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Episode 1: Beating Your Genes
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Good evening everybody welcome to our first show of unblocking your path to happiness. I'm your host in Nate G. and one of the topics of today's show today is this concept of beating your genes. Now I actually got interested in this subject kind of accidentally. I loved reading new books, spy novels, crime dramas, some sort of mysteries, and I always look to sprinkle in some nonfiction self-improvement books once in a while. So for me, I've always been interested in actually how the mind works, and really why we are the way we are. So about 10 years ago I was reading a book about health called The Pleasure Trap. And in that book the author was making the case that happiness is tied to health in a really big way and of course it made sense to me but it wasn't anything that brilliantly new. But the really unique concept though is that the author explained that pleasure and happiness were actually two completely different feelings. Pleasure being short term and happiness being long term. And the interesting part though is that they made the case that it's not really in our instinct to look for happiness it's in our instinct to look for pleasure. Sometimes pleasure and happiness align, like when we're finding someone really special to be romantic with and we're getting pleasure along with happiness, but sometimes it doesn't align like when we can't resist a really rich delicious chocolate cheesecake despite maybe having diabetes or something. So in modern society what the authors suggest is that understanding some of these instincts and then being able to go against them may actually be what makes us happy. So to talk about this a little bit more let's welcome our guest today author of The Pleasure Trap, Dr. Doug Lisle, here to talk about this concept. Welcome Dr. Lisle. [Doug:] Yeah it's good to be here thanks for having me. [Nate:] Yeah thank you for having us. So talk us through a little bit about this this concept. [Doug:] Well the the notion is that in the pleasure trap is that that we were not designed by nature to actually persue happiness per se. We're actually designed to pursue pleasure. For example food and sex being the number one things that that people are actually...the positive goals that people seek. And avoidance of pain being the number one negative goals that they seek to avoid. And so you're sort of being pushed and pulled along along a path that will ultimately be successful genetically by trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The the way that happiness works with us is it's actually a secondary guiding system that is helping you along the way to try to put together a sequence of behavior that's successful in the pursuit of pleasure. So for example somebody that is hunting. Actually during the process of the hunt they have a productive feeling of happiness. It isn't the it isn't the kind of happiness that you feel like...but it is in fact a feeling of happiness because you're you're actually fully engaged and interested in what you're doing and it feels inherently very productive. This is the same kind of feeling that probably, you know, a football team that's marching down the field feels. It's it's making progress towards a goal and that is how our moods are designed to essentially guide our behavior through longer stretches of time than the way pleasure works. Pleasure is a very short term. It's a few moments. It's very intense. And pleasure is sort of the exclamation point at the end of a series of successful actions. So the ultimate sort of pleasure and happiness combination would be in romance where it's creating happiness to meet somebody new. There's a lot of excitement, there's very great sensitivity towards the feedback from the other person that they find us appealing and the feeling that we have as we find them appealing. Those are moods of happiness but they are not actually pleasure. Pleasure is the actual sexual activity and physical activities that are involved and those are shorter term relative to the the happiness dance that is a guidance system that takes us that direction. So that is why for example when we meet somebody that -- and we've had a good interaction with them -- we will actually say (it is very good manners to say), "It's been a pleasure." And what we are really saying, the truth is, is that this has been a mood of happiness but it has been in such a good mood of happiness, I could almost call it a pleasure. And in that way we are saying a very flattering thing about the interaction that we had with the person. [Nate:] Okay and so is it common for people to come to confuse happiness and pleasure? It almost seems like our language wasn't designed or was designed to kind of mend/meld the two together. [Doug:] Yeah I think people are confused because they're two separate ways of feeling really good. They actually have to do with neural activation in very different areas of the brain. So mood regulating circuits are essentially charting when you're making success. If you think about it as a sport but then it would be the equivalent of happiness is kind of what's happening to a football team every time they make a first down or whenever they have a successful play as they're making progress. A mood of unhappiness is what happens every time that you lose yardage or go the other direction, you know, essentially things don't go well. So your happiness and unhappiness are little guidance systems that are trying to get you to do things in a successful way as you can advance the ball downfield. Now the the touchdown or scoring, that's what pleasure is. In fact it's interesting that that's what guys call sexual activity, is they call it "scoring". But this is how nature is constructed is with these with these two different kinds of feedback systems. They're actually located in different areas of the brain and they actually use different neural chemicals and they actually have quite different experiences. So happiness is not the same thing as pleasure and if we can