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Chef AJ: Q A on Social Media Addiction More! | Interview with Dr Jen Howk
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are live hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today we have one of our most popular guests her name is dr jen hawk she is half of the dynamic duo of the unbelievably popular and wonderful beat your jeans podcast she's here today solo sometimes she comes on with dr lyle sometimes he comes on without her but we have her all to ourselves today please welcome dr jen hawk it's always so nice to see you oh it's great to be here how's it going it's good well i feel like i just saw you yesterday because i joined your virtual village which if you like you can talk about which is really nice it's a it's a really kind of fun thing that you do now if you want to tell people yeah oh sure yeah if people are interested in that that's a that's a monthly um well it's actually i think i'm going to move it to just kind of an ongoing thing so people can just sign up and they can come and go as they like but it's um every right now it's every sunday might be moving to saturdays in april march is full so so i can't take any more registrations for the month of march but if people are interested in in joining for april and going forward it's basically it's it's a weekly kind of anything goes live stream chat with me and a group of folks who are interested in all things evolutionary psychology and pleasure trap and um you know we just talk about a bunch of stuff i mean if you were there last night you know that we we we talked about the role of religion and evolutionary psychology we we talked about all kinds of hot button stuff so it was it was quite a um quite a rollicking session yesterday so it's really just it's kind of part group therapy part q a um just part it's i really thought of it as um replacing the stone age village you know it's sort of let's all gather around the campfire once a week and just talk about what we're going through share some wisdom um so it's really just kind of a fun zoom community if people want to join that they can they can find links for how to how to do that on my website jennahawk.com and it's a going forward into april it'll be a patreon benefit for um for people if they want to subscribe that way so um but you can find all the details at jennhawk.com i think if you need another name you can call it hawk talk yeah definitely it is it's uh but you know i try not to i try not to make it too much about me and that it is kind of the group and everybody's sharing but it does a lot of it just because people are curious about evolutionary ideas um it always i we do do a fair amount of q a so it's it's just kind of it's a little different every week and it really is all about who's there and what they want to talk about and you did that wonderful three-part webinar series with dr lyle and dr greger and people can still get the replay on your website if they like yeah that that recording is available on my website too if people missed it and they just want to want to snap that up they can get that at junhawk.com too yeah that was a good one well angela says it's really wonderful being a member of the virtual village it's so helpful stephanie says i love dr hawk i was just binge watching a steam dynamics in the member video section if you're going to binge that's the kind of binge we recommend yes absolutely yeah yeah and talk about the member center because i mean the thing is is it so the price is so low i think people won't believe it it's like 99 for like the rest is it the rest of my life or the rest of your life or whatever comes first yeah i guess it's the rest of yeah whichever comes first probably but it's a lifetime membership for 99. um the thing about the lifetime membership for this is the the sort of um membership site that dr lyle and i have together so just to keep people very confused i have my website jennhawk.com where i have all of my offerings and all the stuff that i kind of do um not everything i do is a collaboration with with dr lyle although a lot of it is so the the main thing that we work on together is the esteemed dynamics website and particularly what we call the the living wisdom library which is this compendium of everything that we know about evolutionary psychology and how to apply it to daily life you know he really is the first evolutionary psychology clinician in in the world as far as i know who has taken these ideas and applied them to real life problems in a really systematic way so he and i together have built the site we have quite a bit of members only content including a four-hour uh tour de force of of self-esteem and of the history of psychology and personality and what personality really is and the behavioral genetics of it and that is the human nature series which is only available in our members section so you can sign up annually for 29 um or you can do a lifetime for 99 and you can also pay the 99 and three installments if that's more convenient for you the real benefit of the 99 lifetime membership is that puts you on the list for access to our book when we finish our book we've gotten somewhat derailed as most of the world has by covid and so we're running a little behind schedule we weren't able to get as much work done this year as we were hoping um we've been ships in the night sort of passing each other but we made a lot of progress in the last couple of months and we're looking forward to having that book out um hopefully you know before the year is out so um if you're interested in getting a copy of our book which is sort of like part textbook on evolutionary psychology part uh self-help book and you know really let's let's apply these ideas how can i how can i think of evolutionary psychology in ways that are really relevant for personal happiness and relationships and jobs and family and all of the things that we talk about um so that's that that will be available for folks and the the website is the only way to get that book that is we're we're uh we're not making it available elsewhere so if you're interested in getting on that list it's the lifetime membership is currently the only way to get the book wow well everybody's asking when is coming out yeah i don't want to commit to a date because this is a collaborative process and we're also it's not entirely up to us because even though we are self-publishing we are um we're sending it out to a lot of advanced readers and people who are going to give us feedback so we we can only police that timeline so much and we want to give the people that we have reading it plenty of time to absorb everything and and we're still finishing some of the original writing we still have a little bit to go so um you know fit we'll finish in the next month or two and then you've got to add some amount of time for people to get back to us with feedback and then if we integrate some of their comments um you know it's very hard to say but i would say by probably by by fall or early winter would be a safe estimate that would be amazing i hope they'll be an audible version yeah yeah well we're looking into all of that so we want to make it as widely available to people as we can we just don't want to necessarily you know get into league with our corporate overlords because there's actually a question on audible today that i actually relate to since we mentioned audible i'll just jump into the questions is from seth he says ever since i started to listen ever since i started listening to books on audible i'm literally no longer able to sit still and read a book why is this and is this normal well it's the this is the principle of energy conservation at work so you know if we if we have to really dial down to the part of the motivational triad that is most relevant for human decision making um you know this the motivational triad is essentially you go through life avoiding pain seeking pleasure and doing both with as little effort as possible because humans are lazy just like all animals are lazy so audible you can get you can absorb this content for less effort you know you can multitask