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Chef AJ: The Perfect Personality | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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oh yeah you gotta live before well just want to welcome everybody in our viewers from chef edges group so today we're gonna be here from dr. Lila we are live from a fasting escape retreat center the fasting Escape is where people can come here and get back into balance so all kinds of things that we do in the outside world we're just out a balanced diet sleep exercise sunshine laughter appropriate response to stress and a loving social circle those are those are things that we need to get back into balance and the podcast dr. Lyle and I do and the information that we've that I've learned from chef AJ Bryan when developing Forks Over knives and John McMahon and all all the leaders have shared all these leaders in the plant-based boom and have given me enough knowledge and really inspired me to do something like this and because of this we've got a retreat center where people come and get healthy so today we have a talk from dr. Doug why my mentor my friend and I let me just yeah you look great so people probably heard this before but there's different ways to do it and sometimes you will learn different things on a second hearing so this is sort of - two big problems in psychology and one of them is actually a lot bigger than the other one the small one is the one everybody wants to know about so that's the one we'll do the the big problem in psychology is going to be what we call general psychology that is that to give you the analogy Grey's Anatomy so Grey's Anatomy is studied everywhere you know on earth and it works everywhere on earth so we're on earth here if you're a doctor and you were learned your doctoring and Virgin Islands you know doctoring everywhere obviously because what you've learned is the general anatomy and physiology of human the once you do that however that doesn't make you a kidney specialist so a kidney specialist on the one hand all the kidneys work the same in principle and on other hand every single kidney is different so this is the the difference between Grey's Anatomy Ray's Anatomy isn't going to tell you anything about the individual differences of every kidney you're going to see their career or kitty doctor so psychology those two big problems first big problem the most complicated problem is the equivalent of Grey's Anatomy how does the entire thing work that's general psychology that is what we talked about really in the pleasure trap we talked about the basic major meditational principles that guide humans and then also where they get into trouble in the modern world yeah this is the second part of that problem actually this is that this talk came out of two different people's squabbling those two people were where John McDougall met Alan told him John came to us a few years after we've had written The Closer trout he said there's more do more of the story and so you guys you know think about it come back with something and Alan said like what you know the but Alan had always had a an open his mind about individual differences and the the reason why is there because he put out a tremendous amount of energy with every client on outpatient basis I've got to watch him I become even when I was in grad school he was already faxing I'd kind of visit and I would watch him you know during his morning and he would put out huge energy you know with a series of jokes and the series of stories to teach each patient and then he would he worked physically very hard and mentally hard at trying to transform these people that were just local people in and run a park in Santa Rosa we weren't necessarily health conscious but he was trying to move them towards thinking more thoughtfully and he would tell me that I could see that it was energy drink that was he would put out a lot of it he just did it every day that's what he did for years and he said there's got to be some way for you to find the people that will do this as opposed to people that long now at that time I was in grad school and I was being trained by prominent experimental social psychologists Timothy Wilson University and the great lesson of social psychology is a lesson of general psychology it's how everybody works it's not the story of individual differences and in fact in psychology there's a battle between the people that are very interested in the general story and the people that are very interested in the individual differences and the people that are interested in the general story are social psychologists prominently and the people that are very interested in the individual differences are called personality psychologists ie the individual differences in every single one of them and they're constantly at war they published in the same prominent journal called the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology how the personality people got first billing yeah but being trained by Tim Wilson I was basically told like any kid that's been to Senegal on her to church you know there's certain way you're supposed to think about things and you're supposed to be about things as that we're not concerned with individual differences that's the noise in the system we're doing Grey's Anatomy here and what's important is the general principles so I would tell Alan that the individual differences weren't that important and the fact that what's most important is the general principles and in fact if you if you think about this and if you read the pleasure trap you'll realize in retrospect that's all we talked about it reflects a pleasure trap is in fact the story of the greatest anatomy the human mind and how each and every one of us is subject to these same sorts of pressures and how those pressures work and result in us getting into trouble there's not one sentence in there about individual differences okay so that was my that was the best that I can do at that time meanwhile Alan was always quietly complaining what are you gonna come up with sheets and tell me I can work but no I shouldn't bother okay you kept saying that and I kept telling them don't look at it that way because you're gonna miss the big picture the big picture is we need to get better at helping everybody rather than worrying about who we should be trying to help them do we shouldn't be trying John you would have flunked any test that's actually a great example so John McMahon has been on a phenomenal transformational Road here in the last year would have been someone who would have flunked the personality test would have said who should we work with okay and so that's why I was not interested and I knew that that was true I knew that any test of personality or individual differences at this point in history psychology is are very creative and they're gonna miss way too much and so much more important think about general principles the however MacDougall's snarling Alan's always been chirping you know always wanted the individual different stuff and so I thought well maybe we gonna go back to that question about individual differences maybe it's worth doing so I went back and I started thinking about it and I'd been a long time before a long time since I even really thought about personality any more than you you and your friends to others we all think about personality a lot but I hadn't thought about it systematically I have been professor our personality actually at Stanford you know 10 years 15 years earlier and I so I knew the feel well but I didn't consider that the field had necessarily that much to tell us they just have about so because of MacDougall's nagging I thought okay I'm going to go back and take another look so this is the story of what we what you know was known and is known about personality and then for the first time I started thinking about applying and in the end I actually found something a little bit humorous I actually found that out of a 729 possible combinations normal combinations personality types or profiles which should come up with there's exactly one that is the perfect personality for the problem of healthy living and it turns out that I have met exactly one of those people and his name is alcohol and none of the