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Episode 107: Bullying, Job satisfaction, Changing careers
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here we've got a pretty good show ahead of ahead of us today we got a lot of questions we got a caller on hold dr. Lyle how're you doing today good good how you doing doing pretty good that's spring is coming so it's getting a little bit warmer but yeah that's nothing compared to our folks in the Midwest and a colder region so I'm a bit of a pansy because I lived in Southern California so been looking forward to it all right well yeah we're going to 60 there thank goodness made getting him back oh my teeth oh you know what it was like 40 40 degrees a couple weekends ago and I was just about ready to put the snow pants on all right well we're just going to get right to the questions dear dr. Lyle what do I do what do you do about being bullied by someone you don't know you always say to look for status as the motivation but how do you give status to the bully when you don't know anything about him I was bullied in junior high by a kid who I didn't even know his name he was harassing me for being smart I did well in school and had just one student of the month and he was harassed me for being rich which we weren't he'd bother me every day after school I was waiting for my mom to pick me up I just tried to ignore him and eventually he just stopped kids are often Billy for being overweight I saw an 8 year old patient recently and she was really having a hard time at school due to being teased about her weight what should I have told her to do for an older kid I guess you could suggest they just agree and walk away but this kid is 8 years is only eight years old a good question here and one of the issues is is that every situation is different and so we we try to we try to get to the to the root of the bullies motivational system and we try to twist it a little bit if we can so for example if I had a kid that was being bullied in school I would definitely use a third party like the vice-principal or whatever and we would call in both kids at the same time and and essentially but I would have the vice principal I would instruct the vice principal that what we wanted to do is we wanted to a revered as the counselor everything we would want to to essentially give the bully status so we would want to to let them know that they were you know they were a kid that was you know pretty cool and has you know hasil has a lot of you know has a lot of Wow has a lot of cool chips where we would say that and so you know when you're when you're somebody like that it's actually a you know it's really a fine thing to use those chips wisely and the and so you know sometimes it's sometimes it's a little tricky to figure that out but one of the best things that you can do is to actually treat kids that are that are quieter and be be good to them and that's a that's a good way to go about doing things and so that's what you know you would be it would be a good thing for them to do this and we you know we would we think that that's that's something they ought to think about okay so what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to give them status and with the one hand and we are threatening to take it away with it with the other if they don't use it wisely that's the idea and so it's tricky for the bully in that situation because they they have been given status but they might have to give it up if they misuse their quote power there they're cool chips so we don't we don't admonish the bully exactly we essentially this is a this is a version of on my website I call that the Boy Scout Jamboree principle that if we're trying to suck up to a teacher to get a special okay to leave and go to the Boy Scout Jamboree and we're suppose to never be able to do such a thing in her class or she says this we better be sucking up to her early tell her how great her class is how much we love it etc etc we better do this two or three months ahead of time before we come up to the Boy Scout Jamboree date at which point we're gonna say oh gee you know I just have this thing and now now she's in trouble because she she essentially is going to give up a bunch of status if she denies this kid to be able to take this week off and so she we put her in a bind all we're going after here is the cost-benefit analysis of the person on the other side of the equation and so it's not the the reason why it's not easy to give you a one-size-fits-all and any of these things is because it depends on the the status matrix that is driving the behavior inside that kid's head so that that's why it takes a little bit of art to do this to diffuse this and this is uh but this is the general direction that I would go if I were the kid himself I mean obviously people have dealt with bullies forever by just trying to be quiet and fade in the background and that's what a lot of kids do that's a lot of times the only thing they can do but if it's a repetitive thing and it doesn't go away then you use a third party and use a third party very with a lot of crafts and with this sort of craft Boy Scout Jamboree principle we disturbed the cost/benefit in the bully's head and we caused confusion or cognitive dissonance about what's really in their best interest and that's how we wind up Dee railing bullying behavior now now this this guy asks about about this girl so we've got an 8 year old girl in school being having a hard time being teased about a weight the usually a good way to deal with this without being too just about anything or being made fun of about anything is to essentially acknowledge it and and therefore defuse it so if someone said you know gee you're fat you say what you're right okay