Does Your Height Determine Your Success in Life? @Memeable Data

Watch on YouTube · 2025-04-11 · 19 min

0:00 Alright, what's up? I am going to be reviewing a video called How Height Predicts Your Success.

[video] 0:07 In 2020, Joe Biden became US president. He's 1.83 meters or 6 foot. Four years later, he was succeeded by Donald Trump, who's 1.90 or 6 foot 3.

0:18 Yes, these are the leaders of the country. For sure. And it makes sense why they would put taller men for the population to look at.

[video] 0:31 Abraham Lincoln himself was 1.93, or 6 foot 4. These were all tall presidents. If we look at the height of all the US presidents over the years, we see two things. First, most of them were taller than the average male height at the time. And secondly, it seems that their heights have been going up over the years. Why are US presidents so tall? And why are their heights getting bigger? Do you need to be tall to become successful? I looked at the scientific research on how your height impacts your life. And I investigated how height predicts your sports performance, your health, your dating life, and your career. I'm going to use two short characters and two tall characters to show how they're impacted by height in these four areas. But what exactly is a short or tall person? People come in many different

1:10 It's relative. There's no such thing. It's the same with hot and cold. It depends on how you as a human experience it, what you call cold or hot. For other beings, what you call cold could be hot and so on. It's just all based on experience. Same with height. We see somebody who's 2 meters tall as tall and somebody who's 1 meter 50 as short.

1:40 If you would grow up with a population where the tallest guy is 1 meter 50 and everybody else is 1 meter tall, the 1 meter 50 guy would be seen as tall. It's all relative, it doesn't really mean anything. I think that people used to be way taller back in the day than they are now.

[video] 1:57 In the US, doors are typically 2.03 meters tall. Let's see how people from different countries fit through these doors. The country with the shortest women is Guatemala, with an average female height of 1.51 meters. But that's just the average height, there are shorter women in Guatemala and around the world. For example, Simone Biles, an American who's the most decorated gymnast in history, is 1.42 meters tall. As for men, Timor-Leste has the shortest average height at 1.60 meters. In the US, the average height is 1.61 for women and 1.75 for men. The tallest country in the world is the Netherlands, with an average of 1.70 for women and 1.84 for men.

2:37 I lived in the Netherlands for like two years. I was still taller there than most guys. But yeah, people are tall there for sure in comparison.

[video] 2:50 Roughly one in every five Gen Z Dutch men are at least 1.90 meters.

2:55 Yeah, now and then there are some pretty tall guys walking around, but it's pretty rare, though, still.

[video] 3:00 NBA players are 2 meters tall on average. And Zach Eady, the tallest active NBA player, is 2.24 meters tall.

3:10 Kristaps Porzingis is 2 meters 17, I think. Latvian NBA player.

[video] 3:16 If you want to check the average height of your country, you can pause the video now and check the table on screen.

[video] 3:22 I also asked my audience about their heights. It turns out they're 1.67 and 1.79 meters tall on average for women and men respectively, assuming we only include the adults. For characters, I'm going to use the nationalities of the shortest and tallest countries, and I'm going to give them typical names. Willem, Willemijn, Manuel, and Maria. To highlight the difference in height, I'm going to assume Maria and Willem are a bit shorter and taller than their country's average. So, who has an advantage? Let's start with sports.

[video] 3:50 As you can imagine, it helps to be tall if you want to make it to the NBA, but being

3:54 Sports are just an imitation of hunting. Usually you're going to have more success if you're taller because you're then also quicker. But then again, if you would have to crawl somewhere, there's also an advantage or hide.

4:13 Usually the taller one is going to have, of course, more of an advantage.

[video] 4:17 As you get bigger, your rotational momentum increases to the power of 4 and your rotational inertia increases to the power of 5. Rotational momentum and rotational inertia are complicated words to describe how hard it is to speed up or slow down the rotation of an object. Shorter people tend to be able to change their rotation speeds faster, giving them an important advantage in sports like gymnastics, which probably explains why Simone Biles is so short. So while taller athletes have an advantage in reach and raw strength, shorter athletes...

4:40 Yes, but all that matters in the end is how well you can hunt, how well you can survive. What else matters, really? If you can throw a ball into a net or throw... Well, the spear was kind of close to hunting. All sports imitate hunting in some way. The spear throwing is obviously as close to it as you can get, really. Seeing as humans are throwers, that's how we hunt. We think, we lurk, we sprint and we throw.

5:13 That's what, when it comes to the Olympic Games, a lot of those games are about. They're just playing. It's just people playing with their tools.

[video] 5:24 Kids tend to be quicker, more agile, and strong for their size.

