Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 111: Evolution of language, Emotional first-aid, helping a friend
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


all right so we got a couple of questions today on the evolution of language something called emotional first-aid and a couple of situations from our listeners for helping their friends but before we get to that there's one question that I got just a couple of days ago that just struck my fancy because I could relate to it a lot but so we'll just take it from there so dear dr. Lyle is there something sexy about being a doomsday er this podcast and Matt Ridley have given me a more optimistic view of the future but now I consistently notice men around smart beautiful women one-upping each other on how bleak the present and the future look what kite are they advertising oh this is beautiful yeah so that's a great question the it's clear that what they're advertising is conscientiousness and intelligence and so they're basically saying I'm a lot smarter than other people that can't see into the future and can't handle eyes all these horrendous contingencies that I'm able to put together the evidence in a complex way and see trouble where the world is not seeing it and I'm so worried about it because I'm so worried about other people and so therefore I'm just I'm just a really that this is this is the kind of mind that you need to fall father your children somebody that's really going to look out you know and see things that others see that's hilarious I mean you see this with global warming public health crises environmental crises economic crisis you know children and NTD like everybody's you know why napping each other into the horrendous crises that the world is facing and Harry Brown who's probably my very favorite sort of psychological philosophical writer has a has a name for this and he calls it the burning issue trap and the notion is is that you know there's these burning issues out there and we can't all rest and be happy until these burning issues are addressed and the world is not going to be free until this happens you know a lot have good friends of mine who filled these things who feel a desperate desire to point out to the world the world's ills and the terrible things that are going to happen and they they don't they aren't they aren't doing what kind of say they're not the grandstanding that's going on behind this can be very honest and and part of it can be coming from legitimate conscientiousness some of it is sexual grandstanding which they they would never admit and would not possibly even have any access psychologically to know that that is what's driving it but the truth is folks is all these types of problems are are essentially moderate in nature so I can remember hearing I believe as dean ornish you know saying in in in hushed tones that you know this generation will be the first generation that doesn't doesn't outlive its parents now I I'm trying to this is I actually can't remember the exact quote or what was exactly what was said but the but the possible inference was that kids might be so sick they die before their parents would die which is of course not what was being said but it starts to sound like and it sorts of getting people alarmed the the second way to interpret this is that children will not this will be the first quote generation that will not live as long as its parents well second of all there's no evidence for this zero the and the sort of the issues with public health for example are there they're notable you know people are are overweight and sick and struggling and medicated and you know not very healthy but the truth is they they live a long time and they they're living longer considerably longer than they ever lived before so you will are this generation now that is now fit he will outlive the people that were their parents on average and they'll do so by significant margin by probably a couple of years the and we're starting to get so that people are essentially so safe with such a benign environment that they're living pretty close to the edge of their genetic code the if you're a nonsmoker you're you're getting pretty up pretty close to you every mile that you can get out of it out of this car you're leaving it a little short but the big issue with public health really is not longevity and crisis and people dying it's really function and these issues are a question of personal choice you can't tell me that people don't know that they shouldn't be putting the pizza and chocolate shakes down that they shouldn't be walking around the block and eating an apple of course they know this they may think the chicken and fish are a good thing and they may not be such a good thing but people are making personal choices on these things and they're sort of there they're running their own cost-benefit analysis now the same kind of panic that we hear about children and television and now children and cellphones and how the next generation is going to be so you know incompetence or stupid or ADHD etc etc this is all this is all much ado about totally nothing global warming I just got to roll my eyes it's like all you got to do is look at the evidence and see that that we are within one degree of where we were a hundred years ago so whatever whatever terrible problems await us not that terrible every whether in Poland every week with that so then Here I am complaining about the cold every week you know yeah so the issue is I'm not saying that there's nothing to these issues there are things to these issues the problems