rest of us do the story then is you know Allen always considered this to be a really easy right as soon as he figured out what to do and he was about 17 or 18 years old he just did it I mean he never looks like this he has looked at all of us including me is these weak pathetic you know and week of the flesh you know I'm disciplined self-indulgent his favorite phrase is yes what is it pleasure seeking self-indulgent pleasure seeking energy can't remember laughter seeking pain avoidance often told your behavior whatever that's really fast and it's really insulting to me the so what we're gonna do tonight is we're going to actually look at the story of personality so we're going to put the story of general principles aside and look down into what makes each one of us different and that's that's what this story is and we're going to do it this time we're going to use music because it's going to turn out that every person wears their personality and they don't even know it and it emanates out of everything everything about them so their clothes where they live what they read you know do they get together with who their friends are where they want to go on vacation what they want to do with their lives what they eat okay the how they dance every single thing about a person is emanating from some core characteristics about how it is that they're different from other people it's precisely like looking at kidneys you look at kidneys is there going to be as several measurements that you would take and that's going to tell you this or the individual differences in those kidneys the same thing is true about people it's going to turn out that with just a few literally a handful of concepts about how people are different we're gonna be able to figure out a great deal about why each of them has the kind of behavior patterns or choices that they have yeah so we'll start with what people like for music tell me instead of songs cuz that's gonna be too hard tell me artists who just any artist Tony Bennett said Mozart belong some could be an individual or group all right okay all right which is really good okay Gypsy Kings Gypsy Kings cats - I'm Shelley oh you could say funk if you wanted Bob Marley but Shelley I'm drea Bocelli the blind guy Oh silly be on baby [Laughter] didn't win Star Search Jennifer Elton John it's gonna turn out that the human personality you really gets it's essentially made up of six ingredients the they're made up of what we call the Big Five and then there's one more which is intelligence so the six major ingredients are intelligence and then after that they spell the word motion just for your own if you want to know how fancy psychologists like me remember the big five it's because it smells ocean all right openness conscientiousness extraversion interurban agreeableness and neuroticism those are the those are the big five and the big five were discovered actually in the early 60s and then completely forgotten so they're forgot for more than 20 years so somebody had essentially published some original evidence that looked like that this is what it was and then everybody just it was so far outside of the box as a concept everybody just totally ignored so xx 20-something years later some things happen that I believe probably gave rise to the re-emergence of this and that is dead when I was in grad school suddenly I can remember a day when I came in and my prof had a computer on his desk so he didn't before that he didn't have one and so then another help a couple years later we hope to analyze our data mm-hmm from many experiments that we ran we got it there was a huge mainframe mainframe system down in the basement of Gilman Hall at the University of Virginia where they have the big mainframe computers and they have all kinds of really smart people that hated psychologists that worked you know the computer area and we would run our programs that we would write to analyze data and they would and they wouldn't work when we don't they're swearing like everything's white on this program right they'd say no right there was a period and there needed to be at semicolon Oh God how was I supposed to know and this is how it went so you would you would take hours analyzing something to get the program didn't work right and and one day we just a statistical program called SPSS and one day my professor says look at this via spss on this desktop computer desktop computer that's unbelievable and he goes not only that it's not picky you can have all kinds of mistakes in that then you just write up what it is that you want and spits it out I'm like it's unbelievable I've spent four years fighting everybody in sight and the whole basement of Gilmer Hall as all of us did it and you know it was unbelievable this is a revolution in did analysis took place right in my grad school career and so it's happening everywhere I've been all over the world and so people that had large datasets and personality could finally analyze their data they could analyze it easily it wasn't going to be a big hassle so people started analyzing data probably didn't sitting around or they started taking on survey projects that they wouldn't normally bother with and what emerged in sitting in SPSS or some important advances in mathematics that have taken place you know mid twentieth century called the factor analysis which is where you can take a large data sets and you can figure out is there something that's driving the patterns that you see is there no like so for example we try to figure out what causes a cold so that the people got cold did they sleep or did they touch somebody with Hanseatic ole like what was it and so you use you know you might use factor analytic methods try to figure out what's the most important factor that seems to be predicting this well in this case it turned out that there were five factors or fundamental ways six once we did intelligence out of the equation we start asking people questions about what they liked the reason why I tell just a softer side is that it doesn't really tell us anything about what you like it's really sort of how much horse powers in the engine how many mistakes it makes as the reasons it's really what it is so it's not really a preference issue even though it's an important personality or individual difference variable it doesn't fit the same pattern as the other five the other five turn out to be telltale clues as to what you like in life and what you try to avoid you know how what's that nature of the behavior Academy of your life what's driving you to do things that you want to do those turn out to be openness conscientiousness introversion extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism so I know for example John is very open John Joe John did not decide to spend his life in a library studying I don't know how Swiper works you've been everywhere all over the world and all kinds of wacky stuff that's what he does that's what open people do and so if we look at this we're gonna find that the people here the music the people may in the personalities of people to make it are gonna tell us something about openness we're also going to tell us something about conscientious is also going to tell us something about introversion and extraversion itself something about how agreeable they are and they're going to talk also about how emotionally stable or unstable they're so as we look at this we know that people that have certain characteristics will like certain kinds of music because this music will actually factor analyze into five factors just like we would think away okay because of the different kinds of music are in fact as well as a result the reason people make that music and you've even heard of it is that it matches up to preferences inside of even that human individual differences okay so for example let's see open versus non no even okay so we could look at this and we did pretty quickly who would be sort of conventional conventional people not crazy not whacked out thanks mark Frank Sinatra pretty conventional Tony Bennett and he certainly is conventional John Denver sued regression and there's like I've not been right there okay so people might say wow like to go to Rocky Mountains isn't that open no actually what would it be if you went to the Rocky Mountains