversity of its ecosystem.
We were taking it out of the picture and this had huge consequences. One of those consequences we can still see all over the place, which is, for example, the enormous numbers of deer that are in many states.
And those deer in turn have enormous consequences on plant diversity because they mow down the plants and forests, et cetera, et cetera. So the discovery that some creatures have these outsized effects was a surprise.
They were about these sort of hidden connections in ecosystems. And then we understand that if we can replace some of these things, maybe we can reverse some of the changes, some of the unwanted changes that have happened in places.
So I give you the wolf example, but in the tide pools on the Pacific coast, that certain starfish in the Serengeti, it's the wildebeest that the massive numbers of wildebeest just munching the grass have an enormous impact on the diversity and stability of that ecosystem. So this gives us insight into really how these systems work and how we can better manage them in the future.
And this impact that these creatures have is good, bad, both, or? Well, I mean, you know, nature was around a long, you know, we were latecomers to nature, right? Humans and human population growth is very, very recent. So most of these places, you know, have operated on their own without human intervention for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
And then we came along and, you know, in either in settling these places or in wanting to exploit them, for example, think of things like the fur trade and things like this, where we took specific creatures because we wanted them for our own gain. We've disrupted the balance in those systems.
So from nature's point of view, these creatures are all good. From our point of view, they were either bad or desirable for other reasons.
And we, you know, we eliminated them. And then we've really sort of, you know, tipped these systems into a different place.
So, it's rethinking our relationship to nature, you know, not to make ourselves out as the, you know, as bad and evil or anything like that. It's just, we were doing this unwittingly.
We just didn't understand our impact when we, for example, eliminated most of the sea otters, for example, from the Pacific coast. And what that did amazingly to kelp forests, you know, you'd sort of think, I mean, why would, why would sea otters have any influence on kelp forests? Well, it turns out they eat the things that eat the kelp forests.
And if you don't have sea otters, the kelp forests can't grow. And those kelp forests are great habitat for fish.
And those fish are

great food for bald eagles, et cetera, et cetera. So there are all these domino effects that removal

of these, what are called keystone species, keystones dubbed after the name of the keystone

in a Roman arch, removal of these keystones have really outsized effects on systems. And so their

restoration can have outsized effects on the restoration of the health of these ecosystems but nature by its nature is pretty efficient right i mean if you're a creature and you're meant to stay you stay and if you're not you go it's a very competitive world out there yeah um and you, you know, creatures are competing with each other of, you know, different kinds and of their own kind for resources, etc. And that, these are very complex web of interactions that's going on, you know, anywhere, you know, along the, you know, in a coastal system, you know, in a forest, in a pond, out on a plains.
But that web, when you, there are certain components of those systems that when you remove them, the web sort of collapses. And that's what humans were doing unwittingly for, I think, a good part of the 19th and 20th centuries.
And it was a bunch of biologists, a bunch of ecologists studying these systems over long periods of time in the last four or five decades of the 20th century that put together, essentially from studying different systems, an understanding of these rules that sort of knit life on a large scale together. And understanding these rules then, of course, empowers us with a better understanding of what's our best long-term behavior.
And what are some of the, just to get a flavor of this, rather than drill too deep, what are some of these other rules that you've uncovered that would help people understand what this is and why it's important? Yeah, let's go with one. So one rule are these certain species that have these outsized effects called keystone species.
Another rule is there's sometimes really strong indirect effects between species. And one of my favorite examples is the influence of salmon in Western rivers on tree growth.
And you're like, what? Yes, trees need salmon. How does that work? Well, it turns out that those rivers, think of things like the Columbia or Snake, you know, sort of majestic rivers in the Pacific Northwest, those rivers don't carry a lot of nutrients.
But salmon, when they come upstream to spawn, and when those salmon are then taken, for example, by predators and eaten on stream banks and all that sort of stuff, a lot of the nutrients that they bring from the ocean get into the forest. And you can map those nutrients right into the growth of those trees.
So it turns out that salmon are like a conveyor belt for nutrients coming from the ocean into these forests alongside these rivers. So who would have thought that, right? I mean, it's just sort of stunning to think that trees are somehow influenced by salmon.
Yeah. And as you know, a lot of those rivers have been dammed.
That's blocked off the salmon. Well, that has effect on the rivers.
That has effect on the forests around those rivers. And so again, there's a lot, now there's a huge movement.
There's a lot of dams being taken down in the West and biologists are monitoring what's going on. And as the salmon populations come back, you can actually see the nutrients moving up those rivers again.
So those, these strong indirect effects, the idea is that salmon would influence trees or that otters would influence the kelp forest.