or legitimate concerns for people to to sort of put in the big matrix of a big picture but if you put things in a big matrix of the big picture folks the correct vision of your life in your location in history is the same picture that Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker have which is that has never been a better time to be alive it's not even close and you you live if you are in a Western democracy you live in the safest freest best fed longest lived most opportunity time in world history there is less prejudice against divorce race religion gender everything okay so you live in the best time that there has ever been and you will live out your life in the best time to December Bend so for God's sakes don't spend a bunch of time and energy worried about these burning issues that are not going to they're not going to burn anything so just relax and enjoy yourself but yes this is a beautiful place for people to grandstand particularly men that will get on the balcony and grandstand to attractive women about how brilliant and insightful and and how you have essentially undervalued their great brilliance is because they are they should they should be given awards and Nobel Prizes and accolades for being the great sage that is predicting doomsday if you want a wonderful history of this Matt Ridley in the rational optimist spend several pages talking through the last hundred seventy five years has started at about 1825 he tracks the doomsday commentary of generation after generation after generation and just blows it to smithereens showing that essentially it's it's almost never been true the certainly there have been times when life got grim and bad Hitler was bad news the Atomic Age was scary and remain scary however the these these a lot many of these things are well beyond any anybody's ability to influence any outcomes at all so pay attention to your own life and make the best of your own existence and don't worry about where the world is going because it's kind of going wherever it's going anyway and it's going fine all right all right well this makes me think is for this particular listener in I guess for other men listening to yeah if we started to display this rational optimism will we more likely to attract less conscientious mates who do not overestimate the worst-case scenario or simply for concern you bothering about that I don't know I don't know what value there would be I think that I can imagine I think I've got this right I think it's a what this is is it's saying my intelligence is seeing contingencies and threats that other people are not saying now if you if you go against that as I do I say well that's just ludicrous there's no you've got no you've got no chain of evidence here at all the it makes it there's no advantage really that is obvious to the female worrying about her her children her unborn children or her life itself there's really no particular advantage to under estimating the worst case scenario that she's going to easily see so I don't really see that this is advantageous so we'll just find out next time I'm at a party which I never go to and there's attractive woman there who wouldn't be talking to me anyway we'll just see if I if I drove up a worst case yeah see if I could get at least 60 seconds of face time we'll find out because I I frequently think that perhaps perhaps when when men are interested in the pair-bond strategy animus sure if that's true but if men are inserting the paramon strategy will try to display conscientiousness and intelligence er as if they're in a casual strategy they're trying to display openness and passion but at all no possibly the confidence that would come with being able to handle obstacles would come so so the ie the openness and the ability to have survived that openness so also the the disagreeable and dominant to actually contradict the this other sort of zeitgeist of the world of the panic and cowering so the yeah there there would be a way for the the Matt Ridley Steven Pinker take on life to be to be a little bit sexy but so far no traction firm so I think that the doomsdayers definitely have us beat on this strategy alright let's go out on the next leg alright our next question dr. Lyle I'm a speech pathology graduate student and I got into the field because at a great interest in how we developed language so naturally what was the evolutionary drive for language development in early humans I'm also curious about your opinion on language instruction and intervention for children who are showing deficits in expressive or receptive language if language is something that's hardwired into us why do some of us show language deficits even though intelligence and comprehension or normal yeah I can't expertly answer this question so don't think I'm not going to answer it but I can't expertly answer it because I haven't I'd actually don't know the data I'm going to give you my impressions of this and and then hope the person who answered this doesn't slit their wrists okay here we go I want you to imagine have you ever run into anybody that couldn't talk now I have not I have never run into a person that could not talk and I have I have been you know I've actually been in a room and talking to people actually you know what it's just occurring to me that that's not true I actually have spent a little while an afternoon in its in a place with children that were that were you know if you have extraordinarily disabilities that they're actually in an inpatient facility for life I remember this was it in Denton in North Texas and this was a state