Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert.
Speaker 1: The audience probably doesn't know this, but you're a tall person.
Speaker 1: I'm reasonably tall. I'm six two or six three. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're taller than me and Joe for sure. Though, as
Speaker 1: we found out when we did our photo shoots a
Speaker 1: couple of months ago, we always and whenever we do
Speaker 1: the Facebook lives, we usually end up putting you in
Speaker 1: the middle. So it's not like this weird lopsided three
Speaker 1: headed creature. But yeah, you're definitely taller than the two
Speaker 1: of us. I'm five. Depending on I guess, like how
Speaker 1: how good my day is going. You know, it's interesting
Speaker 1: to think about exact heights because some of the literature
Speaker 1: were looking after this episode. I saw estimations onto what
Speaker 1: degree nan round up their height? Oh yeah, and I
Speaker 1: I find that I tend to round down. Really, I
Speaker 1: can make a claim for six three, but I'd rather
Speaker 1: just be six two, like I'm calling it at six two.
Speaker 1: It's I bumped my head enough at six to uh
Speaker 1: if I even think I'm a little bit taller. I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm just gonna have more head injuries. That's
Speaker 1: funny because I do the opposite. I totally round up
Speaker 1: because I'm like, you know, when when I get the
Speaker 1: measurement at like the doctor's office or whatever, it's like
Speaker 1: five nine and three quarters or something like that, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not totally five ten, but I just
Speaker 1: say five ten to everybody. That's interesting, huh that somebody
Speaker 1: should do a study on that. Uh, that would be
Speaker 1: interesting in relation to what we're gonna talk about today.
Speaker 1: So this is one of those like scientific I don't know,
Speaker 1: past times that we end up seeing in like our
Speaker 1: popular media a lot, like especially newspapers, that it's basically
Speaker 1: like every couple of months, there's a publication that comes
Speaker 1: out and it says, well, if you're over this height,
Speaker 1: like if you're tall, then you're gonna live longer. If
Speaker 1: you're short, you're gonna a die sooner, right, right, And
Speaker 1: then like people read that and they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: they go out of their minds. They start they go
Speaker 1: out and they run for like two weeks, and then
Speaker 1: they're like it's fine whatever. Well, and then likewise when
Speaker 1: it comes to psychology. Uh, you'll find studies that that
Speaker 1: are basically saying, oh, well, well short, shorter people that
Speaker 1: behave like this, taller people behave like this. And then
Speaker 1: we start turning the microscope on ourselves and like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: am I like that? Do I have a Napoleon complex?
Speaker 1: Or am I do I have some sort of like
Speaker 1: tall person vanity? And uh, it gets problematic because you
Speaker 1: end up with these broad generalities, oftentimes supported, especially in
Speaker 1: the psychology realm, by studies that are maybe not that
Speaker 1: large and convinced. Yeah, And so this is how we
Speaker 1: got on the track for this episode. Was one of
Speaker 1: these studies across our desk and we're like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: kind of interesting, and it was, well, we'll mention it later,
Speaker 1: but it was about height and lung disease, and we
Speaker 1: were like, let's actually like take a look at like
Speaker 1: the gamut here and see like all these studies together,
Speaker 1: what we actually come down to, like, what is is
Speaker 1: there anything to this? And if there is, is it
Speaker 1: better to be taller? Is it better to be short?
Speaker 1: In terms of health and both physical and mental? I
Speaker 1: want to touch on just a couple of quick overviews
Speaker 1: about human height. So over the last hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 1: the average height of people in industrialized nations has increased
Speaker 1: approximately ten centimeters or about four inches, and today the
Speaker 1: average human height is currently about five ft seven and
Speaker 1: a half inches for males or one seven two centimeters
Speaker 1: and five ft two or one d fifty eight centimeters
Speaker 1: for females. Uh. And the this has said a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years out of all human history, that's a
Speaker 1: very recent development. We actually have another episode of stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind wanted to with Joe a while
Speaker 1: back called Colossal the Science of Human Height that gets
Speaker 1: a little more into why humans have grown or have
Speaker 1: grown taller in the last hundred and fifty years, as
Speaker 1: well as a look at certain gigantism scenarios. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that hundred and fifty years or so ends up pretty
Speaker 1: well with our understanding of why height is related to health,
Speaker 1: and in the basic assumption goes something like this that, uh,
Speaker 1: it's a combination of your genetic potential and what's referred
Speaker 1: to as net nutrition. So this is the food you taken,
Speaker 1: especially during childhood, and how it determines how tall you
Speaker 1: can grow. But then it's referred to as net nutrition
Speaker 1: because there's things that can take away from the the net,
Speaker 1: such as disease. So if you're if you have disease
Speaker 1: in in your childhood, that can subtract from your net nutrition,
Speaker 1: maybe leading to being a little shorter. So what we're
Speaker 1: seeing is like as our nutrition has gotten better, as
Speaker 1: the world has become more developed, as wealth is spread around.
Speaker 1: That's why, especially in the America's and Europe, there are
Speaker 1: taller people now. Now. For a long time, historians have
Speaker 1: used recorded height actually as an indicator of the living
Speaker 1: standard in both our health and our income. And this
Speaker 1: is basically because there's not a whole lot of other
Speaker 1: data available when they're looking at old records. Right, It's
Speaker 1: not like we would have like socio economic records of
Speaker 1: somebody's name written down, but a lot of times they
Speaker 1: do record their height and their weight. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: this general assumption about people earning more money and then
Speaker 1: that being connected to health, that's one of the big
Speaker 1: questions here for us today. I think, I mean maybe,
Speaker 1: so there was this instance in China, there's a study
Speaker 1: found that height does increase as health and survival do
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, so we're seeing that reflected in
Speaker 1: China now the same way we saw it in America
Speaker 1: and in Europe. This seems to support the idea that
Speaker 1: adult height is like quote, a crystal ball that reflects
Speaker 1: early life conditions such as nutrition and disease. So you know,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something to that, But basically, the way we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at it today is like, what are the
Speaker 1: meta studies on this, right, Like, has anybody bothered to
Speaker 1: take a wide lens look at all of these and
Speaker 1: kind of figure out, like, so, what's the truth here
Speaker 1: or not? And then we're gonna zoom in on the
Speaker 1: ones that are detailed that are specifically about like organs
Speaker 1: such as like your heart or your lungs or your brain,
Speaker 1: and like whether or not those are affected by your height. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we you know, you get into the specifics of
Speaker 1: all of this and you look at like, okay, who
Speaker 1: tends to live the longest and it's a based on
Speaker 1: the information I was looking at, yes, you, I believe
Speaker 1: it's Japanese women, and like the longest in the Japanese women,
Speaker 1: I'll do not have a reputation as being just towering
Speaker 1: physical giants. So a lot of this, you know, you
Speaker 1: deal with the generalities when you break it down, everybody
Speaker 1: can name a short person who live for a long
Speaker 1: time or a short short person who died early. The
Speaker 1: same with with tall people, and nobody's coming up to
Speaker 1: a tall person a short person on the street and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: why did they not feed you when you were a child,
Speaker 1: and you you will live forever. When you get into,
Speaker 1: of course, the extremes, When you get into conditions that
Speaker 1: cause an individual to be um you know, extremely a
Speaker 1: small in stature, or you know they're suffering from some
Speaker 1: sort of a gigantism scenario, then everything is going to
Speaker 1: potentially be more out of line. But when we're doing
Speaker 1: with sort of the standard realm of human heights, that's
Speaker 1: where it gets really interesting and and difficult to to
Speaker 1: pull apart. So let's look at this first theory, which
Speaker 1: is just the general idea that short people live longer
Speaker 1: than the tall people. Now we'll go to that example
Speaker 1: that Robert just mentioned. According to the World Health Organization,
Speaker 1: Japanese women have the longest average lifespan in the world.