For example, the number of wildebeest on the Serengeti influences the numbers of giraffe. I can go through that again, that explanation as well.
These strong indirect effects, these domino effects that ripple through a system, they really were unexpected. And they, you know, it's it.
So almost everyone is a sort of surprise when it's discovered that the dependence of species on each other are not obvious. You have to sort of map these out.
Well, you had mentioned before, like the proliferation of deer in many states. We have them here.
We have them in our front yard this morning. and there's an assumption, and you tell me if this is true, that one of the reasons that there are so many deer is, you know, we don't really hunt them as much as we used to.
And probably also people think they're cute and like to feed them. And that's partly why they have proliferated.
True? Yeah, that's part. That's partly why they're doing well.
But the hunting really wouldn't have been that significant until the deer herds exploded in the early part of the 20th century. So deer, when wolves roamed the lower 48 and abundant in large numbers, deer numbers were, I'm going to take a stab at maybe a 50th or a 100th of what they are now.
I spent a lot of time in the state of Wisconsin. And I mean, the annual deer hunt is a huge thing culturally, and the deer herd is enormous.
But some of the pioneering ecologists of the 20th century understood that that was a huge change from, say, from the 19th century in that deer exploded when you took away their predators. So, predators have a big role in controlling the size of populations of their prey and take away the top predators and you can have an explosion in the number of their prey.
So, really, deer numbers are abnormal all over the country because they have no essentially no significant natural predators I mean there are a few you know wolves are coming back in various places but they're not making a dent and now deer have spread over all these you know suburban and urban populations and they're making a living on our gardens right so um yeah so so deer So, so deer, you can, I know they're cute,

but they are essentially an invasive species, or at least they're a species that's out of control, out of natural control. So, you know, I think deer are with us to stay in these large numbers, but, you know, for a lot of people, you see deer and you think, oh, that's wonderful, that's nature.
But it's really a big difference from the way things were, say, a century ago.

Maybe I don't want to hammer the deer thing too much. But you would think that at some point there would be too many deer for the food that's available and that that would start to level out the population.

That's a great point, Mike.

In fact, essentially the third rule.

And that third rule is that the density of populations is sort of self-limiting. So when there's a lot of food, abundant food in populations are small, they will grow explosively.
But as that sort of population fills up the space and as food starts to become limiting, that will slow or in fact sort of reverse that to a population decline. So lots of things are density regulated.
And so deer are, you know, have expanded their habitat, they're filling, you know, our suburban areas and things like that. But there's still limits on deer in terms of food abundance.
And there's also, you know, there's cars, you know, as you know, there's lots of collisions and things like this. So there's various things that are constraining the deer population, as well as disease, you know, because they have certainly acquired some diseases now that they're in close contact with humans.
So, yeah, so the general concept is that no area will be, there is a limit to how much can be carried by, the population can be carried in any given area, limited particularly by food supply. My sense is there's a tendency to look at, you know, what humans have done to mess things up.
But do other creatures mess things up? That's a hugely important, maybe sort of philosophical question. I think, you know, you said earlier about how nature kind of works these things out.
Let's take something like a beaver. And you could say, all right, a beaver builds a dam, and that dam diverts some water.
And, you know,

does that impact other creatures? It certainly does. And maybe it impacts, you know, the ability of fish to get around in some places and things like that.
But it also, in creating these wetlands, you see all sorts of plant life that thrives in the wetlands and then creatures that invade these places and or exploit these places. And so beavers, you know, are often referred to as, you know, one of nature's engineers,

you know, their net effect is, you know, to create habitat for lots of different things.

So we, you know, in a lot of places, we took out beaver and we straightened out rivers,

we straightened out waterways.

We didn't want beaver dams on our waterways. We wanted unfettered access to this.
But it's hard for me to see the beaver in a negative light because it has done this particular job for eons. and all sorts of creatures became dependent upon that job.

And then we came in and essentially took the beavers out of the picture, and lots of things

suffered for that. So, it's often the case, I mean, I'm going to try to see if I can come up

with some other example where you might wonder about, I'll jump through to elephants. Okay.