learn to distinguish those two it's very clear that they're different things. [Nate:] Now is this global with all humans and all animals or is this just because we're in modern society today? [Doug:] Oh no this is -- these are -- universal principles of the way the way neurons work and the way brains are put together. So it's also true of your cat. So your cat is in a mood of happiness as its curled up by the fireplace and everything's pleasant. But it's it's having a pleasurable experience as its chomping down the canned cat food. So those are two separate things. It's actually getting a mood of happiness as it sees you moved to the refrigerator, and it gets up out of its chair and it's running towards you meowing. That's it -- it's actually excited and happy that it's about to get fed, so that's a mood of happiness but the pleasure won't take place until it's eating. So these are -- this is -- essentially the nature of the way brains are constructed and it's not only universal to humans but it's universal to the animal kingdom. [Nate:] That's interesting. That has a lot of implications. So does that... so obviously, life isn't all about food and sex (or maybe it is) because, you know, we go to work every day. We maybe go on a hike with a friend, we go grab some coffee with with, you know, a colleague... Is life just about food and sex? [Doug:] It's actually surprisingly about food and sex. Food and sex are tremendously major motivational targets for human behavior. But actually what life is about is about gene reproduction. And so food and sex are just intermediate goals for the ultimate goal of life which is gene reproduction. And if you look past, deeply through the layers or veneers of the different motivations for human behavior you will see gene reproduction at the root of everything. That is why people trim their toenails, that's why they get their hair cut, that's why they go to work, that's why they mow their front yard. They don't know that this is true. The motivations...the ultimate motivations for these goals are not within them. But for example think about parents concerned and upset about their kids doing their homework. It makes no sense for us to try to figure out why that is without the understanding ultimately that life is about gene reproduction. So the mother and father are upset that Junior isn't doing his homework or he's not doing so well, because they want him to do better in school. They want him to do better school so that he can do better in high school. They want him to have better grades in high school so that he can go to a better college. They want him to have a better college education so that he can get a better job, and they want him to have a better job so that he can get more resources. And they want him to get more resources so that he can essentially compete more effectively for mates. And they wanted to have better mates because they want those the better mates have fewer mutations and they're more sexually attractive and more psychologically attractive. And the reason why they want that for him is they want their grandchildren to be better genetic specimens. And they want their grandchildren to be better genetic specimens so that the grandchildren can successfully compete for mates in the second generation out. And so that it's statistically more likely that their genes will be on the planet five hundred years from now. Those parents have no clue that that is why they are upset the Junior is not doing well in algebra, but that is in fact why they're upset that Junior is not doing well in algebra. And all of their behavior and feelings associated with that challenge are related to gene reproduction. [Nate:] And so how did this...how do these theories and how did this how did we start to know...how did you come to learn this? What's all the basis behind this? [Doug:] Yeah this was...this was exposed to the world in a famous book by the distinguished Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. And the the name of the book is The Selfish Gene and it was in fact the most important book in the last part of the 20th century in terms of the education of the world's biologists. So The Selfish Gene is actually fairly technical. I mean the intelligent layman can read it, they may not want to read it, because it's a little bit of a struggle. But if you've got sharp listeners out there that that are up to the task and would be interested there is no greater dose of cold water to clear your palate. And clear your ability to think than The Selfish Gene. So The Selfish Gene actually explained to the world's biologists and to anybody else who is paying attention that this is the driving force of how how life works. And this was...Dawkins himself didn't actually invent this argument. This argument was was realized by a couple of major biologists in the 1960s. William Hamilton and George Williams, both major-league, A-list biological theorists. And so Dawkins book was an outstanding popularization, and in some ways, an extension of those ideas and those ideas would then finally come to the attention of psychologists in the late 1980s. And that's when I finally I got exposed to that as a young psychologist. [Nate:] So you're not like 80 years old right? [Doug:] No. But the older I get I start... I think that anybody under 30 doesn't really know anything. [Nate:] See the older I get I realize how much I don't know. When I was in college and I was taking the just the regular psychology classes...a lot of the stuff I, you know, I probably didn't pay attention as much as I needed to, but a lot of it was was a basic idea about why things are bad, why people are unhappy, why they're stressed... And one of the things that, you know, they they really briefly covered on is that you know animals have this "survival of the fittest" mentality. It never really quite made sense to me but what do you think about all that? Is it just pop psychology, is it something that's not...that needs to be explained in greater detail? [Doug:] I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Give me another...turn the camera like 20 degrees and