Speaker 1: They live to be, on average, eighty six years old.
Speaker 1: The average height of a Japanese woman between the ages
Speaker 1: of seventy and eighty is a hundred and forty nine
Speaker 1: point five four centimeters or about four point nine feet tall,
Speaker 1: So you and I would be towering over these people,
Speaker 1: would be easily a foot or more over them. Um,
Speaker 1: but they live longer. So for comparison, the average US
Speaker 1: man like Robert and myself, lives to be about seventy
Speaker 1: five And in two thousand and twelve, a study found
Speaker 1: that shorter men in the US do actually live longer
Speaker 1: than taller men. So that's one in my column. Although
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know if I qualify as shorter.
Speaker 1: I'm shorter than you, but I don't know if I'm shorter.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna find this when we look at these
Speaker 1: studies that the measurements are all over the place in
Speaker 1: terms of like what height they used to measure as
Speaker 1: tall and above, and what height they use as short
Speaker 1: and lower. But here's the thing. There really isn't a
Speaker 1: proven direct relationship between height and life expectancy. But there's
Speaker 1: this idea out there that's connected to the short people
Speaker 1: live longer theory called the Methuselah gene uh. And this
Speaker 1: is named after Noah's grandfather in the Bible, he was
Speaker 1: the oldest man that was listed in the Bible, and
Speaker 1: he lived to age nine hundred and sixty nine. So
Speaker 1: apparently none of us get to a thousand, even in
Speaker 1: the Bible. Now, this Methuselah gene seems to be connected
Speaker 1: to the idea that short people live longer, and basically
Speaker 1: it's a rare genetic mutation that decreases the body's cellular
Speaker 1: use of a particular kind of growth hormone, and those
Speaker 1: who have it tend to be smaller and live longer.
Speaker 1: But there are all kinds of factors that could be
Speaker 1: involved here, right, that aren't just this gene. There could
Speaker 1: be lifestyle factors, birth weight, early childhood, care, nutrition, vaccinations, antibiotics, diet,
Speaker 1: and income level. All of these things are important. So
Speaker 1: it's weird that we keep looking to height, and it
Speaker 1: seems to be that we're doing that because of that
Speaker 1: historical precedent, right, just like the basic idea that well,
Speaker 1: height is connected to wealth, and subsequently wealth is connected
Speaker 1: to a good nutritious environment, therefore those people will live
Speaker 1: long access to healthcare as well, Yeah, exactly. Now, the
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist Dr Armand Leroy discovered the hormone that controls
Speaker 1: our height, which is called insulin like growth factor or
Speaker 1: we're going to just refer to it as i g
Speaker 1: F here, and that it controls our height, but it
Speaker 1: also controls our aging and so if you have a
Speaker 1: low level of i g F, this means you're going
Speaker 1: to have a longer life expectancy, right. Well, in animals
Speaker 1: this seems to be true. For instance, smaller dogs live
Speaker 1: longer than bigger dogs. This is this is an example
Speaker 1: I thought of as being something that even if we're
Speaker 1: not like directly analyzing it, it's in the background, Like
Speaker 1: a lot of us tend to know that you have
Speaker 1: this giant dog, it might not live as long as
Speaker 1: this smaller scrappy mutt. Yeah exactly. Like I have friends
Speaker 1: who have like the like tea CuPy Yorkies, like tiny
Speaker 1: little dogs, and they live a long time, and then
Speaker 1: like I guess, I mean, I don't remember what the
Speaker 1: averages are, but like a big dog, I think isn't
Speaker 1: expected to live longer than like a decade, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I've known people who have had the like
Speaker 1: Great Danes, yeah yeah, and I think I think they
Speaker 1: have all all the Great Danes have passed. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's too bad. But here's the other thing. There's another
Speaker 1: animal that we can look to for this mice. And
Speaker 1: I never even thought about this, but apparently dwarf mice
Speaker 1: lives seventy five percent longer than other mice. So if
Speaker 1: we pull that out and we look at humans, right,
Speaker 1: this idea of the I g F connected to our
Speaker 1: height and our agings seems to come out to be
Speaker 1: about for every extra inch of height, it shortens your
Speaker 1: life expectancy by an average of one point two years.
Speaker 1: So if you're six two and I'm five ten, then
Speaker 1: we got what three four inches between us, depending on
Speaker 1: how we're rounding or what kind of hats were wearing.
Speaker 1: So according to this, I'm gonna live four point eight
Speaker 1: years longer than you, maybe if I don't get hit
Speaker 1: by a bus on my way out of here. Um So,
Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of part of it, right, It's
Speaker 1: like you can't really I mean, that's obviously getting hit
Speaker 1: by a bus can't be factored into your your health expectancies.
Speaker 1: But it's kind of it's not factoring and all those
Speaker 1: other things like your lifestyle or your diet or whatever
Speaker 1: or nutrition. So I'm not entirely convinced that height is
Speaker 1: a reliable predictor of health. And actually there was a
Speaker 1: meta study that was published on this. There's a paper
Speaker 1: by Angus Deaton that was published in two thousand six
Speaker 1: in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here
Speaker 1: in the United States of America, and it indicates that
Speaker 1: in developing countries there's an inconsistent relationship between height, health
Speaker 1: and income. And he looked at developing countries specifically because
Speaker 1: of the assumption that it's always been a money connected
Speaker 1: to nutrition and health care factor. Now, his argument, after
Speaker 1: looking at all these studies together is that basically heights
Speaker 1: an unreliable predictor. For example, he asks why when he
Speaker 1: looked at all of the measurements, were African people so
Speaker 1: tall when they traditionally have a lower income and are
Speaker 1: exposed to more disease. Right, So that seems the reverse
Speaker 1: of what we we assume to be true about heightened health.