I'm working on it real simple okay so this is a rather than even being silent and therefore cowed by this then you know nasty kids can be essentially encouraged by that that kind of passivity so we we want to defuse it in a in the simplest way this is what we call confess and avoid so we just say now you got or you know if slightly slightly smarter group of kids at age 12 we'd say yep you're right and hey you got a point you should do something about it you got a point I'm working on it real simple so we do that we do that so that they they don't observe that they're having a potent effect emotionally so the kid has something to say and we might come up with two or three of those that they say and pretty soon it gets old okay and so we don't fight and engage a battle with disagreeable little children who like to do this to other people we just acknowledge basically give them a Teflon response and we move on all right what else we have fantastic all right yeah and eight-year-olds can handle this whereas you know do we see a lot of bullying and younger kids or what what age to do kids start to show they're disagreeable cells and they're nasty so I don't know I mean it's a probably theoretically almost at any age you could start seeing this but there's usually adults around with kids or four or five six years old it gets a little more oh it gets a little bit more problematic as the kids become in more time independent out away from a direct adult supervision and so you know and then it's going to happen you got 10 years of it from potentially 8 to 18 so it's useful to have essentially very simple little strategies that that don't count on anything miraculously happening in the bully we're just simply going right at their cost-benefit analysis as as as elegantly and simply as we can and with essentially the notion is that we're really kind of not worth it okay we're trying to make this is not worth it as possible for the bully not by fighting fire with fire but instead stepping around the problem so that the Shire kid that's not as that doesn't have the defences can essentially walk their way around and avoid the problem if it gets tougher than that then adult supervision and intervention is increasingly necessary and you know then we've got a different issue and if we need to if we need to bring in big guns and get in the face of a little sociopath we will okay and then we make it a big issue so we go small first and then we we dial up the sanctions against the little shithead to the extent that we need to and you can you can bring a lot of pressure on a family and a group of people if we if we decide to get tough all right interesting all right okay now we're going to turn the ship completely erection and ask about job satisfaction but action is our conscientiousness intelligence and stability the personality traits most important in job satisfaction there's trying to understand two of these aspects with regards to employment success assuming conscientiousness it's adequate so if intelligence is speed of understanding and reacting and stability is the ability to withstand survivability how would someone who's above the IQ range for a certain occupation but below the stability range fair at their position this listener watched a lecture throughout a list of occupations according to the IQ range necessary to succeed in excel and states that we should aim to be within the top quartile of percent people in the field for the best satisfaction mmm two things number one you're breaking up and number two seems like we've had this question before but maybe we haven't let's see our conscientious intelligence of stability to both support traits and job satisfaction well first of all there's a there's almost a I'm thrown off by the question the question looks reasonable but I believe there's a subtext in the question that that begins to be not reasonable or maybe it is severe the standpoint if you're an employer I'm just trying to look at I'm trying to figure out which angle of the telescope we're looking through the if you're an employer I guess it would be useful to try to predict job satisfaction and employees I suppose and and so you would want to pick highly conscientious highly intelligent highly emotionally stable and highly agreeable people so agreeable would be a significant issue for most most jobs I think so from the standpoint of an employer those things are all useful traits the if you're asking is an individual what are the most important things then it's kind of a fait accompli it's like you're not changing these characteristics anyway and so the it doesn't really matter what's the most important characteristics for you because you are who you are and and a lot more will go into your so since you since your personality is essentially well it is it's a fixed issue there's nothing we can do to change it so now the question is we go on here the trying to understand these subjects with regards to employment success okay assuming conscientiousness is adequate if intelligence is speed of understand and reacting which is not actually what intelligence is exactly people that are very intelligent might be slow and methodical and very careful and then get things right that are more complex than somebody else so it's not just speed of understanding and reacting it's a that would be a it's an error right there but it's not completely wrong stability and ability withstand stressors and variability how would someone who is above the IQ range for circuit occupation but below the stability range fair and there are in the position this is way down in the weeds of course we could not possibly say because we don't know how much IQ matters into given occupation and we don't know how much emotional stability a matter