you can do other things it just gets fed directly into your brain and i think there are big individual differences with how people respond to that and how um how easily they integrate uh audio information i have a very difficult time if i'm if i'm listening to an audio book um so i actually don't listen to audiobooks very often because my mind tends to drift i start to think about something and i i'm off and pretty soon i've missed you know five minutes and i i don't know what was in the book so um unless it's fiction fiction i have a little easier time kind of staying with but i much prefer just to curl up and read old school but that's an individual difference so people have different brains that work very differently and if you have met audiobooks and that works for your particular brain and how you like to assimilate information and it's this nice little shortcut of course you're going to go for that it's the same reason a lot of people listen to podcasts and youtube videos at two or three times the speed that they that they come out on it's like okay energy conservation i could get more for less this is the primary force that governs all human motivation and uh behavior so when in doubt always look to what's the what's the shortcut how can i how can i get the same thing with less effort yeah because i i do that i do i do speed it up but i find i can exercise i can walk the dog and still have the book read so it's kind of i totally can't i get super super distracted so i'll listen to them like several times if it's not something that i'm really um like if it's something i just kind of want in the background and i'm just hoping that i'm absorbing it somewhat hypnotically i i will listen to things while i multitask but not if i'm really trying to dive deep and really absorb um complicated nuanced information then i really have to read and you know really kind of like take notes and underline and do the whole thing so that's that's how i'm wired but different people are very different nice so i'm normally i ask the questions that were submitted in advance first but this one seems like an emergency from adam he says dear dr hawk i'm waiting in the hospital for a ct scan result that will come back in an hour or so i'm terrified and so nervous what can i do to calm myself please oh gosh that is really tough yeah um i mean there's there's really no magic answer to this there's no technique that i can give you know you know everybody sort of wants some magic breathing meditation or something that can immediately calm you um but i you know what i do when i'm when i'm very anxious about anything i've talked a lot about my flight anxiety and other things is i go back to my meditation training and my mindfulness training and you know i spent years kind of hanging out in in meditation halls and doing these retreats where you basically just take yourself out of that reactive space and you you you kind of float above yourself a little bit so you put yourself in what they call a lot a lot of meditation traditions called the witness position where you were you were watching yourself have this anxiety so um if you if you can get into this space where you can just have this really limitless compassion for the fact that you are you were really going through it right now and there's nothing that you can do we don't have any information there's there's no um you know there's no particular advantage to going through all of the parameters and thinking about the worst case scenario right now because you might you might not get there so really this is just about sort of feeling the feelings that you're having sitting with them allowing them to churn because you're just being taken for a ride by your nervous system right now um and just letting that process flow and and trying to kind of separate yourself as much as you can not in a kind of um you know this is not a you're not shutting yourself down or avoiding yourself you're actually just you're you're you're you're a lot of the these traditions will use the metaphor of you know as if you're holding a child like a like a sobbing child who is really struggling and having a very hard time you're just there for that child you're not trying to necessarily soothe it or calm it down or anything like that you're just like this sucks you're really really going through it at this moment and in an hour from now we'll be in a different space well you know the the thing that people don't necessarily appreciate when they're in this kind of uncertainty particularly with a an urgent health issue is that even if the news is very bad the what you're feeling right now will not be how you're feeling in an hour because you your brain will be able to be like okay so now we know where we stand now we know the situation and so now we can start to marshall problem solving resources and really figure out what's the next step it's the state of uncertainty because your nervous system does not know how to allocate time and energy so you're just cycling around a lot of anxiety and a lot of big feelings but that process is is time limited it's only going to last while you're in this waiting room waiting for the results so so just to sit there and be like this is it this is the you know i'm in the space for the next hour or however long it is and that is not forever and this too shall pass and whatever is coming my way i will confront that squarely and fully when it happens but until then i'm just being present for myself that's really the the best i can offer i know it's not a magic magic pill um but it's uh it's the thing that helps me most when i'm having a lot of anxiety and i think gives the best perspective on that situation great thank you so much all right so no broadcast would be complete if we didn't get into coven stuff but we're not this is not like a question asking you if you're getting the vaccine because i don't i'm not doing that but this is an interesting question because it's about why this has divided so many uh vegans so monica says when dr esselstyn posted a photo of him getting his second vaccine on instagram he got hundreds of hateful comments from vegans saying things like now i'm not going to believe anything you said before or you're you're obviously being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry and many more vile comments that were hateful i was under the impression that one of the tenets of veganism was compassion and i don't understand why all the vegans who are against wearing masks and getting vaccinated are being so hateful um i've been vegan a long time and i've never seen this kind of behavior can you please explain it yeah well you're looking at you know dr also stan is somebody who has a lot of followers on social media i mean he's he's really uh you know very visible person he's gonna attract a lot of attention and the more people you have that are aware of you the more you're going to see the full spectrum of human personality um so you know when people kind of start off if they have an instagram or they have a facebook account or a twitter feed and you know their mom follows them and they have like five five friends that are paying attention to what they do they're gonna see uh pretty you know more um the the the personality that's gonna be on display is gonna be very similar to theirs if they're agreeable most of their friends are gonna be agreeable the more visibility you have um and the bigger your audience the more diversity of personality you're going to see in the in the followers and so this is a good thing and a bad thing because it's great that he has great visibility it's great for the movement it's great for all of these things but just because somebody is vegan doesn't mean that they are necessarily a very compassionate person or a very agreeable person you're seeing all of the personality differences that just exist in the population become more visible the more people that are aware of him and of a post and something that is sort of a lightning rod like the vaccine process is really going to bring all those people out of the woodwork so i think you're just this is you know personality 101 there are a lot