ask again. [Nate] So I keep hearing...you know when I was hearing in psychology classes that survival of the fittest is what drives all of our behavior and that we're always just trying to be the fittest we can be and that's how the world works but I've heard you talk a little bit about Hamilton's law and Hamilton's rule and how that survival the fittest really isn't the way the world works. [Doug] Right yes survival of the fittest is somewhat simplistic. So it's the notion that essentially the animal that it is the best one that survives is the one that perpetuates the species most effectively etc. The the truth of the matter is that biology is more complicated than that. So very often for example, so we have to understand what the word fit means when we talk about this. It is in fact survival of the fittest but it's not survival of the fittest animal, it's actually a survival of the fittest strategies or genes. So genes are actually strategies for survival and those genes might for example make fur thicker to make it warmer for an animal and if the climate has turned cold then that's a that's a good genetic strategy. That's a good place for an animal to essentially use its resources but another way to be "fit" would be to, for example, let's suppose you're a bird and you've got a choice in a habitat to keep quiet and make sure the predators don't get you, or sing your heart out as loud as possible in hopes that if you're a male for example you might mate with a whole bunch of females before some predator gets you. And so you can see that there's two very different strategies here. One of them is: Look, I want to make sure that I survive as long as I can, and maybe I mate and maybe I don't. And the other strategy is: I don't really care too much as long as I survive. I want to survive as long as I happen to get lucky, but really I'm trying to mate. Now it's going to turn out that the second strategy is much more like nature. So animals have two strategies. One strategy is to survive but the other one is to reproduce. And those two strategies are naturally in conflict with each other. So the football player that goes out for the football team in high school, or let's say he's a professional for god sakes, or a college player... What they're trying to do is they're trying to show off how fit they are and, in doing something difficult, they are in fact showing that they are potentially much more fit than people that are not out there banging heads and banging muscles with them. However they are also increasing the likelihood that they get severe injury or get killed. And so as a result of this, you see the two strategies are actually directly opposed to each other. And yet...so we we can only understand this potentially self-destructive behavior, i.e. non-survival behavior in understanding that the survival that's at stake here that's important is not the individual, it's their genes. The only way for the genes to survive is to define the opposite gamete that matches you if you're a sperm producer you got to find an egg producer and you've got to get your sperm into her. That's the only way that you're going to reproduce. And so therefore the behavior that you see is directed towards that, rather than directed towards survival itself. [Nate] Interesting. So sometimes people can be pursuing that genetic...the reproduction of their gene at the cost of their survival but if it works out then they just benefited a huge amount. Am I understanding that right? [Doug] Well, the way their minds are built is, their minds are actually built to try to calibrate those two goals. So the mind is actually designed, as is the body, it's designed to actually maximally increase the statistical likelihood of the genes that are inside that body getting into the next generation. That is actually the entire point of the organism. There are...so you can see that there would be a huge range of strategies that would that would put different investment amounts into different problems. So for example we could...we could eat real carefully and exercise and go to sleep on time, and go to work and save all our money and put it in the bank, and buy really good health insurance, and etc etc, and then make sure that we never go out to a club because people with knives and guns and drunken behavior are at clubs, and we can make sure that we always came home right after work and didn't drive anymore...etc. We could essentially direct our entire life towards maximizing our lifespan and reducing the likelihood of an accidental or immature death. We could do that, but we would not be maximizing the likelihood of our genes surviving. Because it turns out that it's at dance clubs with people being drunk and wild that actually open up opportunities for gene reproduction if you're a male. So you would you can see that the correct strategy or the optimal strategy for an animal is to be concerned with both goals. Number one being prudent that we're likely to survive and number two the willingness to sacrifice some possibility of survival in order to maximize the likelihood reproduction. And you aren't just going to reproduce once in principle. So for example you don't want to just bet the house on doing one reproduction activity - and see whether or not you can get a child in the next generation. In principle you want to optimize your behavior over that problem. And so that's what human life looks like, is people are actually trying to optimize their behavior in order to optimize gene reproduction and they don't, like I said, they have no idea that that's what they're doing. But they're doing things like trying to get into nice neighborhoods with nice jobs get nice college degrees and have nice haircuts and nice cars, and what they're trying to do is they're trying to put themselves in positions to compete for nice genes. And that's why it is that people do what they do because nice genes, very good genes, the best genes that you can get your hands on and reproduce with... It's more valuable to do that than to scatter your seed among a bunch of very low-end DNA, because that DNA in in the stage would