what personality characteristic would be somebody that would like to hike back into the Rockies adventurous someone open but not is not as important as introversion okay so it's gonna turn out John Denver actually was quite introverted you just like to spend a lot of time on with his family developing his plane didn't check the gas died okay bottom line is is that this is that this guy was you know he wasn't super into her it he was he was open and up or normal enough in the belapur that he could go out and and be a musician and be a performer but he was actually pretty on the quiet side that's who he was you've got other people I don't know about being Hamlin the but you're going to see the conventionality or the openness will definitely track this way through here somebody that would like Mozart would tend to not be this openings okay the also what's our it's gonna turn out the more complicated music is it's going to be easier and more pleasant for more intelligent people to listen to okay so they're gonna like that complexity whereas you're gonna find people that don't don't have as much horsepower aren't gonna like it it's just it's uncomfortable for them mentally to actually keep track of a lot of music so what we're gonna do I mean we can talk about openness we could also talk about agreeable so let's see now let's look at who's who up here is kind of disagreeable I mean that person is that he's that a group or a human that they're disagree okay and the very nature of rap is disability it's just inherently argumentative so those people are actually that's the that's the stick in other words it's all about we're disagreeable yeah I suppose to James Taylor who's big yet was a friend okay how how agreeable can you possibly signal that's what that is so we see you know that's a striking difference that difference doesn't take place by accident and if you go to a James Taylor concert it's gonna look an awful lot different than if you go the so these are and as we go through here Tony Bennett is going to be very variable so Tony Bennett's songs are going to be very sort of etc Sinatra's kind of not necessarily that agreeable he's going to be in the middle he can go he's a more diverse personality you can do you actually go on and look at media and look at my way that that was written by Paul Anka I think I wrote my way and he as soon as he wrote it like over a night and he got the music he heard the music somewhere in Italy and he bought it and I bought it for a song yeah then he he knew it was a great piece of music and he sat up at night I had talked to Sinatra and Sinatra had told him that he was thinking about quitting so there's a conversation they had in the night timing it's not just like I'm fed up you know I can only imagine the music it's just got to be just unbelievably tough tough business and so Sinatra had told his his protege Anka you know they'd quit and Anka sat up all night and he wrote this this poem to this time and then he told Sinatra you gotta listen to this I wrote this for you and the studio execs told the record a sec stole danke you should saying that he says now I'm it's not for me yeah this was all about Frank and so soon after loved it becomes a signature song and not only that it turns out if you look on Wikipedia it's been responsible for many many murders it turns out that a lot of people are so like this is like my way my way like a lot of guns have been drawn because it's a middle testosterone basically saying Wow hey listen you look it up it's very quite an analysis so inside of Frank Sinatra there was some significant disagreeable that keep all their you know very Gribble very at cetera so as we look down through here we see that the Beatles we saw them emerge as people so they start they start out much more conventional and then you you watch these guys as they as they get their money it soon becomes super famous and then we've watched their real personalities emerge is what what time that happens and so ie general psychology says do what it is whatever it is that works say what you need to do that would be general psychologist so even a really disagreeable total impulsive jerk if it's the only job in town you say yes to the foreman if that's the only possible way you can feed your family there's some company town in 1910 in the coal mines like you may not want to do it but you do it because you have to so if you're the young Beatles and there's all kinds of all kinds of demands coming at you and there's something that people want and there's credible fame and fortune online then you're the Beatles because it's working but as soon as you get to where you need to get to what did we see we see these guys really start to diverge and you see they're very different differences John Lennon far more open than Paul McCartney okay just by nature they're they're reserve different guys McCartney McCartney's much more conventional and it was on no problem following a conventional success path later in his career where Lennon was all over the place and that's just who he was the so we can go through here but we're gonna be looking at us the following you can yourself each each of these personality characteristics actually if you measure them it turns out just like if we were to look at how many nephron cells are in the kidney and we were to look at a million people we would find out it's going to turn out that in nature things will do biological entities will follow bell curves now might your major things fall bell peppers but that's not true so the the size of lakes in Minnesota does not fall in all it's in a different curve okay so most of most of the lakes are small and then some are a little bit bigger a little bit bigger so it's actually the size of the lakes in Minnesota okay so very different shape when you see that a light should go off in the heads of scientists and that is that's what that measurement looks like and that means it's a living thing okay it's a living thing okay it means that DNA built it and what DNA did is it built a a prototype for the species to prototype kidney or a prototype apart thanked for the type eyes and it built it built a system according to a particular set of specifications and we want to death with some one of those types of systems being the best one for that environment and therefore that gene that built it is the most common gene in the population there's something else that's very close okay so for example mmm 15 years ago probably the most popular car the United States close to it would have been the camera okay so the camera is effectively the the species prototype and then something interesting happened the the the Koreans came out with with the Han dyes that were very close from the Kia's and they were very very similar we've got other similar ones so you've got that other car makes I can't remember oh yeah the Accord was a very close those things were very close and then what something happened and that is that these other things got a little jazzier little sexier and it turned out to everybody better move towards sexier and including the camera gonna get big yo they're getting pushed by essentially market pressure which is the same thing that happens in evolution creatures get pushed by evolutionary pressures into certain genes being more effective than other chance right so this is uh this is the species prototype for example for openness so so we'll put you can have IQ over here and that's sort of one whole thing but I'm not that interested in that cause I'm more interested in this story of preferences than people's feelings because that's where personality sits this is gonna be open as experience and what that's going to be some people that are very open this is very open overbearing very adventurous and over here they're very close and that's that's the first difference so these are people that that Benji John I have to go see Kathmandu before they die you know I'm saying they've been been there every capital in the world all have to look at weird stuff to try different bizarre food take weird drugs all kind of stuff like that that's what happens out here okay over here you just get a little bit more adventurous here you get normal insane here you get boring yeah that's what that is okay that's when next bell curve is