Speaker 1: In the abstract for his paper, Deeton actually says taller
Speaker 1: people earn more on average, and they do better on
Speaker 1: cognitive tests and live longer. So that again, so we
Speaker 1: were getting different reports here, right that his his research
Speaker 1: the literary review that he went through for his paper
Speaker 1: was basically that tall people live longer, even though we've
Speaker 1: got all these other studies that say there's a methuselah
Speaker 1: gene and short people live longer. So Deaton says that
Speaker 1: as a consequence of possible disease and a lack of
Speaker 1: nutrition earlier in life. The idea is that short people
Speaker 1: are more prone to chronic disease late in life, and
Speaker 1: therefore they're more likely to die earlier. But even the
Speaker 1: increase in heights in Europe and North America are regarded
Speaker 1: as not being driven by genetics, and this is specifically
Speaker 1: here in Deeton's paper, but he says it's more about
Speaker 1: changes in disease and nutritional environments. So all right, let's
Speaker 1: back up here. Now we've got we've basically got two
Speaker 1: competing meta theories. Right, We've got the one that says, well,
Speaker 1: heights totally an unreliable predictor. H here's some data that
Speaker 1: says people who are tall live longer. And then we've
Speaker 1: got other studies that say, well, no, shorter people live
Speaker 1: longer and there might be this methuslagen. Uh So what
Speaker 1: we did was we basically pulled a bunch of studies
Speaker 1: for this episode based on health and mental factors, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna kind of go through them and cally up
Speaker 1: as we go along and see which one of us
Speaker 1: is going to live longer, Robert or me? Okay, the
Speaker 1: great contest here. Okay, So let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna start off with cancer. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. We're talking about human height, short people, tall people,
Speaker 1: shorter people or taller people. I guess you would say,
Speaker 1: and uh, just the general question, does one of the
Speaker 1: other have a leg up on living longer? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: unfortunately we don't have any studies into leg health related
Speaker 1: to to height. Um, that seems like it would be
Speaker 1: one of the first ones they'd go to, but I
Speaker 1: didn't see any cross my radar. Uh. We do, however,
Speaker 1: have a lot on cancer now out There has been
Speaker 1: a link scene between breast cancer and women and height
Speaker 1: that's been proposed as early as nineteen. So we're talking
Speaker 1: about melanoma, thyroid, kidney, breast, colon, and rectum cancers all
Speaker 1: being strongly associated with height, and studies have found that
Speaker 1: women who are five ten or more are likely to
Speaker 1: develop these types of cancers. Than women who are five
Speaker 1: two or lower. So again, like as I said earlier,
Speaker 1: each one of these studies uses a different metric for
Speaker 1: what tall and short is, and this one apparently it's
Speaker 1: five ten and five to uh. The explanation basically is
Speaker 1: that tall women tend to have larger organs and subsequently
Speaker 1: more cells, so their chance of developing a mutation that
Speaker 1: leads to cancer is greater, and that this could ultimately
Speaker 1: be their hormones influencing their risk of cancer. Okay, so
Speaker 1: basically the idea is they have more dice to roll,
Speaker 1: and therefore there's a greater chance they're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 1: roll to one on one of those dis Yeah, which
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I don't know if that lines up
Speaker 1: with like my the math that I remember for like
Speaker 1: the g R E. But but well, let's go on.
Speaker 1: We'll see if they've got some more stuff here. One
Speaker 1: study of this used data from the Women's Health Initiative,
Speaker 1: which is the study that was it took like a
Speaker 1: broad look at women's health between at forty different clinics
Speaker 1: across the United States, and even when they introduced controlling
Speaker 1: factors like body weight b m I and socio economic status.
Speaker 1: They found that there was a significant relationship between height
Speaker 1: and cancer at any site in the body. Uh. And
Speaker 1: for them, they said that for every additional ten centimeters
Speaker 1: or three point nine four inches of height that a
Speaker 1: woman had, she was one point one three times more
Speaker 1: likely to have cancer, basically be at risk for cancer overall,
Speaker 1: they weren't narrowing in on any of these specific cancers. Then,
Speaker 1: Swedish academics just last year back this up with a
Speaker 1: study that found that the taller you are, the more
Speaker 1: likely you are to develop cancer. So for men, they
Speaker 1: included men here, so it wasn't just you know, we're
Speaker 1: looking at two different genders. Here the risk increases eleven
Speaker 1: percent for every extra ten centimeters of height, while for
Speaker 1: a woman it was actually eighteen percent for every ten
Speaker 1: centimeters of height. So okay, so if we look at
Speaker 1: these and it's two separate studies, I'd say, all right,
Speaker 1: in this case, it seems that we have to tally
Speaker 1: up that cancer is more likely and taller people, so
Speaker 1: you're more likely to get cancer than I am. But
Speaker 1: then again we're dealing with a general indicator here very much,
Speaker 1: and there of course a number of other indicators for
Speaker 1: for the risk of developing cancer. Yeah, like whether like
Speaker 1: if I live next door to Chernobyl, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: small shorter person smoking, taller person smoking, etcetera. So all right,
Speaker 1: let's look at blood clots next. And the reason why
Speaker 1: those are important is because they can potentially lead to strokes.
Speaker 1: So another study found that if you're five ft two
Speaker 1: or under in your weight. Now remember in most of
Speaker 1: these your weight has to be close to normal for
Speaker 1: your height, Like you can't be either super skinny or
Speaker 1: morbidly obese and have that height that that's going to
Speaker 1: throw the calculations off. But if you're a normal weight
Speaker 1: and you're five to your three times less likely to
Speaker 1: get a blood clot. And this is because blood must
Speaker 1: be pumped a longer distance in taller people, which may
Speaker 1: lead to reduce flow and an increased risk for a
Speaker 1: stroke causing clot. Okay, well that makes sense. It's just
Speaker 1: basically it's just business essentially. Yeah. Um, Now, while height
Speaker 1: is associated with blood clots, a two thousand to study
Speaker 1: looked at ten thousand Israeli civil servants and it found
Speaker 1: that height was associated overall with stroke risk, not just
Speaker 1: the blood clots, but just stroke risk overall. Being taller
Speaker 1: was not good a Scandinavian study. The Scandinavians seem to
Speaker 1: be looking into this a lot, probably because I mean,
Speaker 1: we assume that they're taller than us. But they found
Speaker 1: that taller people are two point five times more likely
Speaker 1: to develop venus thrombo embolism, which this collectively covers both
Speaker 1: deep van thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms. Now, in this study,
Speaker 1: men over five eight were two point five seven times
Speaker 1: more likely to develop recurrent blood clots. If they were
Speaker 1: also over rate, that rose even more up to five
Speaker 1: point to eight times. So okay, So again, looks like
Speaker 1: we've got to put tall people on on the list
Speaker 1: as being more likely to get blood clots and strokes.
Speaker 1: Sounds like, okay, man, this isn't looking good for you, buddy. Alright,
Speaker 1: what about your heart? How's your heart feeling? Pretty good?
Speaker 1: Pretty good? I have heart problems, not like major stuff,
Speaker 1: but like I had a mitro valve prolapse when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, and it's like a thing that I
Speaker 1: have to get checked up on four occasionally. Just means
Speaker 1: like one of the valves flaps differently than than the
Speaker 1: other three valves. But um, I don't know. Let's see,
Speaker 1: let's roll the dice. All right, Tall people are less
Speaker 1: likely to develop heart disease, all right. There, For every
Speaker 1: two point five inches taller you are than someone else
Speaker 1: of your same gender, your risk of heart disease actually
Speaker 1: diminishes by four. So in the study that looked at this,
Speaker 1: researchers actually measured the association between DNA variants and height
Speaker 1: as well, so they weren't just like measuring people and
Speaker 1: then looking at their medical histories. They're actually looking at
Speaker 1: their DNA And what they found was that the association
Speaker 1: between heart problems and height was actually small. But then
Speaker 1: they combined it with the overall associations that they had
Speaker 1: from other data, and they still found that genetically determined
Speaker 1: height was at risk of coronary heart disease. So before this,
Speaker 1: observational studies had basically suggested that there was a link
Speaker 1: between shorter height and coronary heart disease. So this one's
Speaker 1: a little confusing to me. I don't know, Maybe it
Speaker 1: plays out in the end like it's kind of an equalizer.