5:30 Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day, in nature, there are no weight classes. You gotta fight who you have to fight against. Whatever animal it also is. So in the end... Probably the one with more strength and mass is gonna have an advantage. Because only in the Olympics, for example, you have some weight classes and categories. In nature, there are no rules, nobody cares about that. The best one survives, that's it. The loser is forgotten, like you never existed.

[video] 6:06 Wow, at least he mentions that. Alright, good video, yeah.

6:36 The nutrition is super important. It says childhood diseases, but whatever diseases you will have as a child will be from bad nutrition anyway.

[video] 6:47 Yeah, which you cannot take seriously because they eat absolute slave food in these top countries.

[video] 7:14 development index tend to have taller people and if we plot the height against childhood mortality we get the opposite correlation disease during yeah if you compare it to people who are starving like in laws where they eat rice the shortest people on earth yeah of course when you're actually starving and malnourished you're gonna stay short childhood can limit growth and countries with a higher child mortality rate tend to have shorter people as living standards increase around the world so did our

7:41 Yeah, because of course you eat a grain-based diet. I think that I saw Yemen there, which is what they eat there, because of malnutrition sanctions.

[video] 7:54 In the space of 100 years, the world average height increased about 8 centimeters for women and 9 centimeters for men.

7:59 For when did he say? Oh, okay. So the last 100 years approximately. Yeah, but I already made a video about this in the response to Rehab Room, but you can argue about this a lot because back then they only measured the height of prisoners and people who went into the army military. Those are the only people who were measured. But if you look at actual papers from researchers, The answers are very mixed. Many said that we used to be taller, at least just as tall as now, and really very few actually come to the conclusion that we used to be shorter. If you look at the men in the military and prisoners who were starved, yeah, maybe. That doesn't really mean anything.

[video] 8:51 So health tends to increase height. But how does height impact your health? Tall people tend to have harder falls.

8:58 Well, this is nonsense. If nutrition and health increases your height, that means that a taller body is healthier. End of discussion. If it would be healthier for you to be short, then eating healthy would make you shorter. Come on. Pure common sense logic. That's it.

[video] 9:16 Drop a very small cube of stone on the floor.

9:19 Yeah, but you can theorize about it as much as you want. This is not really how you test how healthy somebody is.

[video] 9:26 ...will most likely bounce off the ground.

9:29 A healthy human being can survive in nature. It's a strong human being. That's it? This is stupid.

[video] 9:36 Drop a very large cube of stone. It will probably break. the impact of your fall increases to the power of 4 relative to the height. That would be fine if there would be enough surface area to dissipate the impact, but your surface area only increases to the power of 2. If villain hits the ground, he would suffer an impact with a concentration of energy 2 times bigger than Maria's. And that's assuming the impact is evenly distributed by the body. If the impact is concentrated on a small area, let's say the corner of a

9:58 Yeah, and what is Maria going to do if they both meet? You're talking about stupid slave scenarios in the city falling on concrete. Talk about nature and how life is.

[video] 10:10 Then the impact could be almost four times bigger. Therefore, shorter people then have a lower risk of injury during falls and car accidents. The torque generated when you bend over increases to the power of 4 relative to your height, but the counter torque generated by your muscles only increases to the power of 3. As a result, taller people tend to have more back problems. And due to the proportions of heart muscles relative to your body weight, tall people also tend to have a lower heart rate, which is a risk reduction factor for cardiovascular diseases. And because of their body mass to surface area ratios, it's easier for tall people to stay warm in the cold, but that also puts them at a higher risk of heatstroke. There are both pros and cons for being short or tall, and if you look at the research on life expectancy we've

10:45 He just tried to think of anything, even though it's totally stupid reasons.

[video] 10:48 Find mixed results. However, some research indicates that taller people are more likely to get cancer. And in the end, it seems that shorter people have a slightly longer life expectancy.

11:00 Yeah, you're just looking at correlations, some kind of links. This is not science.

[video] 11:06 Now, how does height impact your dating life?

11:11 If he is now going to say that shorter people have it better when it comes to dating, then I'm shutting this video off.

[video] 11:19 This chart shows the height of US men measured by doctors in physical exams. The average US male height in 2023 was about 1.75 meters or 5 foot 9. But if we compare this line with the height self-reported by US men, something interesting happens. Firstly, the distribution is skewed to the right. On average, men exaggerated their height to be 2.4 centimeters or about 1 inch taller than their actual height. Secondly, when we get to the 5 foot 11 mark, we get a dip followed by a bump at 6 foot, suggesting that many men who are just below 6 foot add an inch to their height. There might be some truth behind the memes, although women also exaggerated their height by 1.7 centimeters. It seems people do exaggerate their height, especially men.

11:56 Okay, but some people also don't know exactly. Somebody may say, okay, I'm 1 meter 80, and maybe they are close to 1.81. Some people don't even really care about it that much.