going to be conscientiousness and so this is going to be how much anxiety you have about doing the right thing so here we have very conscientious over here and here we have flakes the right thing the right thing the right thing is that which is for you sort of in any manner of speaking it's actually the thing that will be the safest okay and it could be richer following reasonable rules or decision rules that will result in ultimately the best long-term outcomes so the right thing for example this is this is where can you can look a little confusing the yeah so what's the pose that you are in Atticus and kill a mockingbird and so the right thing is to do the best thing you can to defend your claim now the thing is is that that's going to be problem because you're going to have a lot of people from the town telling you you're doing the wrong thing so only a very high conscientious person could could they would have that circuit in their head we would burn so hot they would do something even though everybody else would because the wrong thing they still know it's the right thing okay so this is this is hyper conscientious individuals they they tend to have a lot of anxiety because they miss their the mine is spending a lot of energy worrying about fairly low risks you know you might say well this sounds fancy and it is because these are people that you want to hire okay this is sort of also people to somebody where you want to have have us friends but it turns out this is actually the species prototype so the species prototype actually is not as worried as people they are worrying the amount that is reasonable or the risks that are involved so I have a friend that will call me from the airport super hyper function interest individual friend it will call and ask me whether or not he should weigh lay the pilot because she sees something on the back of the plane it just doesn't look like it's quite right checked before it gets on the plane hey and so this is this is what this is and he has a lot of things I do and that's that's how that works the yeah yeah did you get a strange thing because that very same person is also fairly open okay so John my own mutual friend is pretty open but also highly conscientious and that creates a lot of tension in the system because the openness wants to do something exciting and new and the conscientiousness says oh that's that could be a problem and so you watch the cognitive dissonance fire off inside that nervous system this is not a problem for me because I'm about here okay I not being very open if life gets a lot easier I mean it's boring but it actually is gets a lot easier my friend Alan is here I always thought I was wild and adventurous I got out in the world which I barely did okay so the third thing is going to be introversion extroversion or how sociable a person is so this is going to be very extroverted okay and over here is a very introverted and so this species prototype obviously down the middle most people are sort of halfway in between and really aren't aren't either final to developers a lot of people think just because a person's going they're an extrovert but that's not true right right it is correct yeah you can you can be pretty outgoing fed but you actually really liked your quiet time and you can get overwhelmed with it so the Michael Jordan is reasonably he can meet the public but he gets overwhelmed as you can imagine being Michael Jordan so when the dream team was travelling through Europe in 92 the guide was out there in the crowds on the streets being the Greek god forbid to touch as Charles Barkley Charles Barkley is just tremendously extroverted he just is okay Michael was sneaking out the back door he and Larry Bird like they didn't want to talk to anybody that's that's now how people are different what's that Charles no there's usually a specific purpose to the social process like I'm actually very intuitive okay but I'm perfectly comfortable with a group of people and even if the group was larger I've been fine not a problem but then I'm sorry I don't like to keep them that much sorry no it's done this is just how this is and we're all to explain why that is in a minute why it is that people have this why we believe that they're this dimension even exists we're going to look at all of these another one is how agreeable so you're gonna have people that are very very nice this week and you're going to have people over here that are very difficult and so that's a that's a one of these major inventions and then finally it's gonna be sort of health stable people are so over here you're gonna have people that are very stable and over here we're gonna have people that are very excited now the might say this is all cute you know me people been talking about personalities for a long time you put some put some words up there on the board obviously we recognize those words why do you think that those words are the words that map out human nature well one reason is that if you took the English language it turns out the average English speaker can talk about 60,000 words and if you took those 60,000 words and you factor analyze that you would find out that 18,000 of those words are six concepts okay you are connoisseurs of these six concepts yeah okay you you could call it something else we could say adventurousness instead of openness but it's the same concept and it turns out that there's going to be three or four thousand words that all say the same thing okay so you know we're intelligence but you also know that were brilliant down there you also know the word genius tension you also know the word don't you you also know the word stupid don't you you also know that we're idiot that you you know the word bright dull all those words are the same concept they all define a bell curve of intelligence of along which there's a continuum and we use different words to describe to denote different places on the continuum but they're exactly the same idea and no matter who runs the data set and what data said it is it always winds up with the same six bunkers so this starts telling you that there's something deep about this and then it gets a little more interesting still if you run the personalities and dogs it points out the same it's not because people are describing the dogs actually the dog's behavior it also wins in percentage so now we start thinking wait a second what do we know about this we know its genetic okay and it turns out that we can prove this and at the same time that they were rediscovering the big five and in the 1980s different personality researchers were also discovering research done on monozygotic twins that were raised apart the University of Minnesota and when they did this they tracked people down that had been separated at birth that were identical twins and when they tracked them down it turns out they were unbelievably similar in terms of their personalities whether they were raised apart or raised together didn't make any difference when they look at people that had been raised in the same household by their biological parents they were no more alike than people that have been raised apart they have been identical twins by completely different grounds and solve the age-old question as to his nature or nurture or dominant when it comes to human personality the answer is overwhelmingly its nature okay now this was the ultimate a politically incorrect so this this did not go down well in academic psychology and it still does not go down well in academic psychology thirty years later academic psychologists are still twisting themselves into a pretzel to deny this but they can't okay no data has ever contradicted this now what's interesting about this to me as somewhat of a historian of the field that if you pan the camera back and look at this you'll find that the twentieth century began with people leaving in individual differences and this came out of Darwinian and then Sir Francis Galton's school ultimately through major innovators in statistics Carl Pearson who is the author of the pearson product-moment correlation coefficient which is a foundational statistic throughout scientific world that guide was the genesis there's one of these guys that thought that we have to worry about about the lower classes reading and you