Speaker 1: But we got another study here that says a review
Speaker 1: of fifty two separate studies, So this is one of
Speaker 1: those meta studies, it found that of more than three
Speaker 1: million people, the shorter ones had a fifty percent higher
Speaker 1: risk of deadly heart disease than tall ones. And additionally,
Speaker 1: the genes associated with being short also increases the risk
Speaker 1: of having high L d L cholesterol levels. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this isn't looking good for short people in terms of
Speaker 1: heart stuff. And one more study related to this said
Speaker 1: men who were taller than six one, so that's you,
Speaker 1: had a thirty five percent lower risk of having a
Speaker 1: heart attack than men who were shorter than five seven
Speaker 1: And every inch a man gains subsequently results in a
Speaker 1: two to three percent decrease in heart attack risk. That's interesting,
Speaker 1: but there, as far as I could tell, there was
Speaker 1: no like speculation as to why. Now this is another
Speaker 1: one of those instances where I have to have to
Speaker 1: to say that I feel like I have a warped
Speaker 1: sense of percentages and and likelihood. You know, if scenarios
Speaker 1: taking place based on rolling dice in D n D
Speaker 1: and playing x com you have like a hit on
Speaker 1: an alien and and you end up missing or even
Speaker 1: like um like stuff like that, I feel like has
Speaker 1: kind of warped my understanding of percentile. Well, what if
Speaker 1: like in the in that situation, right, I mean, people
Speaker 1: statisticians out there are going to be screaming at us.
Speaker 1: But but in that situation, if you're playing the game
Speaker 1: and the alien is at a high enough level that
Speaker 1: even your cent isn't enough to allow you to hit it,
Speaker 1: then subsequently, I mean, so if you apply this to hell,
Speaker 1: then it's like if you have something like I put,
Speaker 1: extremely dangerous form of coronary heart disease. Right, no matter
Speaker 1: what your stats are, no matter how tall you are,
Speaker 1: you're still going to roll with like a negative two.
Speaker 1: This always reminds me of a quote from The Naked
Speaker 1: Gun Leslie Nelson uh Flick. I'd like to think of
Speaker 1: it as an O. J. Simpson movie. Okay, well, it's
Speaker 1: about the the O. J. Simpson character Nordburg, where where
Speaker 1: this character says, doctors say that Nordberg has a fifty
Speaker 1: fifty chance of living, though there's only chance of that.
Speaker 1: So I like the percentage upon percentage and ultimately making
Speaker 1: it just completely nonsensical. Yeah, And I mean, like, no
Speaker 1: disrespect to the people who are conducting these studies, but
Speaker 1: when you see them all lumped together like we're doing here,
Speaker 1: it kind of feels like that. It feels like, for instance,
Speaker 1: like the heights are all over the place, the percentages
Speaker 1: are there's a lot of shifting around here. And what
Speaker 1: we're doing here today is clearly not academic in any
Speaker 1: sense of the term. You know, we're not using any
Speaker 1: like statistical models to try to put all these together.
Speaker 1: We're just basically using fast and loose D and D rules. Right, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we're we're not trying to make an actual um argument
Speaker 1: for you know, a tall person or shorter shorter persons
Speaker 1: of chances of of survival, but ready providing an overview
Speaker 1: of what some of the studies we're saying. But so far,
Speaker 1: let's recap. So, Robert's more likely to get cancer taller people.
Speaker 1: Taller people are more likely to have strokes and clots.
Speaker 1: Shorter people are more likely to have heart disease. What
Speaker 1: about your lungs? Now, this was the study that got
Speaker 1: us on this track. So, according to a twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: study that was presented at the American Thoracic Society International Conference,
Speaker 1: lung transplant candidates who are about five three or shorter
Speaker 1: have to actually wait a longer time for their transplants
Speaker 1: than taller candidates, and they're more likely to die within
Speaker 1: a year of waiting for such trans plants. So this
Speaker 1: is interesting. I have to assume that it's because of
Speaker 1: size availability. Yeah, I mean it. This reminds us of
Speaker 1: something that came up in our Cyborg one of our
Speaker 1: Cyborg episodes, just talking about the size of artificial hearts,
Speaker 1: I believe, and how initially they did not have like
Speaker 1: they were sized for adult men, and therefore if someone
Speaker 1: was like a smaller female or individual, just like someone
Speaker 1: smaller than what was the ideal male size, they wouldn't fit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I imagine it lines up with that. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they basically found that shorter adults are more likely
Speaker 1: to be placed on mechanical ventilation and the median height
Speaker 1: that they used was a hundred and seventies centimeters or
Speaker 1: about five point six feet. They used a median b
Speaker 1: m I of twenty five point four, which I don't
Speaker 1: really know the b m I is very well, but
Speaker 1: I looked it up on a chart and that actually
Speaker 1: qualifies as overweight. Uh. Most of their participants were white
Speaker 1: and male. That's important to remember as well too. So
Speaker 1: all right, lungs sounds like shorter people are worse off brains.
Speaker 1: What about your brains? This is a big one because
Speaker 1: it's you know, if everything else is working, that's great,
Speaker 1: but if the brain is not functioning properly as well, then, uh,
Speaker 1: you know what's the point, right, Well, it turns out
Speaker 1: that women who are five seven or taller are fifty
Speaker 1: percent less likely to die from dementia than women who
Speaker 1: are five one or shorter, and this has been attributed
Speaker 1: to factors that contribute to smaller stature again, childhood illness, stress,
Speaker 1: and poor nutrition. So what I'm getting out of this
Speaker 1: is like, height isn't necessarily all that important, but like,
Speaker 1: if you're a parent, it's pretty important that you make
Speaker 1: sure your kids eating well and if they're sick, you're
Speaker 1: taking care of them. Right. Um. Men, however, who are
Speaker 1: taller than five ten, they had a fifty nine percent
Speaker 1: lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than men who are
Speaker 1: shorter than five six. So okay, So what we're seeing
Speaker 1: here is that dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease, seems to be
Speaker 1: more likely to show up in shorter people. So that's
Speaker 1: me again, So I'm more likely to lose my mind
Speaker 1: than you are. Which sounds about right. I mean, just
Speaker 1: based on our daily you know, interactions, and and how
Speaker 1: how with it? I am already at age forty. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like on this show, especially, madness is always
Speaker 1: a risk. This is very true, and we knew what
Speaker 1: we were getting into when we signed up for it.
Speaker 1: What about diabetes, This one didn't even cross my mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but of course this is a big one. This is
Speaker 1: one of This is one of the big killers today.
Speaker 1: This is a primary health concern. So type two diabetes,
Speaker 1: most of us know, is linked to weight, but they
Speaker 1: think that type one may actually be linked to height.
Speaker 1: And the cause of type one is still unknown, but
Speaker 1: it's thought to be related to an autoimmune attack on
Speaker 1: the insulin producing cell of our pancreas. Now, a two
Speaker 1: thousand to study that was published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Pediatrics found that taller children generally experience an increased risk
Speaker 1: for the development of type one diabetes, except during infancy
Speaker 1: or early adolescence. But then there's been other studies that
Speaker 1: contradict this. Right, So, uh, there's another one that suggests
Speaker 1: that children with diabetes are either all similar in height
Speaker 1: or shorter than their non diabetic peers. So this one
Speaker 1: seems to balance out, and that like, the studies don't
Speaker 1: seem to uh come to a conclusion one way or
Speaker 1: the other. So I think we can just like, we
Speaker 1: can file this under null for now. I don't know
Speaker 1: necessarily that you're more likely to get Type one diabetes
Speaker 1: than I am, just based on height. Now, there's two
Speaker 1: smaller ones here that I added at the end. The
Speaker 1: first is about reproduction women who are taller, and again
Speaker 1: totally like, I don't know why they picked these numbers,
Speaker 1: but they chose five six for women who are taller.