not have had a very good chance of successful reproduction. So you see that people target their reproductive efforts towards people that are, relative to them, pretty fancy. In other words that's kind of what people want to do is they want to stay targeting their gene recombination with other people at pretty high targets. Otherwise the nervous system says that you're actually wasting your time, and therefore it doesn't create moods of happiness to be chasing people that are that are genetic inferiors that we could very likely reproduce with. That doesn't create a lot of happiness for most people. [Nate] Now, the modern environment... take us through like what the modern environment has done to this. [Doug] Well I mean the modern environment has altered a lot of things about the landscape. One of the most interesting things about the human landscape is the brain wasn't really designed to have a feel that it was going to live to 60 or 70 years old. So the brain is actually designed with a with an assessment chip that figures that you might not live all that long, and so it's going to turn out that it's designed to fire up, for example, lust and love responses when you run into somebody that gives you good feedback that is... that appears to be about the best specimen you've seen in the last two, three years. And the reason is, is that that in a stone-age environment you have to be... What we call romantic love, the lust and love responses that surround that situation, that's sort of the holy grail thing that human beings are seeking and of course the reason why that's true is that you're going to be doing gene reproduction with the person that would be at the very high end of what it is that you can trade for in the genetic marketplace. So human beings seek that feeling. They seek the feeling that -- wow, they got a really hell of a deal -- and they're all excited about it. And the reason why they feel excited about that and why it's possible but for them to feel that fairly often, but not super often, is that they're designed by nature to essentially calibrate their excitement over how good a deal this is relative to my options. So that is why, you know, the the excitement for example around the World Cup is extraordinary because it only happens every four years. It's really rare. And the same thing with the Olympic Games. If you held the Olympics every 90 days people wouldn't be that excited about it: Meh, you win some, you lose some. There's a whole lot of opportunities. So the same thing is true when it comes to love and romance. You're designed by nature to look for a really good deal, and to be pretty picky about it. And so that when you finally come across a situation where it looks like somebody's very interested in you and you're quite interested in them, then you fire up those circuits, and that's going to happen, you know, it was designed to happen several times in a human life that would live to 40. So the modern environment though has made some some things happen which are you know you know which are kind of problematic. And in the Stone Age this would had started happening when people are, you know, 16, 17, most girls would have been pregnant by 18 or so, and most girls would have been pregnant 10 or 15 times during the next 25 years of their life and they would have born eight or ten children by...four, five, six different people. It's probably how that would've happened. The breakups of those situations would have been... The men would have, you know, if they were "in love" with the female they would have stuck around for a few years and they would have provisioned offspring that kind of looked like them, to some degree. But there wouldn't have been financial disasters for example of what we would call divorce. So there really weren't any things like divorce because divorce was... divorce is a concoction of the modern environment that has to do with the extraordinary wealth that human beings have now been producing for the last 10,000 years. And wealth itself, i.e. improvements to real estate, houses, cars, pension plans, you know what I'm saying, furniture, these things are all... these things are completely...they're very useful for many many things and make our lives much more comfortable, but they are not in fact part of human natural history. And so because we have these things now and these things are extremely useful for example to put nice shoes on your kids, and get their teeth fixed, and send them to, you know, live in a nice neighborhood so we could send them to a nice school... These things are very important and useful for that child to be able to compete for mates in the next generation. So because these resources are important we we developed laws and rituals around essentially insisting that males provision these children indefinitely. And so that led to what we now call marriage. And marriage is in fact a totally unnatural process for humans. I wouldn't say *totally*, let's just say it's 90% unnatural. And so our modern environment is full of social, psychological, sociological architecture that is built around wealth and marriages that are quite inconsistent with human natural history, and as a result, causes a lot of unhappiness actually. So that would be...that's an interesting or actually quite fascinating alteration of the landscape but it's happened in the modern environment where it's at odds with the Stone Age mind that sits inside of our skulls. [Nate] It's very interesting. I have a comment actually from one of the listeners in the chatroom, and the comment is "With regards to mating then, why do men love trashy women so much?" (In the context of dealing with higher level people, why do they love the the women who I guess...yeah.) [Doug] Right. They don't actually love trashy women, they they love sexually attractive trashy women. So it's very important that we distinguish the difference. The...what people do is they can scan each other with their eyes and they can actually count mutations, and the more mutations you see on somebody, the less attractive they are. And so when you see highly attractive people, what