is going to give an occupation though this is this is someone is trying to see patterns here that can't be discerned unfortunately I watch the talk and the speaker had a list of occupations according to the IQ range necessary to succeed in Excel and states that you should aim to be within the top quartile two for the best satisfaction now that is interesting and that's a that's an interesting observation and it very well likely is true so this is basically because you're going to be competing in an ecological niche and whatever niche you're competing in it would probably be a good idea to be in the top quarter for IQ for people that entered that niche so you wouldn't want to be the stupidest RN on your floor because it would be showing up that you are the stupidest RN on the floor and it it would be you know in a source of embarrassment and repeated repeated feelings of vulnerability etc so if you are if you are in the bottom of your profession or your your occupation for brains and brains are a very significant issue with respect to this quite frankly in the NBA I don't think anybody cares the because the brains is not an important predictor of success there the but if you're in an occupation where intelligence rather than physical skill or some other characteristic is actually critical to the success in the field and is highly associated with variants in the success in the field then certainly it would pay to to pick something that that might be in your you know that you might have an advantage in that niche I think that that's true I'm not sure how you would go about that except that people sort of naturally do this in terms of when things start to get tough they bail out there was once upon a time I had thought that I wanted to be a PhD in astrophysics because I thought when found really cool okay so I of course started with freshman physics and I found out with a freshman physics even though I did manage to get an A and I did in fact like it it was pretty hard and it isn't like this came easily to me that I was the next Einstein so I decided that maybe I would do something else that's my life instead of that been any right I think yes so there's a few things there in that question it's a complicated question I think the person sort of looking for several different issues and some of them are not answerable but hopefully this gives a little a little bit of issue if you're an employer obviously you're looking for things that employers should be looking for conscientiousness intelligence emotional stability and agreeableness unless it's a litigator and then you don't want them agreeable but in general you would want those four things and if you're looking for some creativity in the field then you are also going to want openness so those are the cause of the types of people that that Google and Apple and things like that they're actually aiming for those characteristics they're not fools they are they're well aware of these characteristics the so if you're an employee or you want to be thinking along the lines of conscientiousness intelligence stability and agreeableness and you that you do want to do that and you want to be thinking along those lines with conscientiousness probably being the most important thing consciousness intelligence and then obviously how agreeable and stable they are or secondarily important but they are important what do we have next first question is dear dr. Lisle I've been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years and my youngest is now in high school and increasingly independent and I feel a deep desire to make a shift in my daily routine to where I'm able to contribute to society in some other way however I'm also introverted I want to be able to still be available to my family and I often feel paralyzed by inaction and indecision for what to do my family of course is opposed to me doing anything because after all they're on the gravy train with all that I do for them so I'm at a complete loss for how to get started in even finding something new to add to my day while not fully upsetting the family balance huh that's interesting the get this straight stay-at-home mom fit for 15 years younger snow in high school independent deep desire to make a shift in daily routine contribute to society we've got a new app folks so I can now not it when Nathan reads these I can actually read them myself the let's see my family is of course opposed to me doing anything wow that's a little odd the I would say that the following is true that that you're an introvert that doesn't mean anything other than you we're not going to get you a sales job the I would say that there are there are a couple of types of of currencies in the world one of them is money and one of them is stone-age money both of them are valuable and they both are you know will cause psychological satisfaction in varying degrees depending upon the individual that that's involved the if the families opposed to her going to work then this sounds like this is not a family she's been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years it doesn't sound like the render and the economic deprivation however the woman herself could feel a lack of marketplace confidence as a result of not being in the marketplace and not earning a check and one of the things in the world that we that our mood states and our well-being is influenced by it is the source of esteem that comes from trade and we are we're designed by nature to contribute to the village in a way that allows us to be part of the trading matrix and earn goods and services from other people for what it is that they do well so statement mom can have that as a lurking anxious corner of her mind not so sure that she is is competent are very competent