of people out there that are um very uh aggressive and um disagreeable on the internet and that is just how they are that is just how these people are and you're more likely to run into them if you're looking at comments from somebody who has a lot of followers it's just that it's sort of the internet rewards that sort of behavior and that's one of the many reasons that i always have my comments closed on almost everything that i post so um yeah and in covet in particular in vaccines this is this is a signal that people are making to uh it's an it's a intra-tribal signal so so people who are um you know making these posts on something like an instagram photo that dr esselstyn posts they they are really trying to signal to their tribe hey i'm one of you you should you should coalesce around me because i believe very strongly in my way of doing things it's it's very much this human tendency to to kind of set up a little soapbox and grandstand about who it is that we are um and we always have had this in human nature and now we see it really amplified in social media um and so you know there are a lot of reasons to avoid social media and that's uh that's one of them if you if you find yourself bothered by it um i i have a wonderful extension that i use um on my on my computer called shut up which automatically blocks comments on every website so it just detects whether there's a comment field on youtube or an instagram or anything and you just never even see it you just never even see the comment comment field and it really made me aware that um you know when i go to a youtube video even if it's not my own i very quickly start to look up comments even before i finished consuming the content directly i'm looking at the comments to kind of figure out okay what does the village think of this person what's the conversation going on here and once i once i started the shut up extension i realized how much that was interfering with my actual interpretation and judgment of the context of the content on its own merits i was i was having a reaction to it and i had an opinion about it but not until i sort of looked at what other people were saying and so confronting that that was happening even for somebody like me who considers myself very independent and very you know like i'm going to form my own opinion no matter what other people think it was an interesting check on that belief because i i was a little um you know i was checking in with the village before i really determined what it is that i thought so just something for people to use i think it works i know it works with um safari but it might work with other browsers too wow that so it's called shut up shut up it's a little talk balloon with an exclamation point there are probably other other extensions that people can use i'm sure it's not the only one but like i don't get why people want to know if dr x or dr y is getting the vaccine because if i mean listen i love dr greger but i'm not going to make my decision because he gets it and i also love certain other doctors that aren't getting it but i'm not going to knock it do you know what i'm trying to say like don't people think for themselves anymore yeah i think a lot of that has to do with the lack of um you know we are no longer in an environment where you know the metaphor always uses we don't have walter cronkite anymore there's no sort of like that there's no universality around you know what what's the right thing to do um and so people are subject to all of these competing streams of information and i you know i have ranted about this at length and i can again if people are interested but you you really need to understand that you are living in a in an individual information bubble that algorithms that you cannot understand or control are are creating for you so everything that you do on the internet is contributing to what kind of information you see so so if you were interested in something and you click on it that is in that is increasing the little the avatar that exists of you that that okay this person likes this information and that motivated them to take action and click and retweet and do this and so we're going to give them more of that so it becomes an echo chamber we live in these little echo chambers of information um where all in and all of this is very apolitical it's not like you have people at facebook and twitter saying you know what how how can we move opinion in a certain direction all they want to do is sell you more ads and so they're very interested in what you're interested in and so they pay very close attention to what you're interested in and what motivates you to um to click a like button or or or even better gets you upset so you know gets you to write a nasty comment or or gets you to retweet with a comment or anything like that this is all information to construct a better um idea of who it is that you are and what motivates you to spend more time with more eyeballs on the screen and therefore buy more advertising um and so that's the whole game that's that's just what's going on and so people are very individual in their information environment and they have overlap with other people but they don't appreciate the fact that that it's very it's really this unique environment unto themselves and there's no overarching this is the thing to do this is not the thing to do and so you have these these sort of divisions that are cropping up over everything including vaccines including all things covered including i mean we could talk veganism we could talk about any topic that you know it's if you do research on the internet you're gonna find evidence to support your point of view um and and people get very they get their status all wrapped up in that where they they post something about oh i found this article on this source that says i should or shouldn't get a vaccine and that's you know this is this is information i'm sharing with the stone age village now they have some status in the game now they're less likely to change their opinion in the face of contradictory evidence because they've taken a stand they've they've stood in front of their peers and said i'm sharing this information because this is what i believe is true so we actually have really good research to show that people um you know are it's very it's a high cost walk back if you share something to then say oh you know what i saw i found another article and that thing that i posted two days ago is bs and so forget that you know go with this nobody does that people get all dug in they get all status associated with their opinions um and so you have you have just this this diversity of viewpoints um again which is not totally a bad thing it's it's great that people are able to pursue all of these different different avenues and get information from so many different places but it creates this informational chaos so they're looking to people that they admire to kind of help them triangulate because there's so much noise there's no clear decision there's no it's not it's not obvious what to do people have a lot of doubts no matter how committed they are to anything and so if alpha makes a decision to do it that that lets us feel a little better about you know our course faction we can we can say hey you know alpha in the stone age village says it's okay says this is the way to do it um and so that's how that's my course of action despite all of this contradictory information that i'm looking at we're very beholden to that kind of leadership because again in our ancestral history for for countless generations it was actually really important to do what alpha said because otherwise you might wind up dead alpha became alpha because the village determined that that was the person who had the most authority who had the the best ability to look at a bunch of different things and come to the best conclusion for everybody's well-being in the village and if you didn't step into line and do what alpha wanted you to do uh you could wind up dead you could wind up hurt you could wind up getting banished all kinds of things that are going to get filtered out of the gene pool as we go generation