you're actually looking at is you're looking at people with low amounts of mutations in the physical arena. Now, human beings actually also scan people for mutations inside the brain, because the brain is...the mind is responsible for about probably a third of the human genetic code, and so it's important to human beings when they choose mates that they also and for mutation loads inside their heads. That's what most human mating takes place after a fair amount of conversation, because you use conversation to walk your way through the neural circuits of the other person, which means you're actually testing and looking for their mutation load to see how "beautiful" their mind is. However, two-thirds of the genetic code for humans has absolutely nothing to do with the mind it has to do with just the physical architecture of the individual. And we're designed to look for a mutation loads. Now, throughout the animal kingdom almost the entire consideration of how sexually attractive another creature is has to do with what they look like or what they smell like. In other words, really basic physical parameters. In very few cases are animals the slightest bit interested in the intelligence or neural circuits of the other animal. So that is a, essentially, unique characteristic of human beings that we would give a damn about what's inside their heads. So why men are attracted to trashy women is that they are, first of all, as I said, they are attracted to highly sexually *attractive* women, i.e. low mutation loads, and then they are additionally attracted to cues in the women's behavior that indicates that the women may be willing to be sexually active without a lot of discrimination for the males they choose. So that way if I'm a "5" male and there's a female that is a "9" but she looks very trashy, then I'm thinking that there's a statistical increased likelihood that I'm going to be able to have sex with her. Whereas if she's a 9 that actually does not look trashy, then I'm well aware that she is very conservative in her mate choices and that there's just no way in hell I'm going to get to those eggs. So that's why men "like the look of trashy women" is because it's an excitement cue just like...it's essentially just like the cat being excited about the refrigerator opening. It looks like we're going to be able to get some food. And in this case it looks like we're going to be able to get to some genes. [Nate] Very interesting. That explains a lot. Thank you. So the interesting part is, with all of this, it seems like people can fall into some traps with the modern environment just because they're following exactly what they're looking for in their genes: The food and the sex and the trashy women and the cat food and whatever it is, how do they get out of...like where these traps come from and how do they how do they beat these traps? [Doug] well there's there's quite a few of these traps and so we could talk about a number of them, but let me give you an example of a beautiful trap that is that is set by the genetic code in order to increase the statistical likelihood of the gene surviving but the genes do not care about the body that they're located in. And this is what's going on... Let's imagine for example the the mind of a female in her mid-20s. We'll make her early 20s so we're gonna make her a little more naive. And she has two men, and we're going to say that they are actually in terms of their physical architecture -- their bone structure, their facial structure, their musculature, their posture, their skin -- they are equivalent, in terms of their mutation loads, so we're going to call them both, you know, nice-looking young men. However, one of them has his hair long. Has a little beard and little mustache, has some tattoos, wears an earring, and he plays the guitar, and we're going to call him Jimmy the guitar player. The other one actually works at a bank, you know, got his degree in accounting from Cal State, and he's just starting, he's the junior manager in training there at the bank. And he doesn't make a lot of money but he's bringing home his first paycheck. He makes about $26,000 a year but he's, you know, he's he's on track and maybe you know, "making a success" out of himself. And our girl here, let's suppose she works at the bank or works at the at the clothing store next to the bank. Now, both of these young men are attracted to her. And she finds them both physically acceptable. However she finds herself much more attracted to Jimmy the guitar player. And we're going to call the other guy Horace. Horace the bank teller. Now the interesting thing is that her mother is much more interested in Horace the bank teller, and if her mother knew what was going on inside of her head, her mother would be pleading for her to try to date Horace the bank teller, or she might. Now let's think about what's actually going on inside this head. Why would she even consider Jimmy, who, you know, doesn't even own a car, he owns a motorcycle. And has to bum rides with his guitar to his gigs, and he dropped out of high school. He's not stupid but the truth is he's got "flake" written all over him. Now what is going on inside this head? Why do good girls love bad boys? What's happening here? What's happening is that Jimmy is actually shedding cues or signaling that he will have sex with her and then dump her pretty soon. Now, you might say, "Why would that be appealing to her?" Now, the answer why that's appealing is because she has designed features inside of her nervous system that tell her that she actually wants to be used sexually and dumped by somebody who's got a good line. And the reason why it is that she would have that characteristic would be because if she's impregnated by him, then, and let's back up: He better have a pretty good line. In other words he should be someone who is acting like he's all into her, and he's gonna stick around, you know, for a long period of time, he's really into her, but he's also got cues that indicate that he's *not* going to do that. So it turns out he's sometimes missing in action when he should be available