school called Denton state school I went there and was talking to the guy had a psychology there a guy by the name of IRA colorin and I chatted with him and looked at some of his his patients and they were kids that basically were on the order of IQs and the order fifty in other words very far below the level of the cutoff for mental retardation and so these are people with it his brains are have horrendous dysfunction and these kids could not talk so there are people that you will see in this life that cannot talk but they will never talk the question is do you ever run into anybody walking around that can't hardly hold down a job because they're not smart enough to push a broom but they can manage to do this and can they talk and the answer is yes they can talk and they can walk so the truth of the matter is is that I have also had a number of clients over the years that had children or grandchildren where there was great consternation over whether or not these kids were going to talk because it was two years and they weren't talking and I just roll my eyeballs and they would be having speech pathologists and etc etc meetings with the speech pathologists and I just consider this to be a total joke because guess what I've never met anybody that couldn't talk so kids will learn how to talk and the truth is is that they could hack this up into well can they produce speech or the receiving speech can they know what they're doing etc truth is is that I am unaware of any evidence to indicate that nice each pathological process is going to be helpful the notion is oh my god there might be windows of development if we don't get on it do everything we can they may not you know we may we leave them behind but I want you to back up and ask yourself have you ever met anybody that ever got left behind I haven't I've met I don't know 25,000 people in my life I've never met one of them that when I was talking to them they couldn't talk so let's look at what I believe is happening in the world of speech pathology that you have a lot of people that are worried sick about their children and the the common fear is that your kid has some pathology of some kind and they're not going to figure it out that they're not going to figure out how to talk and as a result of this they're going to be severely handicapped in life and be in trouble and so therefore this is a perfect example of where the worst case scenario should be ringing everybody's chimes at 150 decibels which it would be if it was me if I had some kid that wasn't talking and wasn't talking and wasn't talking and wasn't talking I'm like staring at this little thing thinking whoa this is a disaster okay and if I didn't know what I know I would be very worried and be like well better safe than sorry let's go to the speech pathologist to start doing some drills okay I get to total waste of time and somebody's got evidence that I'm wrong send it to me but the truth of the matter is like I said never met anybody that couldn't talk the the issue here is how strong the drive is I have never met anybody they could learn to walk either okay there's people with neurological you know diseases that can't do it but any normally functioning human that has a normal body learns how to walk nobody doesn't learn how to walk nobody doesn't learn how to talk the development of language we do not or when it took place certainly a lot of speculation about that the probably you know it certainly that we know for certain it's been around at a very very high level for at least 150,000 years because it's ubiquitous all over the earth for breeding populations that are you know hundred thousand years apart there's there's people on the earth that haven't had a common ancestor for a hundred thousand years so we know that this goes back that far and it goes back that far at the level of the the sophistication that you see in all races so that that tells you that all human beings were already at extraordinarily sophisticated language by a hundred or suppose so thousand years ago and if they were at that level of sophistication ie sixty thousand words at their disposal for the average speaker then you know damn well that it was at least thirty thousand per speaker you know a hundred thousand years before that and ten thousand per speaker a hundred thousand years before that and five thousand one hundred thousand years before that so this language capability has probably been around at a pretty significant level for several hundred thousand years the question now I've got a friend of mine a paleontologist that tells me that that the evidence would suggest that language abilities would have been so incredibly valuable as they started to develop that would have exploded that the that the additional brains necessary to support language would have been so heavily advantaged by evolution that it would have quickly spread like wildfire and been highly advantageous that that's another part of this person's question like why would this develop well the reason is is that the cost benefit analysis on the transmission and reception of information so I want you to think about the capability that is conferred to an organism that could spend years learning a skill and and then transmit that skill to to somebody else in a matter of minutes the the ability to transmit information about the environment and say listen let me explain over there on the other side of the hill I was just over there let me tell you what I saw okay so this the the the transmission of information and the the inexpensiveness of the transmission of that information