Robin Dunbar on The BEYOND Podcast: Gossip, Trust and the Hidden Rules of Human Connection (Full Episode Transcript)

This is the full transcript of Robin Dunbar's appearance on The BEYOND Podcast, hosted by Aleksandra King. Robin Dunbar, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and originator of Dunbar's number, walks through the framework of his 2021 book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships: the roughly 150-person limit on meaningful relationships and the nested friendship layers inside it (5, 15, 50, 150, then 500 and 1500), the 200 hours of face-to-face contact it takes to make a close friend, the seven pillars of friendship that act as a cultural barcode for trust, the Jane Austen problem and friends of convenience, and the social toolkit of bonding behaviours with community singing, the icebreaker effect, at the top. The transcript is the corrected text layer of the episode: automatic transcription reviewed and corrected against the recording.