on his cell phone, and he kind of disappears for a couple days, and, you know, she's kind of trying to figure out what's going on, and he's just, he's a flake. And she suspects that he's sleeping with other people. Now, meanwhile, Horace keeps coming over and visiting on his break, and looking at the clothes in the closing store, and trying to flirt with her, and she just feels kind of flat with respect to Horace. Now what's happening here is that her genes are actually looking for sleazeball genes. They are looking for good-looking, cool, love-em and leave'em psychology inside the male. Because if she gets impregnated by Jimmy the guitar player then her son will actually have these same psychological characteristics, because both physical and psychological characteristics are inherited -- they are not learned, which is a big misunderstanding in modern psychology. So she's very likely to have similar characteristics in any son that she would have. That son then would be let loose upon the world and be doing the same thing to people just like her in the next generation, and they wind up with 200 children that he inseminates the valley with. Now, let's look at the statistical probabilities of these two different strategies. So if she mates with Jimmy, gets pregnant, he does not stick around. And in the Stone Age, that may significantly reduce the likelihood of little Jimmy Junior surviving. So we're going to say that the odds of little Jimmy Junior surviving to adulthood are now only 50% of what they would be if in fact a father was around to protect him. However, even though it's only a 50/50 chance that he's going to survive, if the little devil survives, he may be extremely sexually successful in the next generation, and not be a good guy that sticks around with anybody but instead basically leaves females of the next generation, in large numbers, with the burden of supporting little grand-Jimmy-Juniors on their own. In other words it's a method for stealing stealing resources out of females in the next generation. Now, if she were to mate with Horace instead then Horace Junior would be double the likelihood of survival, because after all, Horace is going to stick around, and stick with her through thick and thin. However Horace Junior, we know what he's going to be like. He's gonna find some nice gal, and he's going to mate with her, and he's going to stick around and play good dog with her so all of her little Horaces, of which she'll have half a dozen with the same guy, those -- all the little Horaces -- survived, and then all the little Horaces have six Horaces, and so we have some successful reproduction that way. The genes have actually tried to figure out what is the best way to go and you actually see in the modern female both strategies sitting inside of her head. And you see the turbulence inside of the modern female trying to decide between the two strategies. That in fact she wants it as exciting as possible but as-exciting-as-possible also means that that's going to be Jimmy the guitar player, that's going to dump her. And so she knows that "No, that's not really the optimal strategy, so I want to lean towards Horace the bank teller to some degree, but the more I lean that direction the more bored, sexually, I get." So what the modern female actually does is try her best to split the difference between those two strategies, but those two strategies were largely independent strategies in the Stone Age, and that's some of the weirdness of the genes as the genes are absolutely willing to sacrifice our girl -- we'll call her Sarah -- The genes are willing to sacrifice Sarah's happiness and have her be a single mom and struggle by herself in order to raise little Jenny The Cool. So there you go. [Nate] Hmm yeah. So it's interesting because, so now in modern days when, you know, the the girl doesn't necessarily have to be stuck with the kid because they have contraceptives and birth control and so is it advantageous to continue with the dual mating strategy? [Doug] Well, you know, what people really want to do is they want to...they're sort of seeking the perfect spice to their meal. They want it just exciting enough but they also want to safe. Which is exactly for example that's why we set up things like roller coasters. So we want them as exciting as possible but we still want it to be safe. And that's exactly what... how the human, you know, romance is optimally approached. But this is also why it's such a difficult process for people to pull off real successfully. Because in some ways they are seeking a...it is a strange potential that rests inside of human nature to actually get this thing right and have it stick. So it can happen. Like you can have a woman who, the guy that she meets is just exciting enough for her, and it's hitting both circuits enough and so she's happy. And you can have a guy who feels like he's gotten a great with the girl and he settles on down and his... Incidentally, the kind of guy that we call Horace we call out a pair-bonder. In other words they're willing to be bonded in a pair. And Jimmy the guitar player, we call that casual mating strategy. And so those are the two opposing strategies that sit inside human nature. You can have a guy that may have done some casual mating strategy in his time. In other words both strategies ...actually I painted this in a way that is not entirely accurate, for the sake of simplicity. In other words, every male has bold strategies sitting inside their head. And some men are... we're going to be what we call pair-bond dominant. And other men are going to be what we're going to call casual mating strategy dominant. So...but even a casual mating strategy -- a real player -- if he meets a female that he feels like is a better specimen than he is, he can suddenly find himself desperately wanting to play the the true love or pair-bond strategy. And the same thing is true with our Mr. Horace. Mr. Horace can be very pair-bond dominant. However, all he has to go is go to Las Vegas on at a conference and have one of those slutty women walk by that is highly attractive, that is signaling