that is possible through language is truly a light-year leap ahead of anything else other animals can do and so be it conferred enormous benefits in order to be able to both produce that language particularly as you can imagine to transmit it important information to your children and to anybody that's useful to you the Sabet that's what that's why language took off like wildfire the then then so anyway so that's how that's how I see this absolutely hardwired requires some tuning that goes on in early childhood as the kids learn through a through a learning curve process sort of the sounds and they put this stuff together it's really quite interesting what goes on in terms of human human early language development it's a it's literally a hybrid between genetically constrained systems and then the ability to fine tune those with local sounds ie the learning of a specific language and it sounds but essentially that that's what it is and it's so advantageous the drive for it is akin to the drive for walking though me to pathology and it's utility I think it's probably more useful there may be drills to help people after they've had strokes and head injuries etc but speech pathology and early childhood I would be very surprised if there's evidence if there if there's significant percentages of people that they have shown that literally if they're not intervened on they do not develop the normal capabilities so could be wrong open contradiction this person I would say if your speech pathology grad student I would look very carefully at what what areas of speech pathology are actually known to have positive effects and I'd spend my career there and I think it would be a great career as many things would be if the if the effects are really there and that you know that the sub niches within the field that's where I would go content all right very good all right dear what it see wait they said hardwired why are some of us showing language deficits even though intelligence and comprehension are normal yeah well certain certain neural circuits in different individuals come online at different times so that that's why kids walk at different levels at times and kids talk at different levels and times and etc etc so that the genes are not all identical here there is rivaled genes that build you know build noses and ears and hearts and lungs and read twitch fast twitch fibers and the muscles build them all a little bit differently and so therefore you when you have to look at these milestones and where your kid is on the chart you know everybody is so freaking panicked about where their kid is on the chart and they're worried oh my god my kids only you know you know one foot ten inches tall and they're almost three years old or two years old so they're not on the chart everybody's worried about the frickin chart relax the these are these are little plants you water them and you feed them in the emerge okay we're not going to shape them just take care of them love them let them play and chill out all right they've all right speaking of letting them play and chilling out yeah talk to Lyle what is the best emotional first aid so for example if I run into a kid that escaped a traumatic event like a shooting a rape survivor or someone who just got a beating how does one assist in such situations well the let's think about this let's go back to the Stone Age if something like this happens the let's think about what people would have done in the Stone Age they'd say holy smokes you doing okay and what's going on you worried about something let's let's make sure that you feel safe in the situation that you're in okay so where you sleep in who you sleep in who who can you talk to you get nervous etc the notion that there's some damage done by the trauma and we got to try to do something spectacular and empathic in order to make sure that that doesn't take place is ludicrous the human beings are designed by nature to to have processes information processes processing processes in place for when they run into traumatic dangerous things and the way this is designed is that the memory circuits are flagging these incidents and they are computing correlation coefficients with respect to the environmental context in which these things took place the kid doesn't have any fallout from this particularly insofar as obviously if you just almost got run over by a car yesterday then I going to expect that you are going to be considerably more nervous about that today and you're going to be considerably nervous about that the day after tomorrow and the day after that for a while and then it's going to turn out that in your long term history veneer from now you're going to be significantly though not in any bizarre way more nervous about this than your friend who hasn't had that happen to them for a good reason so you you have become aware of a worst case scenario and it's probability is now heightened in your mind because you actually had that incident happen to you the same thing that's going to happen if a kid witnessed some nasty thing or they've been a victim of something etc what what's going to happen is it's going to influence their perceived probability of having that kind of a loss or trauma happen again and they're going to engage mitigating activities that will reduce the statistical likelihood of those things happening so they'll avoid the bully that will avoid Uncle Louie they'll avoid all kinds of things just as they should and our job once we find out about it say hey how can we help you get safe let's think this through let's see what I can do to