by generation so so we do have this tendency to want to follow strong charismatic authority that's that's not a that's not a bug in human nature it's a feature wow but the thing is is to me dr russelson's an icon and even if you don't agree with the vaccine it doesn't negate all his whole life of work you know what i'm saying i mean to me that's just ridiculous yeah of course i mean and this is this is you know again part of what just emerges when you get into this chaotic information environment we suddenly are judging people on these really thin slices of their of their beliefs or their behavior or something that they did 20 years ago or anything else rather than taking the totality of their work and um everything that they have to contribute and judging it for ourselves and taking what works and leaving the rest yeah well speaking of social media there's a question from joel why is it that so many of the younger johnny come lately plant-based doctors are more interested in being social media stars than practicing medicine oh well because everybody in principle is interested in in the increased status that would come with being a social media star so i think part of the answer for that is the the johnny come lately's are just more social media savvy so this is this is a tool that everybody in principle has available to them but you know up and comers are they've grown up with the internet that this is more this is like they're just this is the water that they swim in and so it's very easy for them to start a tick-tock and kind of you know create a bunch of content whereas that's not something you would ever see john mcdougall do because it's just not part of his experience and part of how he knows how to communicate his ideas um you know we could ask the same thing if we were to dial back the clock and go back to 1984 and be like what is with all these young upstart vegan doctors like dean ornish and john mcdougall that keep doing interviews on um you know talk shows like oh they just want to be stars because they're going on talk shows they're they're leveraging the best possible way to get their message out and that's the most natural way that they know how to do it and it's intersecting with this sort of general desire that most most humans have to acquire a little bit of fame or notoriety because it increases our status we are very status driven doesn't mean that everybody necessarily wants to be famous but everybody does want to have signals from the stone age village that they are valued and for most people if we're just kind of going to look at a bell curve of the population most people the more followers they have the more attention they get the more successful they are on social media that's a very powerful proxy for being valued by the stone age village so there's nothing pathological about it necessarily i think it's the intersection between where technology is how comfortable people are with it and just general tendencies toward accumulating status wow that's interesting yeah because i mean the doctors that i go to none of them are on social media like the yeah i don't want to say the real doctors like that those aren't but like i just don't see how a doctor has time like at least you know to be on them all the time anyway okay so here's a question that angie sent in my husband and i were fortunate enough to be able to retire early so two years ago we moved to a warmer climate into an active 55 and older community we've been here almost three years and love everything about it except that we really haven't made any friends i understand that last year there's been a pandemic but i don't know why we didn't forge any meaningful friendships the first two years we're here we are both more extroverted than introverted athletic and social people and had many friends and acquaintances where we live the first 58 years of our lives i know dr lyle has once said that friends are insurance policies but we really don't need friends for that reason because we're very financially stable but we'd like to have a few is it just harder to make friends when you're in your 60s and when you're vegan yeah i think it's generally harder to to make friends as you go through life you know what none of us um kind of has the naivete that we had in kindergarten when everybody was our friend uh the insurance policy metaphor is very accurate so just in case people haven't heard that i'll go over that really quickly so friendship really is it's stone age insurance you you invest in a friendship process with somebody else because there's sort of this implication that okay if things really hit the fan at some point in the future you're gonna be there for me you're gonna you're gonna help me out when we're out on a hunt and i break my leg you're going to help me get back to the village you're not going to abandon me to be eaten by bears and so this is this is a reciprocal dynamic because you want friends who you're perceiving are going to be a good bet that are that are worth the premium that you're investing in them in terms of time and energy that are going to pay off but your friends also want that from you so so i would you know i i i would be curious about a lot of things about this dynamic and like how many people have you met um under what circumstances are you meeting them what are those conversations looking like um you know the people are are looking for the same thing that you're looking for they're looking for sort of an easy connection that's not asking a lot of them socially um and that you have character and resources that are going to be available to them um if things uh get get problematic so that that plus the whole drift that humans experience over the course of their lifetime where we get more discerning about who we want to spend time with i mean when you're when you're a kid when you're one of the reasons it's so easy to make friends with when you're a kid is you haven't developed many correlations of what people are like so you haven't met enough people you haven't had enough experience to be like okay if i observe this trait in somebody that is likely to to uh manifest in a particular kind of behavior later on so you know somebody is kind of uh in a bad mood all the time it means that they might be prone to rages that's a that's a correlation that we develop over time in our in our lifetime with increased experience increased um friends friends that we've sort of had and lost and moved on from but when you're a kid you don't have that everybody seems like they could be your friend as we get older we get much more discerning about who we spend our time with because that's our time and energy that's the only resource so we got a lot of it we got a lot of a lot less of it left right exactly and so we should be more discerning about it so often this takes you know i have a lot of people who will who will tell me that they're worried that they're getting too um self-isolating and that that that is somehow a problem you know people therapists or someone else has told them that it's an issue for them to be self-isolating they need to get out more but i think a lot of people become more introverted with age because they're they're just running the cost benefit analysis on any potential relationship being i don't know if it's worth it i don't know if i i don't know if i need that i don't know if it's worth my time and energy my limited time and energy um to invest in that relationship so you're you're working against all of those tendencies and people running a pretty hard cost benefit analysis on you a lot of the time and you you have a little bit of distortion because you're extroverted and you're gregarious and it's it's you know you're not taking these relationships uh as seriously as somebody who's introverted well an introverted person has less bandwidth for friendship so they're only going to want to make friends with people who are really good reciprocal policy an extrovert can have a lot of friends that are pretty more superficial essentially so you you have kind of differing levels of um of value that you're bringing into that exchange and so if you if you're like