12:08 you can't really say that they necessarily exaggerated it the man probably did a little bit some but really i've seen it myself in real life some people just don't know how tall they really are but do women really prefer taller men the papers i found do seem to indicate that it seems that women prefer taller partners and men prefer shorter partners surprising for women wait the men prefer shorter partners yeah shorter than they themselves you mean or what

[video] 12:36 However, these papers also indicate that, firstly, people prefer heights that are somewhat similar to their own heights, so Maria would probably be more likely to be interested in someone with Manuel's height rather than Willem's.

12:47 I don't know about that, but okay.

[video] 12:50 And secondly, this paper suggested there were no differences in how often short men went on dates compared to tall men. So, although shorter men and taller women do seem to face some challenges in the dating world, the effect of height is, quote, modest and just one of many factors that impact attraction. And how does height impact your co-

13:06 Yeah, okay, I'm not shutting the video off, it wasn't that bad. Still, come on, man.

[video] 13:15 Was Hyde important for these men to become US presidents? We've seen how Hyde has impacted...

13:19 They became US presidents because they... Okay, well, the last two did.

[video] 13:27 ...by your nutrition and health. Since your socioeconomic situation impacts these two, it impacts your Hyde as well. People from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be tall and height has been used as an indicator of wealth inequality. For example, another study that looked at Spanish conscripts between the 1870s and the year 1930 found that highly qualified non-manual workers were on average 3.6 cm taller than agricultural workers. So, when we see a positive correlation between height and career success, we have to keep in mind that it could also be explained by the privileged background of taller people, who may have had access to better education, nutrition, healthcare in childhood. Having said this, even when researchers adjust the data for these factors, they find some advantages favoring taller people. It seems taller people are perceived as more competent, employable, and healthy, they are seen as more leader-like, and they tend to have a higher

14:10 Yeah, because they come from so-called healthier backgrounds, genetics, of course. But that's common sense. You appear stronger, more dominant. And if you want a manager of a company or whatever, you want him, of course. Goes without saying.

[video] 14:28 It just is how it is. There's not just some bias, it's very clear.

[video] 14:48 Can't be a CEO if you're short or a rock climber if you're tall? Fortunately, you can. There are pros and cons to every height. Although it is true there are some biases favoring taller people in the workplace, height is just one of many variables that predict success.

15:00 Yeah, Angela Merkel. She was the Chancellor of Germany because she's a good woman. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Einstein. Cool. Last name.

[video] 15:16 There are countless examples of high achieving professionals who are shorter than average.

15:20 Messi is a good footballer, right? I don't care about him, but what does it matter? He's just some guy who runs around kicking a ball. It's not really that relevant how tall he is. He's not a basketball player. so it doesn't matter tom cruise is successful because of his face what is this here man these people are successful for different reasons shakira because of her face singing yeah come on yeah you put the guy with a model face up what is this nonsense

[video] 16:00 And even in sports, where size arguably matters more, there are examples of shorter people overperforming in basketball and tall people overperforming in rock climbing. Thank you for watching.

16:08 It's as if he wanted to make everybody feel good at the end. No matter how tall you are, you're gonna succeed in dating, your career, sports and so on. Now in dating, even if the woman is short, again, that's a relative term, she's still gonna, of course, want some guy who's tall compared to other men, not simply somebody who's just a bit taller than her. Ideally, she will settle probably with somebody who's around the same height, but that doesn't mean that she actually prefers that if she had the choice, which people usually don't really. That's the whole thing.

16:49 You gotta look at it from a natural perspective. You look at a human being, again let's just say Brad Pitt, yeah? Let's say that Brad Pitt was 1.90m even taller, yeah? Really desirable. You now are a woman who's much shorter than him, let's say 1.60m, not particularly good looking. Would you now be into a guy who's 1.65m, 5cm taller than you, maybe a little bit better looking? Or would you be into Brad Pitt, his face and 1.90m? It doesn't matter how tall or how you look like yourself facially. I know that this video wasn't about the face, but I'm talking about attraction and dating. You're still gonna choose the guy who's more attractive than the other guys.

17:42 It doesn't matter how you look like yourself, because humans are into beauty, youth, fertility. It's just what we are naturally into. regardless of how we look like ourselves, that should be really understood because otherwise you will start thinking that you can just find a woman who's just around the same height as you and she's gonna prefer you. That doesn't mean that she won't like you. Especially if you're good looking facially, or at least above average somewhat. But it's not necessarily her preference. Once she falls in love with you, ideally at a natural age, and you have a family, yeah, then you're gonna be of course together, biologically, biochemically, that's different. Then you're together already. But when she's looking for a mate, or you as a man are looking for a mate,

18:39 you don't look for somebody necessarily around your same level you may in this society because of what you believe you can get but it doesn't mean that naturally that's actually what you desire still not a bad video thanks for watching guys