You can look at elephants are incredibly majestic creatures, but they're pretty tough on forests. Elephants will knock down a lot of trees.
And I've been in areas in Africa where it's pretty astounding what elephants can do to a forest and probably can do it in a fairly short period of time. And if you're knocking down trees, you're probably taking away nesting sites from birds.
You may be taking away food from other animals. So the knock-on effects of some of these creatures are negative for other creatures, but take away the elephants and then you don't get the turnover of the forests and you don't get fertilization through their dung and that supports all sorts of other communities and so on and so forth.
So it takes some thinking through the myriad effects of creatures in these ecosystems to sort of weigh these things out. But I think on balance, we see that, you know, ecosystems, the systems themselves are healthier when the components that have been there for eons are there and thriving and working.
And, you know, these forests that produce, you know, oxygen and timber and, you know, rivers that give us fresh water and glaciers and rivers that give us fresh water and oceans that produce fish and things like this. These are all more productive when they, when their diversity is intact.
So I think on balance, it's a long way to get around to your question and say, you know, do these animals have negative impacts? I would say, you know, yes, in probably a narrow view, but in the broader view, they've evolved as parts of these systems. And the integrity of these systems depend on them.
And so what are some other of the rules of life that people are probably unaware of? Well, we've hit, you know, three of the really big ones. But I think the most important rule, Mike, and probably the most important message I could deliver is that nature is incredibly resilient.
That given a chance, given time and space and taking pressure off these places, they can rebound and they can rebound spectacularly. Populations can rebound.
Species that have been pushed right to the brink of extinction can recover spectacularly. Habitats that look incredibly degraded can come roaring back, and they can come roaring back before our eyes.
Not in centuries, but I mean, in years to decades. And this resilience of nature, I mean, just let's give it a minute to sort of sink in.
I'll give some examples. Fisheries, which we pay close attention to for their commercial significance, a good number of fisheries in North America have been fished to a critical state.
And then the fisheries regulators step in and moratoria are put up. And many of those fisheries have rebounded and rebounded well.
It just turns out that the oceans are incredibly productive, given a chance, and populations will rebound. Species that are familiar to us, like the bald eagle, people may know that in the 1960s, because of widespread use of DDT, bald eagles and peregrine falcons were devastated.
They had a lot of trouble with the viability of their chicks, so populations crashed. We were down to fewer than 500 mating pairs of bald eagles, you know, the national symbol by the late 60s.
Today, that number is over 70,000 breeding pairs and the total population is even bigger than that. So when we took the pressure off, when we took away DDT, which was compromising their ability to reproduce, the population came roaring back.
And you can tell the same story of manatees in the waters off Florida, of grizzly bears in the Rockies, of sea otters on the Pacific coast. So individual species can come roaring back.
And, you know, alligators, the American alligator, people may not know, in the late 60s, alligators were extremely threatened. And, you know, goodness, go to Florida now and try not to see an alligator.
You know, they're everywhere. Well, I like the way you have framed this as the rules of life, how we're all interconnected and intertwined and interdependent

on each other.

And it's not something I think most of us think about, but it's really fascinating to

hear.

I've been speaking with Sean B. Carroll.

The name of his book is The Serengeti Rules, The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why

It Matters.

And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Sean, this was really great. I appreciate you explaining all this.
Thanks, Mike. It's always a pleasure.
What's really important in keeping a relationship happy? Dr. Carl Pillemer decided to find out for his book, 30 Lessons for Loving.
He asked 700 married people who had each been married an average of 43 years, and two answers emerged from his research. Number one, learn to talk to each other and talk a lot.
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While we tend to focus on big problems and decisions in a relationship, it turns out that what makes a relationship work, or not, are the hundreds of little interactions that happen during the day. The trick is to make as many of those interactions positive.
For example, be polite. Often we get comfortable in a relationship and we stop being polite to one another.
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This pattern of doing small things every day is what keeps relationships alive. And that is something you should know.
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That's the end of this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers.
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Have you ever heard about the 19th century French actress with so many lovers that they formed a lover's union? Or what about the Aboriginal Australian bandit who faked going into labor just to escape the police, which she did escape from them. It was a great plan.
How about the French queen who murdered her rival with poison gloves? I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. Every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know, and you will never forget after you hear it.
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I have episodes about all of them.