that she would be available to him in terms of casual mating strategy, and Horace the bank teller will get very interested in casual mating strategy quite quickly. So these are what we call resident programs that sit inside the computer of the mind. And what we are trying to do is (people in the modern environment) is actually quite evolutionarily novel. And that is that (it is evolutionarily novel) we're trying to like hit this thing right and have it be right for good. And that...it is possible because you will see that happen. But it would be useful for people to understand just how bizarre that hope is. And how inconsistent it is with human natural history. And therefore they might not be quite so embarrassed or disappointed when a relationship that that was very good for a while is no longer so good, and be willing to realize that that is what has happened and to move on. Because this is not a failure of either person or in fact a failure of love to be strong enough, but the truth is that human nature really wasn't built to have this thing work out and then work out forever. The fact that it sometimes can is just an interesting and tantalizing fluke. [Nate] that's interesting because I always joke around with my friends saying that divorce, you know, divorce is what, 50%, so one out of two people get a divorce. Now you've taught statistics so that means, you know, if one out of two people -- that means if you get married and you don't get divorced, your spouse will. [Doug] That is a joke I've never... that is really a high class joke. I've gotta give it to you Nate that's a winner. [Nate] But it's interesting because what you're saying is really that we are who we are and if people get in a relationship that they think is going to be a really great deal for both people that it is...what you're saying, what you're suggesting is that it may not be entirely natural for this to last for 50 years or forty years or thirty years or whatever it is. And if it does great but if it doesn't, it's nothing to be ashamed about. [Doug] Absolutely. In fact it would be very surprising if it would. Now, as a psychologist I've been around long enough now...I've been doing clinical psychology for thirty years, so I actually have had the opportunity to watch some people -- some couples -- and watch their rise from young adults into mid adulthood. And so I've been able to actually have a bird's-eye view at a lot of people's lives and to know the intimate details of actually, how they're working. And a remarkable number of people actually have relationships that that work over a very long period of time. I would hazard to guess, actually I'm not actually guessing, there's scientific evidence that would tell us that it's on the order of probably one out of five or one out of one out of four. If a relationship is together ten years there's about a one out of five or one out of four chance that those people are actually both still quite into their partner and that they're really...that they want to be there. Now there's about a three out of four chance that they don't want to be there. So not only do we have 50% divorces we've also got seventy five percent of people that don't want to be there. So that starts looking more like the world that you and I know. It starts looking at the world that... In moments when we find out what's really going on behind closed doors we find out that a good friend of ours that we thought had a good marriage certainly had, you know, a respectful partnership and some happiness and love between two people, but may not have been really into that person for many years! I can't tell you how many people I have heard said, "Well we haven't had sex in 10 years," or 15 years. And that is an extremely common event that takes place. On the other hand I have people that have been together for 20 years and they are very sexually active. And it's it's as if it was still, you know, year 2 or year 3. And so the range of outcomes is extraordinary and people that are in very good relationships a lot of times don't sound much different than the people that are not very good relationships. And this is where life could get confusing for people, because a set of little women that get together once a while and meet for coffee, from their college sorority 25 years later, and they talk...they don't get too intimate because there's some defenses about this, and there's a lot of embarrassment. So people don't necessarily talk exactly about what's actually happening in their relationships. So they bitch a little bit about their husbands because it's sort of, you know, chic to do that and it's... people got some frustration so they talk. So it's going to turn out very often that the woman who is actually very happily married will sound a lot like a look the woman who's unhappily married. It's like, "Oh, god, you know how it is, Bill forgot my birthday." O, you know, "Men!" You know, whatever. There'll be this kind of this kind of talk but the truth is if you ask that woman what she really thinks she's like really happy, she's still very attracted her husband, he's attracted to her, and they are actually, they found the Holy Grail. She's still got complaints and frustrations but it's of a completely different magnitude. Whereas for the other women in her little group, they talk that same way but actually what's going on behind closed doors is much more typical of long-term relationships and that is that somebody no longer qualifies. You know, the husband is not attracted to her, or she's not attracted to the husband, or neither one is attracted to each other, and the truth of the matter is, is this thing that we call love is really not there. And what they have is a, you know, a responsible friendship. They may have a couple of kids, and people are are watching their lives while away and they don't know what to do about it. And they have expectations from the church and from their social environment etc that, that, you know, "You guys are solid," you know "responsible people, you wouldn't consider divorce." But the truth is is a whole heck of a lot of them sitting at that