to contribute in a way that anybody would be willing to pay for sometimes so sometimes people will feel like they are wanting to make a contribution and what they've and if there is no monetary need it seems incredibly convenient to do things like volunteer and sometimes that can solve the other side of this problem which is what I call Stone Age money so if you think about a human life one of the characteristics this interesting about it that we are out to get credit where we are out to get esteem and thereby assure our position in a village insurance system ie friends and and a more extended friendship network and in doing so the way we can do this is by demonstrating the we are more benefit than we are cost to the village by doing things for the village and when you do things for individuals and you are helpful for them they have to have a phrase that we use to say that you have earned a credit and it's called thank you so when people say thank you to you you can read this as a sprays that is saying I owe you and so we can look at this when when somebody says to you well thanks then we know what that means is that they don't feel like they owe us anything this is a matter of cursory action and it's okay no big deal so when somebody when I asked for something and or somebody asked me for something and on the internet and then I send it over some quick thing and they say thanks I know what that means that's like you were supposed to give it to me and so therefore I don't really owe you anything if they say thank you with an exclamation point then that's different now they are signalling that I went above and beyond some normal call of duty and they actually are feeling a debt and they're acknowledging a debt in the ledger between us if they say thank you so much oh my god you're just so helpful bla bla bla bla bla then that's their way of telling me that they are that they feel very much in debt to me and that they are you know they are prepared and would be willing to come through to help me if the shoe were on the other foot so before the days of insurance and currency and banks ie in the more primitive times these thank yous or debts of gratitude were the only money that you could possibly store that's why I call it Stone Age money and so you're designed by nature to try to earn Stone Age money by looking for people who are in trouble or a need etc looking for their faces see that they're distressed ask them what you can do to help them and what you are reading as you know nothing other than unmasking of Elian compassion is in fact deep genetic program that is designed by nature as part of the the moral system to assist others when they're in need and thereby incur their debt and also show off to the village that you would you are operating a very gracious cost-benefit analytic matrix in your head that makes you a good specimen to keep in the village now so now that the children are bigger and don't really need mom's help then they there's no thank-yous to be had from them and so as a result the kids you make them lunch and or you drop them off at school and what do they say thanks no no longer any there's no deep gratitude no anything and you can see that as long as they're fine and everything's dandy there's no action that you're having here that is having a substance of influence on on their situations so as a result you start figuring out where can I get some Stone Age money and maybe you go volunteer for the Red Cross the only problem is is that there's nobody there that's saying thank you very much now there's people in need and the Red Cross may serve those people but they might be in Burma or somewhere else and you can't actually see those people and they can't see you and so therefore they can't look you in the eye and recognize you and remember your name and say wow I owe you very much and as a result a lot of these volunteer jobs don't have a lot of satisfaction to them the so ideally what we want in this life is a job that gives us both currency and therefore the recurrent the recurring confidence that we can earn our way into the trade transactions that take place in the village as well as stone-age currency where people also say well thank you so much that was really helpful ok this is why everybody wants to be a doctor and they want to be a doctor because a doctor could do what save somebody's life and it turns out they're really well-paid for it so in theory a doctor who could save somebody's life not only gets the most currency of a general set of job descriptions in terms of straight finances but they also get the most stone-age money and so for almost every year for the past 50 years that they've been running data the physician is the number one highest status profession in the United States this makes sense it has the greatest stone-age money in principle now so now when you are looking at this question about what am I going to do with my time what a beautiful luxurious question that this person has so there is not economic deprivation knocking at the door the kid doesn't need a fancy pair of Nikes that they can't afford or mom would be looking to say hey I just need to get a job because if I get a job and I bring home another thousand dollars a month and my kid can have some Nike said he really wants but we can't afford I'm not hearing that in this question I'm hearing this person look at the world and say what I really want missed is Stone Age money so what you want to do is you want to be looking at the kinds of helpful processes that people actually do for a living or for volunteer and where do you actually scare people in the face help them directly and then have them essentially feel the gratitude because you extended yourself and really helped so that's what