Speaker 1: Those women are less likely to develop gestational diabetes than
Speaker 1: those who are shorter at five two or shorter. This
Speaker 1: is speculated to be because the genes that are related
Speaker 1: to height have an effect on their glue close tolerance.
Speaker 1: Also a study in Thailand, which I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I look my parents lived in Thailand for a while,
Speaker 1: but anytime I hear a study in Thailand, I'm immediately like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. A study in Thailand found that being
Speaker 1: five one or taller reduces your risk of having to
Speaker 1: have a C section. That seems to make sense to me. Well,
Speaker 1: this one is interesting in terms of of what a
Speaker 1: lot of the data said about about c sections over
Speaker 1: the years, and they're they're those who argue that a
Speaker 1: lot of times, I mean, c section is a is
Speaker 1: a topic onto itself that we could we could easily
Speaker 1: devote a whole episode two. But there are those who
Speaker 1: make the charge that the decision to go the C
Speaker 1: section is is times related to the culture of the hospital,
Speaker 1: the cultural the culture of the medical profession. So I
Speaker 1: can't help but wonder, like, when this comes up to
Speaker 1: to what extent would this translate into an American hospital scenario,
Speaker 1: say a Chinese hospital scenario, into uh, you know, areas
Speaker 1: where there's more traditional child birth outside of a hospital,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Huh, yeah, that's interesting. But I guess like,
Speaker 1: if we take the two of these and we taly
Speaker 1: them up, we can essentially say shorter people, by this metric,
Speaker 1: are more likely to have reproductive problems. So I'm more
Speaker 1: likely to have reproductive problems than you are, although neither
Speaker 1: of us are women. But hey, you know, I could
Speaker 1: play out in other male reproductive type problems. Last one,
Speaker 1: this one makes total sense once I read it heat exhaustion.
Speaker 1: So apparently the larger a person is, the more their
Speaker 1: body has the ability to get hot because the surface
Speaker 1: of their skin dissipates heat at a slower rate. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is This is actually something that comes up in
Speaker 1: the episode of the Joe and I did about human size,
Speaker 1: because we get into the idea of like giant humans
Speaker 1: and some of the problems with with heat that occur
Speaker 1: when you start just proportionally building up a you know,
Speaker 1: an organism spody. Yeah, you know this. I can't remember
Speaker 1: when we did our episode on the science of ant man.
Speaker 1: I don't think that came up, but that would be
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to think about, Like when he's super tiny,
Speaker 1: how much heat is he dissipating, versus when he blows
Speaker 1: up to super big and he picks up an airplane
Speaker 1: or whatever. So the idea here then is that larger
Speaker 1: people are going to dissipate heat at a slower rate,
Speaker 1: so they're more likely to get heat exhaustion, where shorter
Speaker 1: people are able to lose heat more readily, so they're
Speaker 1: less likely to get heat exhaustion. I've never thought about
Speaker 1: that before, but I guess that's another one in my column.
Speaker 1: So you are more likely to get exhausted in the
Speaker 1: heat than I am. Like if you and I crash
Speaker 1: landed in the desert somewhere and there's no water and
Speaker 1: we were just walking for days. You're going to be
Speaker 1: the one to drop before I'm gonna depend on you
Speaker 1: to rebuild our airplane and fly us out of the
Speaker 1: desert flight of the Phoenix stuff and totally do that.
Speaker 1: All right, This is basically our rundown. This is our
Speaker 1: rundown of physical stuff. Though, why don't we take a
Speaker 1: break when we come back, We're gonna get into personality
Speaker 1: and mental attributes. Thank alright, we're back. So, yeah, we
Speaker 1: we've looked at some of the basic health studies out
Speaker 1: there about the human height and where it where, where
Speaker 1: it falls on the healthy less healthy scenario, your likelihood
Speaker 1: for various diseases and whatnot. But yeah, what about human
Speaker 1: height and personality and psychology. So height is a primal
Speaker 1: survival signifier. It addresses physical strength, reach, health, and good nutrition.
Speaker 1: And for this reason, it's not surprising the humans have
Speaker 1: some natural tendencies when it comes to our our psychological
Speaker 1: relates ship with human height. But this is this is
Speaker 1: one of the problems too, because it's very well, we
Speaker 1: don't want to reduce our her views of other humans
Speaker 1: and our own like social scenarios to just oh, who's
Speaker 1: the biggest person in this room all right there in
Speaker 1: charge because they're the tallest, like like obviously, while those
Speaker 1: factors might influence us, you know in the sort of
Speaker 1: sort of in the background at the the rat like
Speaker 1: high brain level, um, there's a lot more going on
Speaker 1: with human personalities, uh, with with with just how we
Speaker 1: interact with people. Sometimes the largest person in the room
Speaker 1: need not be the person with the largest stature, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sometimes just the person with the most personality or
Speaker 1: the most you know, symmetrical features um, or the nicest
Speaker 1: clothes that or you know, they have a reputation. There's
Speaker 1: there's so much more going on with with how we
Speaker 1: perceive other humans than just how tall are they. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's certainly true. Although I've definitely encountered in like my
Speaker 1: business life. I guess that like the the stereotype of
Speaker 1: like the tall guy assuming leadership or or assuming confidence
Speaker 1: in a group. Yeah, I guess I haven't had a
Speaker 1: lot of not you. Yeah, I mean I have not
Speaker 1: assumed leadership here um, and neither has has easy our
Speaker 1: our our tech expert um. So I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know that it has to do with particular business
Speaker 1: cultures or yeah, or maybe when you get an m
Speaker 1: b A they put you on a rack and they
Speaker 1: stretch you out, or is it one of these things
Speaker 1: where a tall person gets promoted. It's kind of it's
Speaker 1: like an attractive person getting promoted saying, oh, well, clearly
Speaker 1: it's because they're so handsome, or clearly it's because she's
Speaker 1: just really tall like you. There's a gut instinct to
Speaker 1: reduce it to some thing that has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with marin rather than actually, yeah exactly, rather than like
Speaker 1: analyze your own like strengths and weaknesses in terms of meritocracy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That being said, there have been times where I have, like,
Speaker 1: I'll have self doubt creeping in and I'll be like,
Speaker 1: oh man, what if I've only gotten this foreign life
Speaker 1: just because I'm a little bit tall, and if and
Speaker 1: if I was just a little shorter, I would just
Speaker 1: I would have fallen into the gutter years ago. No,
Speaker 1: that's not true. But still you end up thinking about
Speaker 1: these things when you start crunching some of these uh
Speaker 1: at times very general studies. Yeah, yeah, no, I can
Speaker 1: understand that I have this experience where I go to
Speaker 1: shows a lot, or at least I used to. I
Speaker 1: don't go as much as I as I used to go,
Speaker 1: but I would often find myself watching a band, and
Speaker 1: then I would if I would get bored with the band,
Speaker 1: I would sort of pull out and pay more attention
Speaker 1: to the audience and start thinking how tall am I
Speaker 1: in comparison to everybody else in this room? And you know, like,
Speaker 1: what's the sort of average height of fans of this
Speaker 1: particular music or something like that, you know, and I'm
Speaker 1: always somewhere in the middle. You know, they like five,
Speaker 1: that's nothing special. Like in fact, when you looked at
Speaker 1: h when we looked at these studies earlier, of like
Speaker 1: all the various organs, like that height was neither really
Speaker 1: listed as being the tall height or the short height.