super extroverted way off on the bell curve and you're running into most people that you're running into are less extroverted than you are it's just going to be a harder trade so that's where dr lyle and i will always use the phrase which is very non-vegan so we need a better phrase if anyone has one let me know but fish where the fish are um so you know this is really kind of a numbers game it's a numbers game with friendship it's a numbers game with romance it's a numbers game with job applications uh if you're not finding what you're looking for you just need to kind of put yourself in front of more potential options that are going to recognize what you're offering and that it's a good trade okay we'll have to think of you know it's interesting there's oh so many sayings are animal sayings you know and they are vegan and that and and because they're not very vegan friendly like uh more than one way to skin a cat kill two birds with one stone i wish we could get that out of the language i mean i'm wondering even how those sayings even started because they're not very favorable to animals yeah well as a species we're not the most animal friendly species out there so i think a lot of them just emerged from our a very exploitative relationship with animals throughout most of our ancestral history but yeah i agree i know that there are substitutions for some but uh fish were the fish are i've never heard a good one so i'm open to it though yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna start thinking about that so i posted on the fans of the beat your jeans podcast facebook page if we only had four emailed in questions so i'm gonna go there first i'm gonna go their second actually and i'm the question that got the most just like on your your website now you're having people vote uh there were three questions about weight loss so i'm gonna go to that one first actually about your weight loss from different people so i'll read them all because then you can talk about it all at once so basically leah in general said i would like dr hawk to talk about her weight loss journey and then meredith said when you look back at your weight loss journey what are the three things you wish you had known when you started out what are things you focused on in the beginning that were time journey wasters and then it may be even more specific ann says i would like to know about how weight loss affects your interaction with people specifically men do you find the attention uncomfortable when you're no longer just in the friend zone with men when i lost weight since gained it all back i felt uncomfortable and almost vulnerable when i would get attention from men you can feel someone looking at you in public and on one hand it feels awesome on the other it's uncomfortable maybe because evolutionarily you're opening yourself up for more male pursuers which could lead to dangerous situations so take it away yeah a lot of interesting questions um i would say at the at the risk of plugging um a product uh if people really want to hear my my story i talk about that in the webinar that i did that you can get the replay the recorded replay on my website the review and renew series so um i talk a little bit about the my my experience and the history and what took me there and all of that but yeah it's um you know three things that i i wish i had known let me think about what those would be the first would definitely be that it takes a lot longer than you think it's going to take it's a much slower process than most most people have been led culturally to believe that it is we sort of all grow up reading these magazines and hearing again and again that something like 10 pounds a month is a achievable and normal standard of weight loss for most people and that is that's crazy that's crazy people who are starting off and have a lot of weight to lose that may be true initially um but for most people who have you know under 100 pounds to lose you're looking much more at something like five pounds a month five pounds a month is actually a very good rate of weight loss you know it's more than a pound a week i would say anything between two and five pounds a month is really good um and the closer you get to your goal the slower it's going to be the only way to change that is to be eating basically under the hunger drive or eating a uh for a lot of people a diet that is so calorie dilute that it's not going to be sustainable over time so it's not that it's not it's not um successful to to eat a very low calorie density diet but that's not going to be a sustainable equilibrium for every person for the rest of their life so you can lose weight more quickly if you really dial down the calorie density of something of your of your daily diet um but if that if you're feeling hungry all the time you're feeling unsatisfied it's not sustainable your nervous system is going to retaliate and you're going to yo-yo if that's the case so what you really need to do is get to find find where the equilibrium of calorie density is for you to lose about a pound a week or half a pound a week somewhere in that range and just stick there don't don't take any calorie density away until you absolutely have to you have to come to terms with the fact that this is going to be a glacially slow process and that it's not linear so i guess that would be number two of you know following that number one it's really slow and it's not linear so you're going to have moments you're gonna have ups and downs um you're gonna have plateaus where you're not losing for a long time even eating exactly the same food even even you know being as diligent as you are which most people are not so most people a lot of the ups and downs are just the vicissitudes of living your life and trying to do your best on an ongoing basis there are times where you're going to be more compliant in times where you're not and i talk about this a lot in that in that webinar that people can listen to um and so sort of how to habituate to that expectation that this is a journey this is a lifelong journey you don't beat the pleasure trap you don't just defeat the pleasure trap and be one and done and and it's that's that's it you never have to think about it again it's really about managing it it's about creating a life that has really good protections and structures to to help you make the best decision more times than not um that's really what people should be aiming toward not certainly not perfection and certainly not this transcendent idea that you're gonna beat the pleasure trap and be done forever and transformed and happily ever after and unicorns and sparkles for the rest of your life it's just really not the case for most people um and then a third thing um i don't know what a third thing will be maybe maybe it'll occur to me um but yeah slow uneven um and i relatedly you know just be eating to satiety don't try to eat under the hunger drive like people i i've done it too i understand that it's tempting um because you see quicker results and so you think when you're in it you think you can pull it off you think you can sustain it forever it feels easy when you're in it and you're losing two pounds a week and you're feeling like oh hey i've got this like no problem but you know and your nervous system knows that you're actually eating under the hunger drive and that it's going to catch up with you and it's it's going to it's going to come back it's going to catch you you cannot outrun these exquisitely exquisitely adapted and evolved satiety mechanisms you have to work with them and accept that it's just going to take time nice hey you know reebs came up with the saying she's uh we were saying of course reeves did can count on reeds for these things uh pink flowers where the fl where the flowers are yeah that's your vegetables where the gardens are yeah oh good good good okay well we'll try i'll try to like move our lexicon in that direction we'll see so he said i love dr hawk i wish i could talk to her every day you probably can just because she does private consults i mean if she's got an appointment open she'll talk to you for sure i do i do and you know i'm