have to be careful about this well we've got a problem along the way with this idea it's not that it's inherently ridiculous the problem is a guy named Hitler got a little bit and when a guy forgot all of it it all went bad it went really down so by 1946 it was no longer legitimate in American universities to talk about individual differences in people being genetic it had the stench of the Holocaust and so that concept got got parked and what came into this place is what we know this learning theory also known as the standard social science model at Hama back of BF Skinner great Harvard professor learning theory and other learning theorists of which there were many we need to find the new field really the science of psychology as learning they were wrong it would take 40 years until it would be okay for somebody to analyze the data again look at square in the face look at what the evidence would tell us and then we find out that we were mistaken turns out a tremendous amount about who it is that you are was there conception and interestingly enough when we go back in history that's what people used to think and not only that folks that's what astrologers if you think back that's exactly what astrologer Simmons Schaller just been saying that on that day this person was born and they had his characteristics and they were born with those characteristics and they're gonna die with those characteristics turns out they were right they just weren't right they're quite the right reasons it turns out the reasons why not being genetic variation and so this is this is now the story is we walk our way through personalities we're gonna find that the reason why these are the five as opposed to five other things like I don't know how what we straighten and put magazines on the table set a personality characteristic you tie your shoes with the right hand over the left the left hand over the right so I have a personality characteristic now those are individual tiny little quirks that predict nothing these predict tremendous things these predict the music that you listen to these predict who your friends are these predict what you're gonna do on vacation this predicts what's your car looks like I would present this at the prison I've worked out I come in Scapa I hide this out of my normal clothes I'm actually wearing that jazz shirt that somebody bought for me otherwise I wouldn't be in this shirt that looks halfway cool I would go to prison and I would lecture and they they'd look at me and they say dr. Lodge you tear up the dance floor again [Music] okay guys you see if you can guess what my cards and they'd say Camry yeah the color said silver so it is so now we're going to look at why I have the big 505 and the big five or because they solve deep adaptive problems the Shannon code so when it comes to openness you can think of a rabbit and that rabbit needs to decide how far it's going to go from the rabbit hole before it needs to come back home and check on the puss or that how far it can afford to get away from the rabbit hole before it has to worry about predator getting so it may turn out that a given habitat the further she goes 100 yards the course there's gonna be some adventurous rabbits that go 150 yards and then there's going to be a John McMahon rabbit to goes 600 yards there's going to be all along developer beer just going to be this individual differences over here there's going to be a rabbit that goes 50 yards and that gene is still in the gene pool but it's not as many and then there's going to be a rabbit that only goes 5 yards and that that genes in trouble and so this is what this is and so this is so you can see that throughout the animal kingdom there's going to be an adventurous --mess essentially that's going to be associated with animals search for mates and food and shelter and that adventurousness you can see that animal we need a search image or a search program that would say how far is too far how how can we investigated the landscape enough and do we now need to optimize within the search parameters that we've already done normally need to go further in case we get something better really interesting it's kind of like a young person trying to figure out a career and whether or not there's job is good enough they search around and search around and they need to get a feel for the landscape but there's a point in time where they say this is about as good as it's gonna be I've got a good job as a CPA and a good firm and painting me well okay and as me as well as my cousin is at the other firm across the street is the same size reasonable Danny so there was there's going to be a search process for resources that's going to go on and personality is going to influence how much how much adventurousness is in the system the conscientiousness is going to be how much anxiety is in the system to make sure all the little procedures are done right so you can think of a mama rabbit that's been come back and then lick all the little rabbit's heads make sure that everybody's clean okay and there's one of them that's going back there and there it's looking looking at every half an hour and there's the normal ones look at him every two hours and this one's only looking at once a day okay these wind up with Duncan their eyes can't see and dot that's why that not looking your your kids junk out of their eyes wanting something not very successful in the gene pool the one that's looking at memory ten minutes super conscientious doesn't get out have enough mates and make enough rabbits today there's all what you're seeing under here is cost-benefit analysis which is exactly the decision-making that every organism does on everything so the organism is making cost-benefit on is it worth going further or do we need to stay closer do I need to redo that and check it or you might not okay sociable is going to map on to in social species this dimension but with respect to people so more people that you meet the more possible mates you have more possible things that you learn the more allies as you could have at cetera but this might seem like it's unbelievably useful and should be the whole species should be hyper social it is whole species the type of social it's a fricken freakazoid species okay just watch them all there's just no end of the talking and Turpin this is I hyper social species but even within a hyper social species there's a bell perfect okay so the middle of the species is unbelievably social Wolverines don't talk to each other like this there's one Wolverine perfect you know 50,000 acres they don't want no interest in each other come together made see you later no don't don't don't sing this song so this is how this works so we are very social or some of us are really social other ups are more introverted even the introverts want some contact okay to some degree we think it's speculated seriously that a reason for this dimension this could have been driven by coevolution with venereal disease so it could be that looks like it's it's not the whole story it looks like it's a substantial portion of the story the more social you are more partners you're going to have and in particular if you're a female more partnership that you're going to have more likely that you're going to wind up with VD more likely you have VD the more likely it is that you're going to be infertile or likely gonna be infertile less less kids are gonna be born so there's a sweet spot in human nature for being open enough to give yourself a chance for optimal partnerships and yet not so openness that we start to wind up statistically pending impressive Edie looks like Edie has been a extremely important co-evolved a problem for human nature to be solving on the personality dimension the you can see the different problems would come up if you change the adaptive landscape and suddenly there's some little predator that's eating your kids eyes and you're gonna poke that something out of its eyes more then more conscientiousness would start to evolve okay so these things are always in dynamic the nature is never static so I'll be shifting around looking for an ideal behavior pattern that will drive optimal behavior for survival regression the realness is going to be the fact that people do a great great deal of cooperative action