Speaker 1: It was always somewhere in between. So maybe I'm just
Speaker 1: more likely to get everything. So speaking of getting things,
Speaker 1: one of the classic tropes, right, is that the that
Speaker 1: the tall guy gets the girl, where the tall girl
Speaker 1: gets the guy or whatever your sort of heteronormative scenario
Speaker 1: is kind of that whole. Uh, the cartoon scenario of
Speaker 1: the the nerd on the beach with the with the lady,
Speaker 1: and then here comes the big, tall, muscle bound dude
Speaker 1: and you kick sand on him and ls off with
Speaker 1: the gal flex Mentalo. Yeah, well there was there that
Speaker 1: I did find a study that that touches on This
Speaker 1: two thousand sixteen University of Edinburgh study published in Genome Biology,
Speaker 1: and they conducted an analysis of the genotype of more
Speaker 1: than thirteen thousand human heterosexual couples, and they found that
Speaker 1: genes that determine your height also influence your choice of
Speaker 1: mate by height. So, simply put, our genes can be
Speaker 1: used to predict the height of our partner. Now there
Speaker 1: are plenty of exceptions here, of course, and we can
Speaker 1: all we all know couples where where you know one
Speaker 1: significant other is uh is is tall, the other ones short. Um.
Speaker 1: But this, this, this paper is making an argument that
Speaker 1: we do tend to gravitate towards people who are similar
Speaker 1: in their morphology. Okay, again from personal experience, this absolutely
Speaker 1: aligns up with just like my subjective experience with other
Speaker 1: people talking to them about who they're dating or why
Speaker 1: they're dating. I know plenty of people who are tall
Speaker 1: and say like, oh, there's no way that I could
Speaker 1: date her. It just wouldn't work out. Or I know
Speaker 1: tall women who have said the same thing, like like
Speaker 1: he's nice and all, but just like there's such a
Speaker 1: disparity between the two of us. I just can't imagine
Speaker 1: just physical height. Yeah, yeah, that's like like an immediate
Speaker 1: like I imagine like, uh, you and I are totally
Speaker 1: off the market in terms of this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But when you use like Tinder or something like that,
Speaker 1: like I assume height is part of the like statistics
Speaker 1: that you have to report. So I hadn't even thought
Speaker 1: of that, because certainly a head shot you're not gonna
Speaker 1: be able to tell. Most photos you're probably not going
Speaker 1: to tell. To be able to tell, we'll have to
Speaker 1: ask somebody in the office who uses Tinder or grinder
Speaker 1: or something like that. But I would assume that it
Speaker 1: would have height and weight included in there. Well, this
Speaker 1: is an area I'd love to hear from listeners on
Speaker 1: two total experience with this, especially as it plays out
Speaker 1: in the modern you know, dating scenario. But some people
Speaker 1: would be like whoa, that person's five to nope swipe,
Speaker 1: or or oh that person is like only an inch
Speaker 1: taller than me, or some people like to have somebody
Speaker 1: who's taller than them but only a little taller than them.
Speaker 1: Do you think they're taggling room? Do you think they're
Speaker 1: like five tens a bit much? If you can bring
Speaker 1: it down to five eight, then we'll give it a shot.
Speaker 1: Here's what I really think, And this is going to
Speaker 1: reveal a lot more about me and not about the study.
Speaker 1: But I have had lots of friends who have gotten
Speaker 1: excited about the prospect of hooking up with somebody who's
Speaker 1: either significantly shorter than them or significantly taller than them,
Speaker 1: but not having a relationship with that person. So the
Speaker 1: idea of the experience is okay. But when they're actually
Speaker 1: like searching around for a partner, they're more likely to
Speaker 1: have this scenario of like, you know, figuring out the
Speaker 1: sort of math of like how they're going to line
Speaker 1: up against one. So it's one thing to have this
Speaker 1: fantasy in mind, but it's another thing to to have
Speaker 1: to think, well, where, what where would we put things
Speaker 1: on shelves and how would that work out? Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: earlier you touched on the income height scenario, and there
Speaker 1: is a highly sited two thousand four study even the
Speaker 1: Journal of Applied Psychology by Timothy a judge and Daniel M. Cable,
Speaker 1: and they did an investigation of the correlation between height
Speaker 1: and success. So quote, the findings suggests that someone who
Speaker 1: is six ft tall earns that average nearly sixty six
Speaker 1: thousand more during a thirty year career than someone who's
Speaker 1: five ft five inches, even when controlling for gender, age,
Speaker 1: and weight. So that's an interesting observation. Uh, but again
Speaker 1: it's kind of problematic. I feel you start actually teasing
Speaker 1: it apart. Uh, Is it really a situation where even
Speaker 1: in the background of cognition, someone's thinking, oh, that's a
Speaker 1: tall one. Make sure we give them a raise because
Speaker 1: they can crush me with their giant hands. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's that so much as that going back
Speaker 1: to that, uh, that idea that we sort of started
Speaker 1: off the episode with, which is like, well, tall people
Speaker 1: must come from at least middle class families because they
Speaker 1: were able to be raised with a nutritious environment and
Speaker 1: they didn't have disease to which got them to this
Speaker 1: point in life. Subsequently, they must have a history that's
Speaker 1: led them to be responsible enough to get a promotion
Speaker 1: or something like. I guess it would be more likely
Speaker 1: to be that, but even that seems absurd when I
Speaker 1: think about it out loud. Yeah, speaking of things that
Speaker 1: sound a bit absurd. Uh. There's also a two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen study out of Ohio State University that argues, based
Speaker 1: on British data, that the taller person is, the more
Speaker 1: likely he or she is to support conservative political positions,
Speaker 1: support a conservative party, and and actually vote for conservative politicians.
Speaker 1: They found that a one inch increase in high increased
Speaker 1: support for the Conservative Party of Written by point six percent,
Speaker 1: and the likelihood of voting for the party by point five.
Speaker 1: That one strikes me as very odd. I can't see
Speaker 1: any correlation. Yeah, I wonder, well, this is British data.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the heighth factor has anything to do
Speaker 1: with aristocracy and certain family lines. I guess. I mean
Speaker 1: you're getting back to that that idea that al right,
Speaker 1: if someone is tall, that means they've had good nutrition,
Speaker 1: good good genetics, and access to healthcare. But that's not
Speaker 1: always the case. And then and then it's not like
Speaker 1: they're not like tall liberal academics and and and tall
Speaker 1: pretty leaning. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, So this
Speaker 1: one is it's hard for me to to really break
Speaker 1: down and I feel like I end up thinking of
Speaker 1: individuals in my life and all right, well, here's a
Speaker 1: tall person, how did their politics line up with my
Speaker 1: with my politics? Uh, this one feels weird. I'm having
Speaker 1: a hard time really breaking this one down in terms
Speaker 1: of just sort of interpersonal connections. Yeah. Yeah, that one,
Speaker 1: I don't know. We have we have more, yes, right? So? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And the in fact, the next one is awesome from
Speaker 1: Ohio State two thousands sixteen study as well. They found
Speaker 1: that tall people have built in advantage when it comes
Speaker 1: to spatial relations. Uh, and that visual superiority holds true
Speaker 1: even when tall people sit down and their shorter counterparts
Speaker 1: stand on a box restool like an apple box. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: and then this one, this one is published in Science Advances.