sort of moving toward i've got the village every week and um i'm i'm sort of i'm i'm at some point in the very near future starting sort of another weekly weekly show that's going to be happening for people who are more interested in kind of political cultural things um so yeah there's there's lots going on you can definitely definitely keep up with me yeah um this is interesting carolyn made a comment because i was thinking of the question from angie because i didn't make a lot of friends since moving here and everybody said oh you're going to be so popular like nobody knows i can't get arrested in the desert i had so many friends in l.a but she said is the reason people have fewer close friendships today all due to social media filling that void i don't have friends on social media i hate social media i don't even do it yeah i don't think so i think there's a strong drive in human nature to have connections with other people in fact i hear from clients all the time that they they you know that social media does not fill the void that they can have as many facebook friends as they want hundreds and hundreds but if they don't have one or two really good friends that's still a real void and a real absence in their life so um you know there may be some individuals for whom spending social media time detracts from time that they might otherwise be picking flowers where the flowers are and and a little bit sort of getting um getting seduced by the idea that these are real friendships we call that pseudoesteem the idea that the you know the more instagram followers you have you have these friends these aren't your friends they don't know they don't know you they haven't run a cost benefit analysis on a stone age insurance policy like you do in a real-life friendship um so there is a little bit of a susceptibility to feeling that kind of like oh i have a lot of people in my corner uh when you actually don't but i think people really you know the sort of the average for the species is one or two really good friends one or two people who are really going to be there for you who you would you would um you know drive across the state in the middle of the night to go rescue from some terrible situation that's really what we need in our life we don't need more than that most most people people who are very very extroverted need sort of um to feel like they're more of a crowd with that less intensity of the friendship but i think average bell curve most humans one one or two really good friends um satisfies that impulse with one or two really good dogs well yeah the best dogs in the universe you know really just blows it out of the water i know that's the best wow teresa says are there good evolutionary psychology books to read on women's issues there's a couple i mean it depends what you mean by women's issues so um we have a full reading list on thebeatyourgenes.org i think it's dot org i always forget i think it's beatyourgenes.org is the website for our podcast um and uh there's a there's a link to our reading list which is you know all the books or at least most of the books that we have mentioned on any podcast are listed they're not really organized by topic but there's definitely a few um you know about beauty and um uh david buss talks about sort of female sexuality a little bit uh there's some but there's not there's not sort of like a women's handbook to evolutionary psychology i wish there were maybe i'll get around to writing that someday after we finish this one yeah i was gonna say why don't you write it you know she's not watching today but i wish she was my don't you think that see i don't i i'm sure you saw a social dilemma right oh oh yes yeah that made me even more convinced about how much i hate it and i've been off it for a long time i mean yes there's posts made but i don't i've never even had a friend page on facebook that's how much i hate it and yet my friend sharon is on it all the time and she could be doing something in life like writing a book or whatever and she says oh but because of the pandemic it's the only way to interact but like every time i do go on which is willfully once in a while it's not even on my phone anymore it's like she's liked everything she's seen everything and it's like it just seems like so many people are living their life on social media and not living it in the real world anymore yeah i think there's definitely some truth to that um and this is because social media is a super normal stimulant but like like like the pleasure trap food is or like alcohol or caffeine is i mean this is it's it's it's hijacking pathways in the brain that are making stone age inferences about how successful you are how much status you have how many friends you have all of those things are getting there's like social media is a little proxy and it's it's filling that gap and it's sending you signals that what you're doing is the right thing when in fact it's the wrong thing and in a lot of cases maybe a very self-defeating thing because the more time for for some people not for everybody but for some people it's a zero-sum prospect where the more time you spend online the more time you're spending on facebook liking things the less time you're spending um you know picking carrots in the vegetable garden um so it's like i'm gonna have to i gotta have to workshop this reebs i'm not quite there yet um but that that i don't think everybody necessarily has that sort of like it's it's you know i'm i'm losing more time for social processes if i'm spending them online but for a lot of people they are and certainly for everybody even if you think you're above it you're not above it so so um tristan harris who is the the writer director star of the social dilemma um the the former google employee who narrates most of it if people haven't seen that documentary they really should because it's going to change your relationship with social media for sure um he calls this the race to the bottom of the brain stem that's kind of his his his tag line and i think it's very effective very very you know vivid um where you you just don't even recognize all of the ways that you your your motivation and your willpower and your interest has been hijacked so there are like so many things going on with social media that get me all riled up so people need to understand that these these tools were built literally by the same people that designed las vegas that design slot machines um and so the example i always want to remind people of if you're scrolling through instagram you're going like this right you're pulling down on your notifications you're waiting for another thing to pop up that is a slot machine you have this kind of uncertainty about oh is it going to be cherries is it going to be bananas is it going to be an ad is it going to be something good is it going to be something exciting and even the little pause that is built into it while it loads the next thing that's actually by design that's to keep you hooked in a little more because it's not like the software needs the lag it could it could it could load these things immediately but by forcing you to kind of sit there and build anticipation it actually builds a stronger connection in your brain to get more addicted to it um the little red flags that appear next to all the notifications and all the apps that's very much like red is a big evolutionary color it's danger and it's excitement and it's food and it's sex and it's all of these things we're very very beholden to the color red so it's no accident the notification flag is red it's no accident that it makes these particular little noises all of these things are are really really well designed and now not just well-designed but they have been triangulated with algorithmic evidence because they have hundreds of thousands of users who are very similar to you have very similar usage patterns to you and they behaved in this way which makes it very much more predictive about what's going to motivate you how you're going to behave that technology just gets more nuanced by the day and so people it's it's the addictive process of social media the fact that you're not