see to it that you are now buffered against this okay if you ever get nervous about this side of the other you come to me or here's where you're going to go and here's who you're going to talk to to make sure you get some assistance so that you you know don't have to face this kind of threat again that's what we do okay so it turns out that the research evidence indicates that when my colleagues go into schools that have had terrible things happen and they sit down and they want to process endlessly and have kids talk about these things and etc etc that it does more harm than good but it's going to turn out that that that the kind of hand-holding and hand wringing and quote deep sympathy process that goes on in PTSD after I post trauma work turns out to be worse than useless interestingly enough so what's actually surprising that you could be worse than useless the but apparently is the case so what we want to do is instead do what you would reasonably do a person has had a threat or a person's had a traumatic event what do we want to do we want to have them you know feel not not an absurd cloak of safety but a cloak of safety and a problem solving and a natural empathy that would make sense we don't need to catastrophize over this I actually think the problem comes when clinicians catastrophize because the clinician themselves has a couple of agendas you can you can start to see this that the clinician might themselves with the psychodynamic or misunder standing of neural architecture might believe that this is actually a terrible thing horrendous thing and oh my god horrible scars have been laid down now and the person will never be the same well then that point the uneducated naive clinician is panicking and they're going to resonate that panic to the - to the victim it's also which which you know essentially can have the victim thinking about oh my god I'm in deeper shit than I thought I was in ok it's kind of like a dr. ominously staring at you and looking at your lab report say whew this is terrible it's like well what is it well oh it's terrible oh my god this is terrible it's like for crying out loud you get a sufferer okay so this is so that that's one thing another thing is that many people are in this arena are going to essentially be acting on status motivation that now this is something terrible to tap and it is very important work needs to be done now okay very important work needs to be done it's like no it doesn't doesn't need to be done what you need to be is practical and reasonable and reasonably empathic and supportive that's how you want to handle it okay and so therefore the individual doesn't have to put up with the fact that the person on the other side is staring at the lab report of their future with horror in their face and in their voice there is no horror it's like hey if something bad happen to you something bad happen to you if there's some perpetrator that's responsible then we're pissed off ok and what we need to do is we need to think through how it is that we're going to protect them because they have that right to be protected and this is a terrible thing that happened and and we're going to step through all possible channels and be intelligent about how we're going to do that and you know what you're going to have some feelings that are going to be no fun so let's make sure that you know what you're going to do if those feelings get more intense okay we can have a non catastrophic attitude about this that is the best way to handle this okay Wow all right yeah all right so we're going to turn the ship a little bit and we're going to go over a couple of listener situations okay all right dear dr. Lyle I'm a 25 year old female and I'm very worried about my sister and her future she's my half-sister and she's 30 and she's engaged to a man who's 32 turns out to be a liar and in my opinion a huge scumbag they started dating about two years ago and he seemed like a nice guy fairly charismatic he told us he was a lawyer had gone to school overseas then it came to light a year into their relationship that this was all a lie apparently all of his friends knew and he only lied to my sister and my family he then revised his story to say that he was working for an education and training program and studying law this also turned out to be a lie at the time he lived in my parents house for two months for free while he supposedly was on injury leave but he carried around a briefcase the whole time well he and my sister have now been living at my sister's mom's house for a year without rent my sister recently tried to convince her mother to cover his car payment which she refused my sister doesn't live at home and we rarely spend time with them so his only when introducing him as their daughter's fiance at a holiday party and being questioned by their friends about his career that my parents had a wake-up call and decided to investigate into him turns out he's in debt only partway through a bachelor's degree and his previous co-workers have severed ties with him because he owes one of them $3,000 as determined in a small claims court so his previous Church has his previous church has severed ties with him and he appears to be unemployed and according my parents he's also been pressuring my sister to become pregnant soon so my parents confronted her tried to be caring telling her that it ultimately was her decision but they wanted her to be informed well she since taken her fiance's side and says that my parents betrayed him by investigating him and aren't treating him with love and or as they should a family