Speaker 1: Yeah so, I guess I hadn't really thought about this one, because,
Speaker 1: if anything, I would have guessed the taller people. Or
Speaker 1: maybe this is the problem with with perspective, Like I'm
Speaker 1: not good at sports or throwing things and making them
Speaker 1: go where I want them to go, so I would
Speaker 1: have the tendency to fall into the trap of assuming
Speaker 1: this is the universal experience, despite the fact that there's
Speaker 1: plenty of evidence that you know, obviously we have plenty
Speaker 1: of of of tall basketball players who are exceptional at
Speaker 1: throwing objects and making them go where they want them
Speaker 1: to go. Yeah. Yeah, And I guess to like, the
Speaker 1: thing that I end up thinking about with this is
Speaker 1: the thing that I end up thinking about with this is,
Speaker 1: for instance, really tall people taller than you even like,
Speaker 1: for instance, my father in law is a pretty tall guy,
Speaker 1: and so is my brother in law. Like, the idea
Speaker 1: of them having like a spatial advantage seems ludicrous to
Speaker 1: me because like whenever they have to get into like
Speaker 1: a sedan, it's like, you know, a complete hassle, like
Speaker 1: their heads touching the roof the whole time, or they're
Speaker 1: bending their neck or something like that. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess like it's a spatial advantage of terms of
Speaker 1: like do they need to get something down off of
Speaker 1: the top of a shelf or something, But like yeah,
Speaker 1: or or I have noticed this that I can Uh,
Speaker 1: there are parts of the house, like the top of
Speaker 1: the refrigerator. Um, I'm the only one who can see
Speaker 1: on the top of the refrigerator without standing on something.
Speaker 1: So I'm the only one who noticed that notices it
Speaker 1: notices that it needs dusting. Yeah, so that's like the
Speaker 1: only example of the spatial advantage that I have, and
Speaker 1: it just ties into laziness concerning the dusting of the house. Sure, sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's strange to me because I a
Speaker 1: lot of the people I know who are very tall
Speaker 1: are do complain about like, well, either these chairs aren't
Speaker 1: exactly made from my body type, my morphology, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: or whatever else in the universe, you know. Um, I
Speaker 1: imagine that there's just like a certain average height that
Speaker 1: is shot for when you're like constructing I don't know,
Speaker 1: like a car and how how tall that goes, or
Speaker 1: particular kinds of chairs or ladders, or or how tall
Speaker 1: refrigerators are. Yeah. So I'd love to hear tall, taller,
Speaker 1: and shorter people comment on their spatial relationships. Uh uh,
Speaker 1: you know when they ride into us. All right, So
Speaker 1: we have one more area to discuss here, and that
Speaker 1: is the idea of a Napoleon complex. Uh, shortman syndrome.
Speaker 1: You're you're familiar with this idea, I am. But you
Speaker 1: know what's funny is that whenever I refer to somebody
Speaker 1: as having a Napoleon complex, I'm never referring to their
Speaker 1: actual height. It's usually more about their personality, although I
Speaker 1: know that obviously the term came from the idea that
Speaker 1: Napoleon was short, right, Yeah, I mean that's that's the
Speaker 1: basic idea here, is that a shorter person is allegedly
Speaker 1: fueled by boastful, aggressive, and possessive motivations to make up
Speaker 1: their lack of physical stature. And and you're mentioning that
Speaker 1: your your use of it has often come down to
Speaker 1: more of a like like they're they're boastful, and they're
Speaker 1: they're rested because there's some there's something some insecurity, and
Speaker 1: regardless of whether it's height or not, they've got the
Speaker 1: Napoleon complex that leads to these characteristics. Yeah, but I'm
Speaker 1: you know, I've probably been using it wrong. Well, no, no,
Speaker 1: I I this is interesting because when we come to height,
Speaker 1: what I mean, we we use it in strange ways
Speaker 1: all the time. Like you talk of some you speak
Speaker 1: of someone like Einstein and and you know, you might
Speaker 1: describe him as a giant, Oh, he was a giant
Speaker 1: of his time, or talk talk about the sciences in general,
Speaker 1: about proceeding on the backs of giants. So that's interesting,
Speaker 1: and we end up applying sort of you know, figurative
Speaker 1: stature to to individuals just on the basis of, say,
Speaker 1: their intellectual merit. So what I think I'm getting out
Speaker 1: of this is that just like humanity in general, for centuries,
Speaker 1: have gotten used to the idea of using height as
Speaker 1: a barometer basically for personality and for health. But in
Speaker 1: the last tree, we've really gotten to a point where
Speaker 1: healthcare has revealed that it's not necessarily the factor. There's
Speaker 1: a lot else that's going into it. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, like our language, our culture hasn't really caught
Speaker 1: up to that yet, right, Yeah, I think that's a
Speaker 1: good read on what's going on here now In terms
Speaker 1: of the the Napoleon complex itself. The term was coined
Speaker 1: by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in uh and it's it's
Speaker 1: all ready to observe because by most accounts, Napoleon Bonaparte,
Speaker 1: famed a French leader, was five six or five seven,
Speaker 1: perfectly normal height for the day, really a perfectly normal
Speaker 1: height for to day. But is there any truth to
Speaker 1: to any of this? Is it all just a matter
Speaker 1: of height? Is m Is it? Just like you said,
Speaker 1: our our culture and language not quite catching up with
Speaker 1: this new balance of of of height and health is there?
Speaker 1: You know, it's is there? Is it just a stupid
Speaker 1: label for which a short person is aggressive while if
Speaker 1: a tall person is acting aggressive and it's just hey,
Speaker 1: they're just that's perfectly natural. Of course they are either
Speaker 1: tall and aggressive. And I have to say that I
Speaker 1: never put much stock in it myself because it's it's
Speaker 1: so cartoony. It it literally makes me think of like
Speaker 1: a cartoon small dog yapping and jumping around. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I looked into it, and there are a few studies
Speaker 1: that that examine the Napoleon complex. Uh. There's a two
Speaker 1: thousand four study titled Personality Functioning the Influence of Stature,
Speaker 1: and this is published in the Archives of Disease in
Speaker 1: Childhood and it used the Wessex Growth Study using forty
Speaker 1: eight short normal and sixty six control participants to tackle
Speaker 1: the question. And they found no significant effect of recruitment
Speaker 1: height or final height on the Adult Personality Functioning Assessment
Speaker 1: score or on any of the underlying domain scores. So
Speaker 1: what they found is that socioeconomic status has the biggest
Speaker 1: effect on the total score, on employment, on education, on
Speaker 1: coping domain scores as well. So quote no evidence was
Speaker 1: found that stature per se significantly of factor the functioning
Speaker 1: off the participants in these areas as young adults. So, alright,
Speaker 1: something just popped in my head, which is another sort
Speaker 1: of generalism that people make about Americans. I'd say, uh,
Speaker 1: and I'm guilty of this as well, but the idea
Speaker 1: that most Americans are very uncomfortable talking about class, specifically
Speaker 1: socioeconomic status. Uh. And this is why, like, for instance,
Speaker 1: you have studies that show that, like, people who are
Speaker 1: metrically in the upper class think of themselves as being
Speaker 1: in the middle class, and people who are metrically in
Speaker 1: the lower class think of themselves as being in the
Speaker 1: middle class. Right, everybody wants to be in the middle class. Um.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is subsequently, why we just keep going back
Speaker 1: to height, is because it's a lot easier to talk about, well,
Speaker 1: Robert's tall and Christians medium size, right, rather than saying, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we have a clear like class delineation problem,
Speaker 1: and the people who have the more money or mora
Speaker 1: likely to be healthy. And that's you know, basic human
Speaker 1: right that seems like it should extend to everybody, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm kind of curious how much that plays into