I would be looking for so you probably if you're feeling that and that is the deprivation that you're feeling that your that your nervous system would be is seeking if that's true then I wouldn't go work at an art gallery because there's nobody there that is going to be saying oh my god you helped me so much okay I wouldn't be taking ticket to the Opera we're selling Opera tickets for the for the local people or anything else you would be thinking about people that are maybe in trouble people that may need help they don't have it and and you might be in a position to extend those efforts if you all want to earn a living doing so then you want to look to the helping professions of some kind in some way where that process takes place so this not everybody needs this a lot of people just like to go to work at the big firm and figure out how to build a new semiconductor that's all cool and make a good living doing that that's great some people like to oh I don't know cut hair there's there's an infinite amount of things that you can do to be part of a trading village and if you do a good job and people say thank you they feel like they've been treated fairly etc but if your your something is calling for you to try to quote make the world a better place or or give your life meaning these are sort of questions that are ringing the bell that the person is feeling deficient in stone edge money and so I would start there with the with the two questions in your head number one is it is it income earning potential and it's actualization that would settle down some of the anxiety and desire in the mind for becoming reaffirming your competence or are we more concerned about Stone Age money may doing actions that other people will find valuable and give us the all-important gratitude '''l responses that indicate that we were of great help so that's that's the direction we need to go okay okay dr. Lyle we've got a caller on hold and so Alan welcome to the program tell us what you're calling hi I'm calling from New Jersey very good all right Alan whereabouts Andrew New Jersey even roughly in the Burlington County area all right very good all right well tell us a story what's going on what do we what are we trying to figure out what can we learn okay sure absolutely may I make a quick just an observation about a previous topic about the bullying or just writing the question sure no go right ahead if you got something to to share with us go right ahead yeah just a tidbit one to get a reflection back what you thought about it growing up obviously you've been around bullying see people bully I mean it's not nothing crazy but just a standard amount I think nothing out of the ordinary but I always took the position never got it from my dad or anybody else but took the position of never be bullied by anybody ever for any reason no matter what the reason was your student anybody and don't let anybody else do it to anybody else for any reason and I feel like taking that stance allowed other people to see that and to stand up for themselves let alone have other people who felt the same way kind of like cluster together and make friends that way because if you meet people and they're they think the same way as you then what happens is don't end up having it become like an epidemic it becomes one of those things where the person doing the bullying is the outcast and they feel bad for doing it because everybody else is kind of standing together as opposed to letting it happen trying to go to a parent or a principal and then that person either just doing it in secret or doing it in a way that where the other person doesn't know like taking their stuff out of their locker or things like you know things like that where it can backfire because that person knows that you know you've went out and out of your way to acknowledge that and try to ask them and they consider you like people like that like oh you needed your parents or you needed this in it alright that's that's too long of an explanation so yeah we're going to we're going to go on yeah we're going to go onto the Weber question let me go make a point though because he was he actually had an interesting thread here so I just want to comment on this that he's actually saying something that I didn't consider because of the examples that were that we were working with and and that is that it is quite possible for popular individuals in in schools to change the culture all by themselves and so the so actually a I had a kid that was that was getting into some hot water when I was a youngster and he was he was a kid out of the out of the service and his parents had been transferred into Long Beach where I grew up and the they went to the principal because they were a little concerned about it and it wasn't going well and the principal did something interesting and this is just me bragging but this actually happened and the principal call me in and talk talk to my mom my mom was a school teacher in the district and they called me in and principal somehow had known about me even though we were I was like third or fourth grade and said hey you know I I want you guys to be friends and so I did I didn't think anything of it and I was perfectly my mom was sort of proud that this happened and so I you know went over his house and got to know them and so that protected him immediately and so this is this is a another this is sort of an adjunct to what it is that this this character was just talking about that there are ways there are additional ways around obviously a really high leadership kid could take this on themselves but they almost certainly wouldn't they wouldn't think of it but if they had adults around that that could understand that this could be a useful technique this is