member as you can imagine this is horrible tension in the family because of this and to make matters worse my parents have asked my brother and I to pretend that we don't know anything about the confrontation or the information I can't understand how my sister an attractive intelligent an overly agreeable person continues to defend this clearly dishonest person is there any chance to convince her to leave him oh my a lot of thing to watch let's say let me think about this try to think about how I would handle this something like this if I were in the situation I would probably come up with a label for this guy that would I would probably want to stick it under my sister's fingernails and really have it bother her and I I'm not sure what the parents were not wanting to her them say or can't remember what that situation was but I would definitely I would feel absolutely a moral responsibility to my sister to do the very best job I could of convincing her that she was making a big mistake and I let me tell you what I mean obviously this what this guy is is a sociopath that's what he is and so this is a that that's just what he is just look it up in the DSM it's got this guy's face all over it now he's not a dangerous sociopath in the sense that he's not slitting anybody's risk and he's not a serial killer he's just a classic sociopath the now and that's what I would tell my sister I would say you know I've been reading descriptions and I've been listening to a psychologist that has criminal justice psychologists that's me 15 years in the criminal justice business and he you know I essentially have listened to this and listen to what he says about these things and this guy would say that this guy brett or whatever his name is sorry if anybody's out there his name is brett is a sociopath and that these people can be very charming and you know attractive interpersonally and and people can really like them but their that's what they are they're sociopaths and and so I would I would strongly recommend that you do exactly one thing which is make absolutely certain that you don't get pregnant like don't do anything else I don't care what else you do okay the secondary thing would be to not get married like why be in such a hurry okay so if it turns out I'm wrong and you're right he's great no problem then two years from now you can have great wedding and you can have a kid and have a nice happy family but if it turns out in the next two years more evidence comes to light that I'm right then you will be really really glad that we took that conservative route why play a gambling game why not play a very conservative game because this is your life we're talking about so you know have fun joy your experience with this guy but for god sakes god sakes put off any wedding and do not get pregnant because I believe that this guy is a sociopath that's what I would say okay the classic and sociopathy is called the mask of sanity by collecti that you know you could get it for the I think Robert hare as a major researcher in sociopathy he's probably he's I think he's written considerably and it's probably had more modern books collect lace as the class the these people are just you know low empathy the fundamentally disagreeable they're superficially can be agreeable they can be they're very tricky when they're when they're naturally kind of confident affable physically attractive what do you call it extroverted and they obviously are very low in conscientiousness so that's what that is and that's what she's got and she is you're you're the sister is obviously dancing very near dangerous fire and if she once again I would say this let me let me frame this in the same way that I frame all the great tragedies the world but everybody's panicked about it's not that if you do things wrong it's a disaster that's not typically what's going to happen it's just that we squandered a bunch of happiness so a person's life could be set up well because they might be attractive intelligent you know have reasonable skill and ability to access a marketplace have decent family and it's like you know they're looking at a life that's going to be eight out of ten you know may not be ten out of ten because everything may not go your way but the truth is it's going to be good this is going to be a good life and then if you make a bad decision like that you can turn an eight life into a three just on one decision a I had a good friend you know twenty years ago really really funny gal who's just had a great sense of humor and she had married this guy and had a kid with him and he was bad news and it was trouble trouble trouble all the way down lawyers faxing her lawyers about who could talk to who and do what and go when and when he's going to show up and not show up and then he shows up drunk and you know then he once put her on him kid on a motorcycle it's like oh my god and she came up with a phrase describing this that was beautiful don't breed with freaks okay don't breed with freak if you are in a relationship with somebody that has is questionable in some significant area go ahead and you know satisfy your overly open curiosity about that your romance and the titillation of it all etc but don't breed with them don't do that okay because what you get then is you are tied to that person forever and they are an invasive force in your life possibly forever it's like wow you just took an eight life and you just dragged it down a massive amount in that situation so is it a tragedy no but it's just it it's a horrendously bad decision for happiness so yes I don't I forget