and that the four hands can do things that two hands just can't do and so as a result a lot of times you're going to be asked to help to do a four-handed job and there's no way for them to like pay for right now so people have to be agreeable enough to cooperate and keep a little accounting system flowing and in doing so stone each village you know accomplishes a great deal more with flowing credits and debits than it would if it didn't have that so that's what human beings can do but if they get disagreeable then they complain and they negotiate and they refuse to cooperate and now it's a problem for them because people don't want to trade with them and so that's what happens here excuse me okay and people that are nice wind up getting exploited so now it's like she can help me again how about them again how about the can how about again okay so they wind up on the wrong side of this so the right thing is in the middle where you're pleasant enough but you're also defend your time and so that's that's the most common gene and the human gene pool but you're gonna see it on both sides and this is so if we're to look for the perfect personality for human light in general it would be here here here here and finally here okay so how stable personality is is how excitable it is about putting on energy behind some new idea so here you can imagine the gold rush and forty nine and some some accountant being told this and say listen Boris there's a gold rush instead of support it's just half a mile down the road I just go do something better yeah blow over it's no biggie okay just like too stable not excited enough here's somebody that's so excited and so devastated that when something something a little bit bad happens to ready to jump cliff okay so Brian Radel gotta tell me Hollywood Hollywood people would like this all these two-thirds nuts you've got an excitable that's willing to jump down that low what's that yeah but this is you're gonna see in different industries you're not going to have accountants look like movie producers there if you get them together there's going to be sort of a difference in the overall dynamics of what that's gonna look like yeah so these are Big Five and we believe that the Big Five are largely funds because they're solving time as present problems to churn up code trying the guy that gave you're often life and now we're going to look at healthy living and now we're gonna see what this would take in the modern environment is we have a really bizarre environment where you're trying to help and the natural environment all you do is you just need the food that's there and you have to exercise you don't have to go to the gym because getting the food requires the exercise and you don't have to worry about getting sleep on time because the sun goes down you're not going to have a choice essentially the water is going to be pure there's going to be no drugs no stimulants you know and once in a while you gotta have a fast because it wasn't enough food what do you there's sunshine in abundance there's no getting around it it's like huh interesting so we've got diet activity sleep sunshine fasting we've got these major correct practices it's a pal that effectively will unwind the overwhelming majority of health problems that people experience in the first world and yeah if we were to tell a doctor that this is what you need to have your patients do they look at us like we were crazy but understand is precisely what all of your ancestors did down to the last man woman and child so it's no surprise that we when we reinstitute those things at a place like passing escape then then frustrated but now how do we or what does it take to stay them in the modern environment that's where the challenges so it's gonna turn out that there is a perfect personality if we were to give a you know a score on each of these you know low medium high low medium high just three scores then there would be six variables that means 729 combinations now it turns out there's going to be one that's the perfect combination and here's where this you would want to be very bright because you need to be smart enough to understand there's a connection between biochemistry and health so that's helpful you would also want to be interestingly enough close because once she found out what it was going to take to do it you need to be somebody that's happy brown rice broccoli and strawberries or do you don't want any openness wanting to see what that Snickers bar still tastes like okay you want to be introverted Brian was saying just a dinner only invited people over last night and I'm sitting back chuckling like that's not something that is said between Allen and I see never invites in the video in his house the only persons ever been invited to his house with me it's all real simple and I've had my home for 12 years now and he has still not come over to my house there's a pair of introverts that's that that's how that goes down the river so it pays to be disagreeable somebody says would you like some allen no and we won't be very stable so there's no reason to celebrate anything because every day is the same and there's no reason to mitigate it because there's no gay that's down there are no high days and there are no low days every day is a fine day and golden rule and this folks is the perfect personality and I when I sat down with these six bell curves I don't know 15 years ago or when this was that it's actually after the trial I was published so it was there dude were coming to us in father 2006 so it's been a probably about 12 years we went back and looked when I first spoke on the perfect personality was probably about that time I sat down with these six bell curves and I started thinking to people and I thought of our friend Larry I went through there and I thought well Larry's you know got an open side it was a rock and roll drummer know he's told me about his his drug history that's a giving man okay so he's not here he's here he's very conscientious okay so he was a very fine drummer when he when he learned when he needed to correct his throwing technique from from a master drummer in Los Angeles Larry's spent seven hours a day in his apartment for two years practicing the drills over and over again and he ultimately became the drummer for Loretta Lynn and so this was no slouch you don't get there without very high conscientiousness there is pretty pretty extroverted on this side he's he's relatively disagreeable more than I'm thinking we'll get on here at least okay so what's up nobody likes to work with yeah so and then in terms of scandal I would put in probably in the middle and so what we're gonna see is that Larry's openness which is about here his openness battles conscientiousness and his he's sociable so he's gonna want to be around other people quite a bit he he doesn't get pushed around by other people in their what they want to do but he will have his good days and bad days and as a result there's gonna be some celebrating and medicating around the food just like a normal person would okay so he's done how has he done pretty well pretty well why well he's smart he's smart and conscientious and those two things have kept him even though the other personality characteristics have consistently tried to pull him off course those personality characteristics have kept him in the right quadrant that's how that works the so I probably thought about Larry because just because he was probably whining to me about one of his blood parameters you know I mean and I said well then quit eating ice cream later you and we have all the tension okay yeah but then I thought about Alan I thought okay let's just do this for fun let's see he's very smart we know that up there I know he's very close so I know that Alan doesn't like any adventure at all I mean you think people kind of think joking about this but let me tell you what the truth is he goes to essentially one restaurant one restaurant he's lived in Sonoma County for 35 years one restaurant there's maybe two entrees that he will be on this vegan restaurant that's it 35 years then okay not interested you talk to him oh there's tribal band you can't go sweet who would want to go to sweet we want to go anywhere why would I be in the United States well actually Alan