table have considered divorced many many times, and they can't...they cannot see a responsible way to make that happen. So...they don't. And so an awful lot of people sail through this whole life never jumping outside of the box, and they didn't even have any idea how the heck they *got* in the box! And it wasn't their fault. They got in the box from the extraordinary sociological changes that took place in this species after it started to develop wealth and civilization. And so, you know, these are the curiosities of the modern world that I find -- we happen to be focusing on a particularly negative one -- but I mean there are many, many positives. There are more positives than there are negatives. But the reason I happen to be off on this at the moment is that some of these negatives are extraordinary and potent and they are difficult to spot how they happened. And so that is why this novel perspective on human nature is shedding light into corners of many of the roots of our suffering that has not been previously available. [Nate] That's very interesting. We've got another comment from the chatroom. Somebody's asking what about the research that shows married people live longer than single people? I'm not sure if that's true but it sounds like you've awakened... [Doug] Yeah of course it's true. Yeah here's the truth: married people are inherently more conscientious than unmarried people. So married people are less likely to smoke, drink, drive their cars fast, do LSD and do all kind...hang out in and dive bars. So there is nothing inherent about marriage that is helping anybody's health. It is the fact that the people who are married are statistically simply more responsible specimens with respect to...it is also true that people that who are married have better credit reports than people that are not married. It is true that they had better high school GPAs than people that are not married. In other words everything under the Sun is is superior in people that are married. People that are married are much less likely to have schizophrenia. Or bipolar disorder or other kind of psycho psychiatric disorder that you can imagine. They're much less likely to be paranoid personality disorder. So this is a... the pablum that the press will feed on the front of Good Housekeeping magazine, but it has absolutely nothing to do with how health works. [Nate] So next time I have a family gathering and my family asks me, "Why are you not married?" I say well 'cause I file my taxes late? Is that a... will that explain the lack of conscientiousness on that end? [Doug] Yeah that explains everything. [Nate] We got we get a few more minutes left... Just to recap a little bit about, you know, finding happiness, beating your genes, basically what you're saying is that the whole purpose of life is -- from a very biological, mechanical way -- is really just to reproduce our genes so that they're alive and well and kicking statistically in the next couple of generations. And so all of our behavior is really centered around that goal, whether it's romance... [Doug] It is. But it's romance, professional success, anything that you can think of. Now, what what *I'm* interested in is that what we're trying to do here is to try to out think the genes. So what we're actually trying to do is instead figure out how we can optimize our happiness rather than optimize genetic success. And so that's where it gets tricky. This is what we call "beat the genes." So beat the genes becomes a strategy when we start to figure out what the genes are up to and when they are goading us into traps. So let me give you a quick example of goading into a trap. A young man who is (or any man at any age) might be in a in a bar or in any situation where there is a conflict between himself and another male. And there's a... there's females that are potentially observing this thing and might even be a specific female that's at issue. So the stone-age brain will tell him to don't back down, because if you back down in the Stone Age troop you would lose mating status and that mating status could really reduce your sexual success considerably. And you're not going to live that long anyway in the Stone Age. You're only, you know, you're 28, you're probably only gonna live to 35. So if you take a big hit in terms of your your cashet behind this incident, this could be tantamount to sexual to reproductive death. So don't back down, even though the risk may be very high for serious injury or death. And so this kind of thing is where the genes are designed to play strategies optimal for a rough and tumble stone environment, but those are disastrous circuits to be sitting inside of a modern young man who's got 50 years of life ahead of him, all kinds of other mating opportunities, no longer lives in a village that's going to remember any incident like this. And what he needs to do is shut his mouth and turn and walk away and be hissed and booed and laughed at as he does. That is actually the optimal happiness strategy. But it's hard for him to know it if he doesn't understand the raging hormones in him that are telling him not to do that. [Nate] That's a really really good example and I would love for you to come back and actually talks about some more examples with some questions that people have and maybe if you guys, if the listeners here have questions, post them in the comments section at the very bottom of the episode and we'll hope to have Dr. Lisle back talking about some more specifics about beating the genes. [Doug] Terrific. My pleasure. [Nate] Dr. Lisle, thank you very much for coming on. Check out Dr. Lisle's website EsteemDynamics.org So Dr. Lisle, again I really appreciate you coming on. [Doug] terrific thank you very much for having me and I look forward to talking to you again. [Nate] Okay take care. All right everybody thank you very much for listening we'll be back next week with another episode to talk in more detail about different things that we can do to beat our genes. Thanks very much, I'm Nate G., finding happiness with beating your genes.
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