another method by which this sort of thing can be diffused all right to touch let me go on we've got another caller on hold so color welcome to the show sure KPN dr. Isles Rob yeah guys New Jersey's name name is Rufus you ramble on too long it'll cut you right off yeah all right go right ahead mob with him hey ducks well what is the evolution what's the behind the evolutionary psychology behind humans reacting to a to an event for example two years ago there was a big Powerball like a billion dollars and you see people lining up out the stores it's all over everywhere you go people are talking about how its billion dollars but yet when it's at its default forty million that's still more money than people know it's doing with but people aren't reacting the same way to the billion a bunch of people get killed at once people react but yet people are dying every day everywhere what's the Stone Age think the thought behind that well there's a number of things about this and there's prob there's probably a few little elements here and I'm probably not going to think of them all because these these are we'd have to I'm just going to go for the most important one certain kinds of of environmental events have high salience so the Powerball getting to a billion dollars that that's a fascinating number for people as the number gets does spectacularly large and it gets enough that it starts to get airplay in the press and so what will then happen is is that people will do what I call computer checking they are they look at other people's faces and reactions and listen to them and they they are using that to to check their own estimates of reality this is you know imitation process this goes down deep in animal biology you'll find it all over the animal kingdom and it's it's extremely important in people the reason why this is the reason why this happens is because it's a way to reduce error variance and decision making so if you're about to do something and put a bunch of your money in one stock you might turn to your buddy and say what do you think and your buddy says well now wait a second I'm not so sure that's a good idea to do that then it gives you pause so what will happen is certain certain stimuli or certain situations or you know cost benefit propositions will will easily tip their way into seeing seeming like it's a really good thing and therefore they can the excitement behind them can run like a like a essentially like a virus through these computers very very quickly so now I didn't just hear about Powerball from one person I heard three people in the 7-eleven talking about it okay this starts to tickle this computer checking chip and suddenly it's like well maybe I should do it and so this is the sort of this is how things can go in waves it's also true that when a bunch of people buy like I guess what were you referring to like the shootout in Vegas or what were you thinking about yeah I mean obviously these events are tragic and they're happening more frequently but what I meant was pretty so and something you know very well what the whole arm health stuff heart disease is killing hundred thousand people cancer you know yes but the thing is is that the heart disease issues killing people that are over 60 and so what am I worried about if I'm 45 the it also feels like almost inevitable because you're going to die sometime anyway the but somebody takes a gun and starts shooting everybody up in Las Vegas it freaks everybody out for a good reason in the sense that that it's it's tickling some very serious and legitimate fear and part of that legitimate fear is that there are there are dangerous weapons and and destabilize people and it would it is exceedingly easy for a destabilized individual to create a tremendous tragedy and so we've now seen this a bunch of times and we will continue to see such things the and so we can and we can inherently understand that some couple that's 33 years old that just got shot and they've got a four-year-old kid that escaped that's an unbelievable tragedy that that's a huge amount of life that's not lived whereas when somebody dies of a heart attack at 72 they they got 7/8 of the ride and and they created the tragedy themselves to some degree and so you know might have been a good idea to not smoke but they kind of decided to do it anyway etc etc so the we can't see say that for somebody who gets shot up in Las Vegas so these so of course these are recognized not only as well as tragic losses but they are also concentrated in a very small time there's a whole bunch of them and it's and it's really salient to human imagination and also God knows video and so as a result of that that's going to that's going to be give us rapt attention and it's going to be cause tremendous amount of discussion and commentary as all the brains you know in this society whirl around this issue and try to figure out how it is that we should prevent it stop and how terrible at all is etc so that that's kind of why it is that that happens it's more relevant to me quite frankly that someone got that a bunch of young people like me hahaha God got shot up in Vegas it's much more important to me that that's true than a hundred thousand people died of heart attacks this year they could have prevented that I already know that I'm already taken care of I would not have considered myself vulnerable walking around Las Vegas to a sniper and so that that's got my attention and therefore will now influence my behavior in the future that the first sign of anything that looks weird out there in public sometime I'll be diving for cover I will register that as as potential big trouble more quickly than I would have without this experience so therefore these these memories are useful and and unpleasant but they're serving their biological purposes we note that this is uh that this is a actually serious and unexpected losses I own a today do a quick follow-up or no yeah alright add got we've got Allen's going to ask this question after you okay go right well great point about the heart disease thing but I was thinking more of the lines I should have said the homicide rate in countries in Central America and South America in Mexico extremely high so I'm going to try to think like why don't more people you know care about that is you know it's in a different context and also if you do have time dr. Lao what would you do if you had 25 million in the bank tomorrow oh that's a good question I like that question why you know your your question about Central America and the homicide rates etc that's a that's a little bit of a tough question because we feel completely two things we feel completely hopeless and helpless about this it's not it's not any of our affair these have to do with corrupt governments and drug lords and all the sort of jazz but don't really have anything to do it with any policy or process that any American citizen could influence so it's sort of outside of our range of influence and second of all it's probably it's not likely to be our DNA that's directly involved so as a result it's sort of a remote issue and we're aware of it I'm aware of it because I you know I like Mexico and I'd like to visit the beaches down there but I actually haven't been down there for the last ten years and maybe stupidly and silly but I haven't been down there for that very reason and so it's just something that it's a not a you know it just doesn't sound like a good situation and I'm sure many of our listeners have been down there and it's been fine and hasn't been a problem of course but this is just a you know this is a different situation than it was 25 years ago when I used to go more often so now so that's sort of that well he had he had some other question 25 million in the bank what would you do with 25 million oh yeah see how quickly that had I you know it's really if that that's a difficult one to say I would I my expenditure patterns I don't I don't feel like I'm in a deprivation and so I I really like where I live so I wouldn't change that I I probably I tell you what I probably would do when I went on vacay which I would go I go on vacation now and then but you know I can only tolerate so much of it when I go on vacation I would not be shopping on Expedia trying to chintz out the hotels and save look so it would change it would change my expenditures just that much my friend dr. Ellen gold hammers is a very successful business person and he we added it interesting conversation a few years ago I think some some friend of ours had flown first class and Alan was his skin totally scandalized and he said I don't think I will ever fly first class like it doesn't matter how how successful he is what happens to his net worth he just looks at it as a as a scandalous waste to fly first-class and so this is this sort of middle class frugal mentality is born into some of this and no matter what happens to our net worth I don't I don't know that we can change but I would change it I would be willing to go from the three-star places to the four-star places and go up from you know 169 dollars a night up to 229 that that was a change so that would change but the cats would still get the high premium cat food that they get now I wouldn't go to a fancier brand all right thanks for calling that's all right Rob thank you very much for the phone call all right we got Alan back on the line Alan's got a couple I said Alan Alan stop go ahead Alan yes what's up fire nobody uh with so many different elements diverging overlapping and blending what does how does one begin diagnosing an issue with considering seasonal regional environmental ethnical genetical physical well-being of an individual without ever truly knowing the person what would be your method like how would you what would you how do you go about that oh maybe butcher process interesting deep question so I'll just give you my process because I don't know that we've I've actually talked this through it's really good question the first thing it's going to turn out that all people have really four targets of action those targets of action are mates friends trading partners and family mates friends and trading partners are all under competitive pressure so you're designed by nature to compete for such relationships and in doing so you have to essentially develop and advertise the characteristics that those people find valuable the reasons why they are even seeking such relationships so in mates we are we are directed towards issues of what things would make us most valuable as a mate or sexual attractiveness our wealth our accomplishments or connections all these sort of things the what respect to friends friends are also looking for very similar things because in fact mates are friends in a way or in partially terms of their roles they're so friends our insurance policies so they're people are looking to see what kinds of benefits that we can confer as a friend in terms of our reliability conscientiousness intelligence accomplishments knowledge connections willingness to help etc and in trade it's our skill and what it is that we have to bring to the table relative to our our competitors competitors you just consider those to be alternatives alternative partners for our mates alternative partners for our friends and trade so the scheme that I go through Ellen is to to listen if a person is in distress the reason they're in distress is that they they are sensing they have reason to believe and the neural circuits of their mind have evolved to detect