what if they say you can't leave California that's not a problem why would you ever want to leave tell me actually you can't Sonoma County this is more or less what goes on here the highly conscientious in other words he's he's got a dynamic tension that wants to get it done right he is introverted obviously in other words he's not uncomfortable in groups either but he he has had one party at his home and in over 30 years I was at that party it's a New Year's party so his wife he finally wanted to have something normal like could we have a New Year's party so she invited all her friends who are all actually as you'd expect quiet Pleasant respectable people that liked how you can be in nature okay so all of her friends come Alan doesn't know any of them because he's not Metis the husband's in couldn't care why introvert okay not open doesn't want to know forget it so they all come and I show up and so I am I don't know anybody so I'm just talking to Alan and then MacDougall shows up Alan invited the one person he knew in Sonoma County to John and Mary came there hanging out and this thing is just the deadest thing on the board of course there's no and the whole thing is just the most to date thing you can imagine so by about 9:30 John and Mary like now looks around and says you know why don't we go to my office start working on plans for the next year that's what we did that was one party we spent we spend New Year's working on plans for the next year okay I conscientious and diverted disagreeable okay so he's not so disagreeable if it's impossible but he's over here easily in that top third of that quadrant so he's not going to make he really couldn't care less of what it is that he's doing or saying it makes anybody uncomfortable he's just conscientiousness and disagreeable completely comfortable speaking the truth they have a numerical so there's no way than anybody would ever feel any social pressure around any social going in fact once we're in someplace and there was hardly anything to eat and Alan started taking the lettuce that they use as decorations and the things we started taking the decorations to make them sell the seller these are stories you couldn't make and finally he's very stable so just almost never see the emotional turbulence at all it's the only one of the rent okay this is the this is the perfect personality and that II has nobody in this room you know can run the table like you won't you won't run into one very often we'll each have our elements we each have our strengths and so nice and disagreeable that's good it's a good thing but if you are no matter what is that you are wherever you are opposite many of these strengths there then we need to patch our way around the weaknesses and so this is so if you're very open this is where you need to have this is where this this endless need for new recipes and new ideas so Alan trust me Brian just so you know he won't be trying any of your new recipes there's no because he doesn't need anything new but a lot of us do we need things that are novel and interesting that we haven't tried before that's part of being a person who's open and so your repertoire and they said a hard returning because you need a wider repertoire and that's how that works so more work has to be put in here in order to make this journey a journey that and work for you if you're not so conscientious if you're a little disorganized then you may need to hire some crunch anxiousness so I have people that are pretty effective in their lives and what they do and they make a pretty good living but they just can't get it together there they're sort of out of energy and I tell them hire cook I had a woman this this last week a tetra North who is a very successful executive in New York and I told her we've got tired of cook yeah too expensive you've got it okay I have a college kid $15 an hour for five hours a week for $75 and you're going out there's $75 a week and you're going out and you're spending it you're you're paying somebody to make your food it's either a person in a restaurant or it's a person in your house how do you want it done and if you want to convenient and easy and right there for you that hire a debt for goodness sakes she said no why disagreeable sort of so if you are if you're sociable this isn't necessarily a problem except you're going to be in far more situations where there's going to be social pressure and opportunity so it's going to make it more difficult and it's going to have to get a lien on the conscientiousness that you have the big problem is if you're sociable and you're agreeable because if you're social and agreeable people are going to ask you to try things you're going to be uncomfortable refusing things this is going to be a problem and this is where you know I've shot a video called getting along with that going along which is also there's a chapter in my book I think about that title some very simple ideas that we use to just work our way around that we we tell people thank you not now maybe later just just struggle around this problem if we get confronted a little more we just say you know not right now I'm just trying to drop trou and keep on track for a little bit you try to gently step our way around this pressure so that we know so that we don't have to go along with them in order for them to be comfortable that's all we want to do and nice people need that help difficult people need that need to know this as well because they turn these things into fights and then they just we have enough into trouble in terms of social process so that's no good either we want a middle ground of pleasantness is we're going to be doing something that's going to uncomfortable and we want everybody to be as comfortable as possible while we go about doing our healthy living and finally when it comes to medicating and celebrating all I can say is the thing to do is to make sure that you've got the ability and knowledge and access to some kind of treats they're healthy and so tonight here we had a variety of outstanding fruit that was a perfectly excellent treat and there's going to be other things and interesting desserts that follow a healthy path these are things that we can have that help can help keep us away when we are when we may be teetering behind our openness and our stress levels and our rebellious s to want to do something you know wild and self-destructive and what's Allan's phrase short-term self indulgent pleasure seeking behavior God's been years since I've since I listened to it or recited that but that's what it is so when we start to get pulled that direction what we're gonna want to do is reach for things that may hit down the circuits but remain within the boundary lines of reasonable healthy living that's really the story of the perfect personality I don't have it you don't have it most anybody does not have a perfect personality for healthy living because healthy living today requires a bizarre person actually does it's an unusually strange personality that we fit this problem we now have a strange ecology for people to try to be pursuing healthy living in and so each of us our natural strengths that work so well in other areas of our life can easily work against us with respect to this particular problem so knowing knowing yourself and then preparing for where your weaknesses playing off your strengths that's how we're going to wind up on a good consistent ow where you have to like you deserve what's that you're going to do because it doesn't matter healthy living is irrelevant to reproduction and survival because we're bundles we've got sense of choice we can reproduce when you generally be live until we're you know can have grandkids yeah and be unhealthy the whole time so there's no evolutionary pressure then the pleasure of practice now forever yeah pleasure trap it will be it will be the problem that will confront humanity from this day forward nod that's just how it is so it used to be the disease of kings that Kings were the only people that had such abundance and a bunch of effort to make their food so processed and so super delicious I mean that they could indulge themselves and wind up with the diseases that we now see as being ubiquitous in the Western world so you're correct on that these these problems