what the parents wanted or didn't want the girl to do forget about it your job is to confront this as intelligently as you can figure out how to do it and I would flood that sister with status before I did this I would tell her listen I'm going to speak for five minutes and then I'm going to leave this alone okay you're going to give me five minutes that's all I ask you are just a superb person I feel like they're so attractive you're smart you are a wonderful human being you are in so agreeable and pleasant and you're such a team player bla bla bla I can remember the time you did this I can remember the time it did that I can't think of a better sister that it edited tada we are going to flood this girl for a minute and a half okay and we're going to use the technique that I say on my website it's you know flood the circuit it's called attribute anecdote so you say the attribute like you're so agreeable I remember the time when you know there's this possible conflict of interest and you just said no I'll do without so we bounce back and forth between the attribute that we're flattering them on and the dude this is in fact the evidence for the reason why we have encapsulated or judge them to have that attribute that's what we do okay and so we flood them with this scripted flood a positive feedback for a minute and a half and then we say this is why I think it would be I cannot responsibly keep my mouth shut okay you are way to get a person to be with this person and this is what I think of him okay and this is why I think of him this happened this happened this happened and this happened and you know what I did I'm so worried about you that what I did was I got some sort of expert analysis of this and this is what's called a sociopath okay he's not a killer he's not going to slit your throat I'm not worried about that but he is shifty and he's dishonest and he's going to leave you in a lot of trouble okay and you deserve so much better because you deserve your equal you don't deserve somebody who's less than you so here's some literature you can look at it yourself and all I'm going to tell you is the recommendation from the experts is when you can't make up your mind for goodness sakes don't get pregnant don't get married okay don't do it if it's such a great idea and it's such a wonderful idea to get married and get pregnant you can do that two years from now after you have considered carefully whether or not I'm right or you're right okay so I don't want to set up an adversarial thing I love you to death okay but this is what I sincerely believe and I swear you deserve better and I'll keep my piece okay and here's it here's an expert that you can talk to and I'd give them my phone number okay this is an expert that you can talk to that is a that is you know was a professor at Stanford and has ten years of criminal justice experience and this guy knows okay and if you ever want to talk to him you just say the word or you call them directly that's what I would do okay you give that girl the best chance she's got of getting out of that trap and right this minute that's my first approximation about that that that's a that's a decent first pass I me you know I would as I go away in the next 48 hours I'll think about seven other things that I would say that might be trickier more valuable but that's the basic concept we flatter the daylights out of her we tell her we are we are we cannot we cannot stand by on the sidelines and now we just want this short length of time to make our case here's where she can get additional help this is where the evidence is and by God you know I'm doing everything you know everything I can to respect your privacy but at the same time do everything I can to help you and you've got nothing to lose by taking your time don't make a big decision when a small decision will do okay that's how I'd handle it and good luck now it's like that guy might be good in bed and we have a problem all right well we've got a listener on hold okay listener caller with the five three zero area code what's your name where you calling from oh I guess he called just dropped okay okay we're going to our second caller with a seven eight one area code caller what's your name I ain't calling from hey Natan duck louts robbed again hey uh what's that hey I know we're short on time here but I get it I think I got another good one for you dr. Lyle Oh dr. Lyle is that there's a youtuber i watch who says all jobs suck get used to it and he has a that's part of his um his stick as he tells he gives advice to people and says all jobs suck get used to it and he talks about how people get especially young people get worthless degrees and they get out of college and they can't find a job but without going into too many details about him it seems to me finding something you don't mind doing is the key here and I don't know if you touch on this in your upcoming book but it seems to me with the associate associated with this esteem dynamics and Happiness what are your thoughts on your basic thoughts on people you know in a country where they can find something that they don't mind doing and like the connection there between your daily you know feeling productive making having a decent source of income but being but realizing that there's there's negative sides to your job that might suck but you find a way to like it and all that kind of stuff Rob thank you it's beautiful it's beautiful all the things that I learn from people the I I'm getting a kick out of this guy's attitude now what would I say about this be I would say that that the