and go through reasoning you know evidence based processes - essentially they are confused and stumped and frustrated about the discrepancy between the esteem signals that they are getting from these three markets versus what it is that they believe they should be getting so they are the distinction is between a set of systems that we're going to call self calibration so let me just briefly walk you through this that you are on if you if you have a PhD in Afro physics from MIT and you're applying for jobs in astrophysics you believe that you should be able to get the job if you are a janitor you don't think that you can get a job in PhD in a in astrophysics so you are calibrated to certain to certain ecological niches in these trade matrixes if you are the waterboy on the football team and AB average attractiveness you don't think that you can ask the prom queen you know the homecoming queen to the prom you don't even think about it you may think about it but you're not even to try to do it you may ask Millie who sits next to you in history who's an average girl that's your market so people essentially set their goals relative to what it is that they think they can compete for within these competitive niches and when and they set their actions based on those goals because the brain is designed by nature to try to attempt to utilize the animals time and energy as effectively as possible in order to secure the resources in order to optimize survival and reproductive success so that's why the five doesn't chase tens around it's not that he doesn't want a ten it's that he can't get one and he inherently knows that that's true unless he's a narcissistic freak at which point he's doomed now the so the process that I go through is really even though there's there's a lot of underlying complexity to understanding evolutionary psychology the broad strokes of how it is that we attack the problems clinically are actually go through a relatively obvious algorithm and that is that it all I need to do is ask the person which which of those three mains of life are causing the person distress it could be the fourth because could be family they could be worried about their child or their mother or something like that that's a different issue there could be family dynamics by which the family is not acting like friends and there could be you know essentially competitive processes within a family but families don't need to be competitive and families don't so as a result the the competitive stress on the organism comes through mating it comes through friendship and it comes through trade so those three areas are the areas that will be the generators of the great majority of human distress and there the next thing that we look at is we simply understand that the problem lies in a discrepancy between what the person thinks they should be able to attain and what it is they're attaining if people are attaining the feedback that they expect an urban or would be system is also by the way hopeful in other words it will not allow you to set low goals relative to what the evidence indicates so you can't you can't get excited about achieving a B in school if it turns out that you are well aware that you could have gotten A's the system simply won't allow that to happen not unless you were trying to get a B with minimum effort because you didn't care about the grades and you just needed a pass and that's not how you select maids friends and trading partners you're designed by nature to use your time and energy as effectively as possible in order to secure the optimum trades across those three domains and when you are not getting the feedback that you believe it's possible for you based on previous evidence and your own internal genetic calibration system you are not happy okay unhappiness it's the hallmark that the organism believes that it's time and energy are not being effectively rewarded and so human suffering can be can be reduced in psychotherapy I mean there's other ways to reduce suffering like learning how to cure malaria and all kinds of things but in the psychotherapeutic process the job is to figure out where the person is making mistakes and where are their unutilized potential for improvement in competitive standing these are these are the types of actions that we take in psychotherapy in order to react out recalibrate and improve minds so that they can become more effective at the competition's and be more successful and happier ok very good or your question what's that your question as well with that oh you go ahead if you have time yes okay yeah we got two submitters you go ahead okay is the profession of psychiatry would you consider to be the manipulation of underwear or lesser minds as opposed to those who have more awareness or higher IQs no I would consider it to be people that know more about how to solve a problem than the people that are than the people that are suffering with the problem so it is obviously helpful and I'm not a psychiatrist by the way the the clinical psychology or actually more accurately clinical neuroscience would would encompass all all of these such efforts the obviously intelligence experience knowledge etc of useful technique the the in principle a not very smart therapist that would understand a way or understand something about the human mind that a brilliant person did not understand could correct the thinking of that brilliant person and help them immensely so it's not necessary for the helper to be more intelligent than the healthy it is necessary for them to know things about how to do things or how to explore and discover distortions and the other person's thinking that that is necessary and that is what the job is
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