Speaker 1: it like all this talk about height really seems to
Speaker 1: be avoiding the socioeconomic factor that keeps coming back in
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. Now there's a two
Speaker 1: thousand seven study and this came from the University of
Speaker 1: Central Lancashire, and this study actually found the reverse of
Speaker 1: the Napoleon complex. The tall men were more likely to
Speaker 1: lose their temper than short men. They explored this via
Speaker 1: what they called the chopstick game. And this is kind
Speaker 1: of hilarious, in which men of different heights dueled with
Speaker 1: wooden sticks, but one of the subjects deliberately provoked the
Speaker 1: other by wrapping them across the knuckle. Okay, so and
Speaker 1: in this scenario, like the knuckle rappers here, they have
Speaker 1: been preconditioned to do this. They're saying, look, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have this scenario. We're gonna go in there and start
Speaker 1: chop sticking around, but just whack the hell out of
Speaker 1: this guy's knuckles. Um. And this was a very small study,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't like a complete battle royale, but you
Speaker 1: have ten men of average height and the same number
Speaker 1: below five ft five uh. And they found that the
Speaker 1: taller men were more likely to lose it over these Shenanigans. Quote,
Speaker 1: the results were consistent with the view that small man
Speaker 1: syndrome use a meth. That's fascinating. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: really small sample study and I'm assuming it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's only within that specific area too, But it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I just love the idea that's like such a farcical uh,
Speaker 1: like like comedy waiting to happen. Like I would love
Speaker 1: to watch like a video of the proceedings where it's
Speaker 1: just like small men whacking tall men on the on
Speaker 1: the knuckles with chopsticks of all things. Yeah, it seems
Speaker 1: like a strange indicator of like overall personality. To what
Speaker 1: extent you were offended by, like someone essentially physically assaulting
Speaker 1: here or going a little too far. I think I
Speaker 1: would just start laughing. Yeah, but hey, I'm only five nine,
Speaker 1: all right. And then final study here, this one came
Speaker 1: from Professor Abraham Bunk of the University of Granigan in
Speaker 1: Holland and here are you the opposite in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, So the researchers question a hundred men and
Speaker 1: a hundred women in relationships about their their levels of jealousy,
Speaker 1: their feelings of jealousy, and how interested they believe their
Speaker 1: partners to be in other members of the opposite sex.
Speaker 1: And this seems to be zeroing in on like one
Speaker 1: aspect of the supposed Napoleon complex, the idea that that
Speaker 1: shorter men are going to be more possessive and more jealous.
Speaker 1: So they found that five ft four inch men scored
Speaker 1: an average of three point seven five out of six
Speaker 1: on a jealousy scale, while men around six six they
Speaker 1: scored two point to five on the jealousy scale. Now
Speaker 1: the female results were more complex. So you have average
Speaker 1: heighted women, they were scoring lowest out of everybody, getting
Speaker 1: a three out of six on the jealousy scale. The
Speaker 1: tallest though women at six ft they got a four
Speaker 1: out of six. And the shortest women they scored the
Speaker 1: best of all. They got, you know, a five feet tall,
Speaker 1: they got five out of six. So the short women
Speaker 1: were the least likely to be jealous. They were the
Speaker 1: most confident of all of these participants. Yeah, man, it
Speaker 1: seems like the way to go is to be a
Speaker 1: short woman when you look again, like back at the
Speaker 1: Japanese women who live the longest there I think, if
Speaker 1: I remember correctly from the data earlier in the episode
Speaker 1: four nine on average, and then these ladies very confident. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. They said this was one of their
Speaker 1: their core findings. Quote, short men were, as expected, most
Speaker 1: jealous in the presence of powerful, tall, strong, and rich
Speaker 1: potential rivals. So this is not a study to you know,
Speaker 1: govern your behavior in life choices, but it it uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting in that it it presents the one
Speaker 1: study that I could find that argued in favor of
Speaker 1: at least some level of of shortman syndrome or Napoleon complex. So, Okay,
Speaker 1: we've looked at the mental attributes, We've looked at the
Speaker 1: physical attributes, We've cracked all these numbers. We've thrown around
Speaker 1: metrics of height, uh and death and rates of mortality.
Speaker 1: Now what have we come to a conclusion on Well,
Speaker 1: I think we've come to the conclusion that, yes, in
Speaker 1: certain scenarios, especially with health, you can point to high
Speaker 1: as it as as an indicator, as a partial indicator
Speaker 1: among many other indicators about what might happen with your body.
Speaker 1: But on its own, I think I agree with that
Speaker 1: study that we present at the top, that it's an
Speaker 1: unreliable predictor. You can't just say well, because somebody is
Speaker 1: this tall, they're less likely to do X, Y and Z,
Speaker 1: or they're more likely to die from A B and C. Uh.
Speaker 1: It just seems like what we should really be paying
Speaker 1: attention to is nutrition, and socioeconomics does seem way more important. Yeah. Likewise,
Speaker 1: with you with the psychological stuff, I really like what
Speaker 1: you said earlier that it seems like it's largely this
Speaker 1: idea that we do have some some primal instincts in
Speaker 1: judging an individual by height. But those those those primal judgments,
Speaker 1: even though they may pop up to varying degrees in
Speaker 1: modern living. Uh, it's a far more complicated scenario now
Speaker 1: thanks to all the additional layers of human culture. Ye. Well,
Speaker 1: that said, I have tallied up our results, and you
Speaker 1: scored three and I scored four. So I am more
Speaker 1: likely to die at a younger age than you are,
Speaker 1: based on this very informal study that we've done here today. Uh. So, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'll see I'll see you when I see you. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: this means you have to do the follow up episode
Speaker 1: after I die, after you die, yeah, which is about
Speaker 1: how it was an unreliable predictor No, no no, no, because
Speaker 1: I'm gonna die first, right, No, I'm gonna I've got
Speaker 1: to do the podcast. You It'll be you and your
Speaker 1: new co host will be seven feet tall. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a robot son telling Yeah, exactly a
Speaker 1: lot of people don't know this, but Carney is very tall.
Speaker 1: They usually imagine it was like a short robot with
Speaker 1: like a mailbox for ahead, but he's he's massive. We
Speaker 1: haven't really reached up there. He's like the robot on
Speaker 1: that that Queen album cover that's crushing the band members
Speaker 1: in their hands. He's imposing. Yeah. Okay, Well, if this
Speaker 1: was interesting to you and you're thinking, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm a tall person or I'm a short person. This
Speaker 1: doesn't line up with what I thought I knew about myself.
Speaker 1: Tell us your experience, you know, i'd like to know,
Speaker 1: have you experienced a Napoleon complex? Do you know about
Speaker 1: any specific physical ailments that you feel like are you're
Speaker 1: more likely to have because of your stature? Let us
Speaker 1: know the best way to do that is to reach
Speaker 1: out to us on social media where we are on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
Speaker 1: and Instagram. That's right, and uh and as always you
Speaker 1: can find is that the mother Ship had Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com on That's where you'll find
Speaker 1: all the podcast episodes, you'll find videos, you'll find blog
Speaker 1: post links out to those social media accounts. Like we mentioned,
Speaker 1: everything is there, and if you just want to write
Speaker 1: us a sweet, long letter the old fashioned way, you
Speaker 1: can reach out to us at blow the Mind at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, is that how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com