necessarily using your time and energy like you might like to be using it and it's the fact that you're feeding into this um misinformation polarizing hyper individualized information environment that is actually in my view as a political scientist um detrimental to to a robust democracy i think it's actually the biggest danger to the democratic process um and i like i i would have thought that that was alarmist to say just a couple of years ago but at this point i'm i think it is the biggest danger that we're facing uh so those two things together are are enough to really get you to take social media um behavior and your the role that it plays in your life very seriously and to really try to pull back yeah even when i was on it i never had my notifications turned on so i'd actually have to like go there to look i and i don't even have notifications on my phone with the exception of my husband if he were to call or text i get a ding that i never even know if i get it i just i'm busy yeah yeah this is you know one of the most common things that people say when you when i go on these rants or when anybody does is okay so what do i do about it you know i'm not gonna give up social media i'm not gonna throw my phone away so there are things you can do to improve your existence and not completely delete all these accounts so one of them is to turn your notifications off so um you know different phones there are actually instructions for how to do this on the um the center for humane technology which is harris's and a few other people put this foundation together to try to solve this problem so if you go to their website um there are some suggestions and instructions for how to do things so turn off your notifications you can also if you have an iphone i don't know about android but iphone you can go into the settings and um make everything black and white which is really interesting so so i've dabbled around with this when you take color away from social media it's much less interesting not just because of the notifications but just all of it just the super normal quality of it um it really diminishes it makes it much less interesting you there are apps that can um well the iphone itself has built-in usage metrics so you can you can tell your iphone limit my social media time to x amount of time a day and then give me a little warning that you've gone over it so it can do that there are also plenty of apps that you can install on your phone and elsewhere that uh can kind of force you into this sort of compliance they they're working on some things that are even trickier and work against the sort of the race to the bottom of the brainstem where it downgrades the speed like the loading speed of these pages just almost imperceptibly over a certain amount of time which basically changes your cost benefit analysis and wanting to spend time doing it and you don't even notice that it's happening it's really really really subtle but in the same kind of way that the lag gets you um all excited this is enough of a lag that you actually like ah screw this it's not worth it so they're they're triangulating on ways to make people's lives better who can't or won't quit social media entirely um and i totally understand i mean this is this is a really difficult trap to escape and there are benefits there are certainly benefits like i i have an instagram account i post on it i i have i've made good connections on instagram and on twitter um i like the information that i'm able to get in these places that i wouldn't necessarily be able to get elsewhere so it's not that it's all evil and terrible it's just mostly evil and terrible kind of like nuclear power it's how you use it huh yeah yeah you could i could say that i think i think nuclear power is a better prospect for humanity's future than social media is yeah i i agree so here's another question from the fans of the beat your jeans podcast that's a private group on facebook if anybody wants to join where the discussion of the podcast happens often and this is from kiki is there an evolutionary advantage or disadvantage to being an only child oh that's a really interesting question yeah i i don't know offhand i'm sure there's research about this so we had um in the virtual village last night somebody was asking about birth order and and what birth order means for personality or if there's certain personality characteristics that are more likely um that we're going to see in older children versus younger children most of that research has been debunked so so it doesn't birth order doesn't really matter too much um so i but i'm not sure if anybody's really looked at the only children question i would look at judith rich harris's book um about birth order and and um sort of uh sibling relationships and you know she addresses some of those questions i can't remember the name of it offhand but i think we like or we have a we have the name of it on the beat your jeans page um and she you know she is giving more weight to birth order than uh subsequent research has turned up but she might deal with only only child questions at least in a way that you could go look at the footnotes and kind of see what other research she's citing and and see where that can take you um i would be surprised if david buss has not looked at this as well so but i don't know offhand i'm not familiar with that literature so we can we can uh put that in the category for our next um member chat i think uh dr lyle and i are having a member chat for the living wisdom library for people who are members um this thursday so i know you're having 11 o'clock when i can't make it because i know i tried to negotiate the time with him and that was just the only time he could do it he and i are always working with like time zone differences and we have busy schedules and so i'm like no that's aj's time i knew you were gonna i knew it was so funny it's like i got 23 other up but that's okay i'll watch the replay so lou from the fans of the beat your genes podcast group says if social and economic status discrepancies generally make us happy when we're the superior party then why do we tend to prefer to mix with people of our own social class is that even true i don't know oh yeah that's very true you you uh your friendship your romance your your associative tendencies are all sort of within a certain um tolerance limit with with ses and also with iq and sort of other other cues that we have from people that we spend time with so i think this is a relative question this is sort of like you you want to it doesn't it doesn't make a huge amount of difference to feel superior to somebody who's three degrees you know a couple standard deviations uh less successful than you are because it's just the the division is too great it doesn't confer any really good status signals on you that's not really your competitive field you want to have it's keeping up with the joneses it's your neighbor next door who makes a similar salary who has a his wife is similarly attractive you you have a similar sized house and lawn that's the person you're really competing with that's your competitive field so it's the it's the signals of um of success and and value that you're getting from the village relative to how competitive you are with people that we could reasonably expect you to be competitive with uh it doesn't mean that you can't be happy unless you're the best unless you're the most successful unless you're the richest obviously that's not true um but you you're probably not going to be happy if you're looking around at your competitive field field of people that you would reasonably feel on a similar playing field with and that you're the absolute bottom of the heap on every dimension if that's the case you're likely to have feelings of depression you're likely to not feel very good about yourself you're going to get bad esteem bad failure feedback about your success in life um and that is why we have those emotions those emotions are a barometer of basically how how competitively successful you are in the domain that we would expect you to be competitively successful relative to the amount of effort that you've put into it so that's not going to travel across the entire spectrum of um human capacity and human talent and and ability you're going to be judging yourself uh along the same kind of metric that people who are very similar are going to be judged nice do you have time for one more question dr hoff sure sure okay great this is also from the fans of the beat your jeans podcast group robin says can you talk about re-entering social life in person after being so separated for peop from people i feel so garden it feels a bit awkward i'm an extrovert you know what i love about this pandemic i mean i don't love the idea of the pandemic or people dying obviously or losing their jobs but i never realized how much of a true introvert i was because i could go on like this forever i mean except for all the death and you know you know i'm not talking about that part but you know this idea of just getting to stay home all the time i mean this has been fantastic for my nervous system yeah this is uh we talked about this last night on the virtual village too i'm hearing more and more that people are kind of having this anxiety about reentry and also some anxiety about losing the coveted way of life which is actually a pretty good situation for a lot of people for a lot of people um you know i wrote very early in in the coven developments an essay that's still on my website called of personalities and pandemics which is really all about how your personality is filtering your experience of the world in every way including your experience of something like like a pandemic disaster um and so people who are on balance more introverted um more emotionally unstable more i mean we could we could sort of more disagreeable we could we could name a lot of different things that you know controlling for all other factors have these sorts of traits you know lockdown life is going to suit them better than it might suit other people of course we have to account for what they do for the for a living and everything else but there are a lot of people there's a there's a non you know a non-trivial number of people in this country who have um benefited from the lockdown status quo in in terms of how uh you know what their competitive day-to-day really looks like they're they're sort of we live in these little pods of zoom and managing our own time where there's a lot of control over impression management and impression management is essential to human happiness when it comes for what kind of status we're getting from the village and so you know it's a much riskier proposition to go to the office and meet people you don't even know you don't know what's going to happen that day you don't know who you're going to meet you don't know who's going to you know what's going to happen in the meeting you don't there are a lot of unknowns it's more competitive stress than sitting at home and being able to have a lot of control over when you're on and when you're off um you know what kind of food you're getting ordered and what kind you aren't like all of these things have become people have become really habituated um and and people are really habituated to uh feeling safer and feeling uh more protected from contagion and all of these things these are these are powerful incentives that now exist at the population level and so it's going to be very interesting to see how these evolve over the next couple of months um and i think my feeling we'll we'll see my feeling is that you know we are very good at habituating to new circumstances look at how you know crazy and unheard of something like uh quarantine and lockdown was when it first began and then how sort of normalized it has become and not that much time and to the point where now we have anxiety about going back to the old way so um i think we will see sort of re-entry proceed in stages with a lot of personality differences along the way but we will we will basically rehabituate recalibrate um to reality as it is no matter what that reality looks like we're very adaptive in that way so um yeah i i it's you're in the same boat as a lot of people a lot of people are worried about interacting and having normal conversations again so it's not it's not just you but don't you think some of this will continue like i mean i know dr mcdougall said you know he put his program online out of necessity but now he says he'll never go back to doing i don't you know i don't know that's true but he makes it seem like he he would prefer to keep doing it this way so do you think a lot of this online education interacting will still continue even when things get back to whatever normal means oh i'm sure i'm sure it's difficult to imagine you know the sort of um i'm i'm a political scientist and i'm looking at the every fall we have this american political science association conference and it's a hybrid conference this year and i think that will continue to be the case because you just are going to have a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be particularly excited about flying across the country to go present a paper and they're not they're not particularly extroverted they don't really enjoy the process um you know all of the sort of gratuitous travel that people were doing for work um is i think you're gonna see that much curtailed because it's it's been proven unnecessary um a lot more remote jobs being being sort of normalized being uh made permanent i i think a lot of that's gonna happen so yeah we'll just see where we wind up there's going to be another sort of tide of uh you know a lot of the extroverts who have the sort of pent-up demand you're going to have a little bit of a roaring 20s effect too when we do get back to any kind of normal social behavior where people are allowed to congregate and get their party on i think you're going to see the extroverts finally meeting that demand but definitely not for everybody why don't they all just go together in some area because you know i can reach so many more people online even when i was doing night conferences i've done 19 of them i mean the most i ever got was like five or six hundred people but when you do things online it's like you can reach the whole world yeah i think something like i was thinking about the american political science association just because that's my that's sort of my annual thing i mean nobody's going to say this out loud but the reason that most people want to go to that conference is it's a meat market it's people there's a lot of sort of like socializing but it's a very specific kind of socializing and so it's sort of a it's this outlet for people to drink a lot hang out with their their old friends from grad school have some hookups all of these kind of things that characterize academic conferences obviously not everybody obviously that's not all that's happening in academic conferences but that's a lot of what's happening um and so that that tendency that desire in human nature is not going anywhere so i think you will see a hybrid model and it's just going to sort itself out according to personality and to innate interest people who are not going to that conference to necessarily find a hookup are going to be very happy to sit at home and present their paper remotely um people who had ulterior motives for going in the first place are going to be like when are we getting back in person i got to get to my favorite bar yeah that's it that's gonna be interesting well thank you so much it's always so much fun talking to you thank you guys for your great questions we'll try to get dr hawk back as soon as her schedule allows either by herself or with dr lyle we do have dr lyle coming up on march 21st which is the first day of the new season meaning i've done the shows for a year and he's coming on with dr goldhamer this time oh boy trump double trouble it should be a good time exactly so thank you so much it's great to see you always and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow because my guest is another heavy hitter none other than dr john mcdougall take care dr hawk bye bye thank you so much see you soon bye
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