are never leaving this this is why we need people like AJ and this is why we need places like Nathan's place here we need we need written works we need magazines like Brian windows work in door Shana we need help and yours we need people to constantly have a different look at this message so that one day it gets there it hits them just right and they decide that this is this is a day I'm going to turn to the right direction and I'm going to start on a path and then they need all the support possible because this is a totally unnatural path to choose it's the right line it's the most difficult one and it's the most rewarding one but it's not easy and that's better for addiction there's one power oh yes if you mind what you wanted to find a mate would you look so mate was similar with similar scores or actually you kind of naturally do this so this is what we call sort of meeting and I'd say it's a characteristic of our species so we do sort right through these things so it's gonna turn out that if you're too exacting then you're just hos I'm just no way so it's going to turn out that you're usually not so someone who's very open it's very unlikely that they can handle somebody over here this person would find them wacky crazy and this person would find them boring so you have to be within latitudes of acceptance the same thing is true for intelligence so you know very bright person has to have people that are quite bright an average person is going to be actually uncomfortable the person is either very bright or not or not very bright so you have to be within a latitude that works it's the same with conscientiousness so my friend Larry is very conscientious is his wife it's about here it's just like one knots more punchy interesting yes so they're both a couple of wackadoodles i mean length makes sense to them up there the and they couldn't tolerate somebody that was 30 or 40 percentile lower down in the average ranges that we're driving nuts so we do this and you kind of do it naturally and that's what that's what getting to know somebody is is that you you think that they're within your latitudes of acceptance and then it turns out three months later they're not okay that's where a lot of love affairs go south is right there is because you finally got enough evidence you can't choose what your latitude of acceptance are those are innate IDU you discover what your latitudes of acceptance are and so but when it's closed nature says you've got to give it the benefit of the doubt that's what nature does so nature will fire up romance circuits if it feels like it's closed and then very often and we'll find out no can't do it the that's that's how that works okay all right incidentally this is why the fact that these personality characteristics emanate from so many choices this is why young people have always talked about music to each other it's because they're using music preferences as a score sheet for the big five that's why they're doing it and so that's kind of an interesting thing to to note that it comes across in in all these different preferences and things let me go okay yes that's interesting I think that's actually a really good question my guess is that you're going to have you're going to you're going to have probably the relationship itself would be too contentious so raising children which is what community is all about the principle and evolution is going to require joint action and a lot of joint decision-making so those two people are remarkably different in their personalities there's going to be a lot of discord there so just in general I think the further people get away from each other the more discord there's likely to be which is why Alan has one friend and one Wyatt said one girlfriend in his life I'm his wife that me that's he's done nice try to get in there just try to [Laughter] yeah yes that's right and so people like Alan my Alan actually is so naturally sort of sort of self-contained organism that his desire for openness is very small mine is actually at least on the chart and that's led me to make more friends for more diverse places that has enriched my life and that's that's been true and so then I go and try to tell him ok Alan this will enrich your life meet this guys like 20 minutes we get 20 minutes but that's but that's sort of how that how that works is that and then there's people over here that these are people that if you have very hope and very sociable and some agreeable these people connect people like crazy ok there they did they just connect up all over the place those are those are people I there's a fascinating little test I didn't know existed it was in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books Gladwell has been kind of an interesting writer who just taken academic social psychology not so much personality psychology but social psychology and brought it to the modern world and they were pretty good pretty clever it doesn't know anything about evolutionary psychology but his as it has a popularizer a basic standard experimental social psychology and so on and so forth and some degree personality psychology those are good books and they have you know all of his books have been interesting to me the and then one of them shows a list of about oh I don't know 150 last names and the test is how many people do you know that has one of those last names and I knew too and and at the end of it it says if you know less than 20 you're like your way introverted my holy smokes I knew - I had no actually until I took that test I was aware I was introverted but I actually didn't understand how much once he did that I had never would have been right down [Music] yeah yeah they were he was a very clear amalgam of those two people and I'm a very clear amount of Monti grunts there's no no question so when I get when I get nasty and argue with people that's my dad and when I'm friendly and warm that's my mom my friends will say that they ever get in an argument with me which isn't often but once in a while they will and it gets tough Larry Larry has a name for that because it's son Ralph just came out look out and so that's what that's what you are actually your personality it seems like and has seemed like psychologists and I think they even personality techno psychologists tend to think of them as blends this blends between two parents but you're actually not you're a composite and that's because these characteristics are inherited you know one gene at a time and very often there will be a block of genes where to be a whole slew of them the way the genes working cross over in reproduction that there'll be a whole suite of genes that will come from one parent and those will be the ones that are dominant immune and so that's why you can have like your your dad's feed check your mom's elbows then you've got your dad's whip I got the big nose for my long side this my sister got a perfectly good nose for my dad's side I wound up like this okay that's what makes your dad's the nature just sort of deals these cards and what you are is a composite so it can look like you're a blend because very often two parents are for example you're in here okay so as a result the trial is somewhere around here everybody child's very likely to be somewhere in that range and and so therefore it just looks like you're a blend but where it gets really interesting is when you have two parents there different on the dimension and so I met a person whose mother was extremely disagreeable and the father was extremely a rebel this is interesting this is the only guy who could have lived with that one okay this is the only guy like you have to be way over here to put up with us right and so this this young lady actually had very diverse reactions throughout her birthday okay so literally would be super sweet to people and then something happens to just blows up sky-high you're like wow what is that you know took me a while to figure out what on earth was the underlying the underlying thing here and what that underlying thing is this literally independent neural circuits around those dimensions led to what what looks like bizarre behavior but is in fact just as principal Vince any other behavior that we see in personality [Applause]
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