following is going to be true let me think about this for just a second I have a comment here I got to make sure that I can make it let me think ah I can sort of make the comment a I know of a following situation of a guy that that coming out of a coming out of a professional school he was in a position to negotiate with a local major professional firm very large salary cost him a lot of money to sort of buy into this firm and he's an expert at what he does and so he he was expecting the job to be one set of procedures and it's turning out now late in the first year that it's quite different than he thought he was going to get it what he was going to get so he hates his work and the conversation I had not with him specifically but with the third party was you know what do we do about such a situation where a guy hates his work he's got a big investment and you know got a wife kids etc etc the answer is get that hell out this is there are people that are in a position of power where you can maneuver your life in a position where your your your job does not suck your job can be excellent okay there are many people that have to run a cost-benefit analysis on how it is that they go about this process and this is maybe who this guy is speaking to the there are other people who have very few choices and essentially have to put up with you know very difficult circumstances in order to get financial security so the truth of the matter is is one brush does not paint this situation so when I listen to people's lives and I hear about what's going on you know I want to know what their capabilities are what their entire sort of financial background and picture is and you know who they are and what they want out of life and whenever I hear a six-figure or not person bitching about their job my attitude is why the hell are you doing it you know why aren't we maneuvering this thing into a situation that you enjoy if you make significantly less money by doing those maneuverings then you have a better life okay so this is all about positions power now you were making a comment about something I would also say something else that that that a lot of jobs are unpleasant because of the people that are involved in those jobs and so I have known people that were doing job X for 14 years in circumstances that were miserable and then circumstance has changed for one reason or another and they're doing the same job in circumstance Y and now their life is a whole heck of a lot better Y same different humans so the so let's keep in mind that a very important issue in predicting the quality of person's life it's going to be what I call the esteem dynamics that are flowing through that person's life and so the that doesn't mean that you have a disagreeable boss that that you should quit your job because there's it's a package deal but I would say that and and there is something to be said from what this guy is sort of saying he's making a comment here that that not everybody is in a position that the optimal decision in this life is for them to feel like they quote do their passion now you might say well now wait a second about that is that really true and I would say yeah be careful because a lot of what people's passions are are actually sexual displays so many people feel they can feel the inherent value and double-dipping not only attempting to get survival resources as effectively and as efficiently as possible but to also but also at the same time that they are getting resources for both survival problems and reproductive problems but also be displaying their sexually attractive characteristics at the same time singing dancing acting modeling athletics these are you know architecture these are things where you know novel writing people have a feel like hey that's my passion that's what I ought to be doing for a living at which point I would say bs good luck to you okay if you can do it for a living spend your 20s trying to figure it out I got a group and they listen to this podcast ID i found them out there a group of musicians and they are a bunch of cool cats and they're smart and they're doing a good job and they're doing well and it's like I think it's great I think it's great that they are able to do that and do well the but not everybody can and a time when we have to run a reasonable cost benefit analysis and often times it's a smart cost-benefit analysis remember that in principle the way the marketplace would work would be the following but the jobs that would generally be the least attractive jobs would pay the most in principle okay just by virtue of supply and demand so I can expect that that somebody who's trying to get a job as a lounge lizard singer is probably not going to get a lot of money for it okay the somebody that's going to try to do dancing for a living unless you've got a body and it's a strip joint don't expect to make much money from it so now what we have to do is we have to look at you know the fact that that there are jobs that are difficult and stressful and but they may pay well and and so good enough so we're running an appropriate cost benefit they quote there are not everything about this job is great there's parts of it that suck but it achieves for me a lot of freedom and security to allow me to live a good life you know on the outside of this so yeah long long convoluted feedback on that robbed that and I'm not sure I hit the nail on the head all the way through this but hopefully somebody benefits from this meandering and thank you for asking your question
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist