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Episode 139: radical honesty, genes vs environment, reconnecting with an old friend
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all right so today we've got some questions from our listeners and dr. Lyle I had heard a topic a long time ago it was like a book I kind of read a few pages of it was all about this concept of radical honesty and I'm probably paraphrasing incorrectly but the gist of what I got is that you really don't hide too much of what you're thinking you just be radically honest with the situation and you know of course I was never that into it tried it a little bit ended up offending a lot of people and just ultimately decided that maybe that's not the right move for me but this first question from our listener has to do with radical honesty dr. Lila what's the best way to use all of this evolutionary psychology knowledge about man-woman dynamics and relationships listener is usually a big usually a big fan of the radical honesty approach but sometimes it might be inappropriate to say for example oh you're just jealous because you're Stone Age brain feels over rewarded with the situation such a lie like an empathetic and weasel my my way around it but as many behaviors of me and people make so much sense and so many people are skeptical towards evolutionary psychology I don't want to get into a huge discussion about nature versus nurture every single time but if I don't share that knowledge I'll end up with AI understand all your behaviors mindset and hope and unfortunately become arrogant maybe yet I bought I bought David Buzz's textbook just so I can learn more so I can convince people may be yet another fear of status loss by losing a discussion it's a fight in my own brain between share it so they understand themselves better or let's make the best out of it and find a solution when I feel like a Conda saying knodel put differently how do you not become arrogant with all of this profound knowledge the interesting question is something-something being raised in here I don't I don't quite feel like I have a full hand one on what the question is but we can we can try let's see we have a desire to bring new information to the village in order to enhance our own esteem so that this kind of knowledge certainly is exciting and radical enough that it it would confer upon the person bringing it added esteem to their village so you would be motivated to bring this information just as you would be motivated to bring health information if it turns out that you found out that I don't know Jim ginseng and arrowroot combined together would get rid of lung cancer then if you really found out that if you were convinced that that was the case then you would be very excited about bringing that information to the village and wanting full credit for bringing it now so that's one motivation for bringing information of the village a second reason for bringing information to the village is to not only benefit the listeners ie had therefore benefits yourself indirectly by having gotten the appropriate status for bringing the information but actually also to potentially turn those people into more effective people so this information has the possibility of improving the thinking of the person on the other side of it so it doesn't just benefit them I either way the ginseng arrowroot cure for their lung cancer but in fact making them more effective engines of problem-solving in in the human dynamics realm and therefore aiding me so I've got five friends and I have discovered that there are limits that they sort of give you a great example of of a bit of a problem that is now once again reawakened in the world as of last night which is the NBA so NBA basketball years in some ways unique among sports and that's because the in football everybody's roles are very well defined and the showing off is it a total minimum in fact in football showing off pretty well is limited to grandstanding after you make a play in the NFL gets upset if a guy grand fans too much and they find them or whatever but you aren't influencing your team's success by your grandstanding other than the sort of artificial issue of the the referees flag and the fines or whatever the soccer baseball to maybe some degree if you are swinging for the fences too much you are wasting at-bats you're not optimal the so to sum there's a little bit of potential in baseball for making decisions that are not in the best which the team it might be and your visitors showing off your big muscles if we've hit a home run not so much so that's that's not a big issue in baseball this is a soccer I don't hockey these are not particular issues the big issues in basketball and basketball is unique you've got got five guys on the court and one ball and there's absolutely more status conferred upon the person that makes the shot the other four guys who are the same team and watch the shot go in and so this means that and of course there's more money paid to the people that can score more efficiently now so therefore it's going to turn out that there is of course they have a goal together which is to collectively win but the truth of the matter is even even if a team loses and four players have a mediocre game but one guy has a great game it scores a bunch of points that guy's going to feel pretty good afterwards now he'll make all the right noises like wow I just played a win you know it doesn't matter we win as a team and losing team blah blah blah but that's not what it shows up in the newspaper and that's not what everybody's talking about everybody's talking about how many points the one guy got and how great he played however videos played lousy so as because people's the individual the individuals involved there's survival and reproductive benefits to be had from the game particularly reproductive benefits in this case this is there it is wife for grandstanding and as a result coaching an NBA teen has got to be one of the most difficult psychological tasks of anybody ever ever tried to take on because the of this tremendous dynamic tension between what's in the best interest of the team and what's in my personal best interests are usually different things so god knows where we went with this and how I got off track so the issue is that you've got with respect to this knowledge your value is that if you as you educate your coalition it's actually in your best interest education coalition because then your coalition became become more effective humans and help you okay so there's that there's that aspect to it the other side of the dynamic is if you're educating the coalition you're getting a bunch of status or you attempting they're in a bunch of status so there's going to be resistance so there's going to be essentially cost-benefit analysis that are going to be running inside of every brain you come into as you attempt to expose people who this information but so it's going to it's going to turn out that you you can learn a lot about where the other person is at with respect to how well rewarded or not rewarded they feel in that coalition their relationship to you how it is that they you know what what what agreements they believe are are in place in the coalition for the management at conflicts of interest between individuals and whether evolutionary psychology and its prescriptions start to slaughter those agreements with with insight and so and so we're going to find out that each individual as they listen to these ideas is going to have a potentially fairly different reaction some individuals are going to feel like it's the devil talking in other words you're coming after tremendously sacred cows for them if I were for example a far leftist Marxist kind of an individual and I I don't know is professor Berkeley or somewhere like that evolutionary psychology would be very disturbing because you know I'm sort of raised on the notion of but the reason there's different differential outcomes between people is that things have been unfair and institutionally unfair and some individuals have gotten short and stick and blah blah blah so all this kind of ridiculous nonsense and so let's just say it's pretty ridiculous nonsense there's a little bit of truth in it there's five percent of the variance or ten percent of the variance is involved but it's not 100 percent of the variance and the vast majority of outcomes for individuals in the United States in this in this free country had to do with the contributions that those people have made or able to make in their in their trade relationships with others including how beautiful they are ie what what contribution that can they make to the person the other person on the other sides of its reproductive goals ie sexual excitement ie more attractive you are.the more valuable you are plain and simple okay the the smarter you are the more valuable you are the more conscientious and diligence you are the more valuable you are the more emotionally stable the more valuable you are the etc etc it's going to turn out that people obviously differ tremendously and how valuable they might be and therefore that that different value that they have the reproductive and survival goals of others goes a huge long ways in explaining the differential outcomes that people experience in life this would bother a left leftist and it goes after their thinking with a hatchet and so you can expect that they're going to bear cost-benefit analysis as they think about where they stand in the world's coalition's how it is that they're paid who they're trying to get laid by etc etc everything about evolutionary psychology is like a voracious wolf whether did care their thinking to shreds and as a result they're going to be extremely defensive about this that would just be one set of people the I was married to a very very fine psychologist really sweet person very smart person very well educated person an extremely well-meaning person but the nature of evolutionary psychology you know 50,000 watt halogen lamp aimed at men women dynamics of which we were a couple of young people trying to navigate those conflicts of interests that was extremely uncomfortable for her and as a result I mean that not as a result but as our you know we we parted ways because it was the right thing to do and very amicably however she never became educated so if you could you could imagine this extremely intelligent extremely capable individual was literally in the ground floor at clinical evolution psychology with me every day for years and never wasn't okay chef let's let's look at that okay and I I didn't particularly push it I would just keep chirp it up to chirp it up perfectly Pleasant about it but I watched this extraordinarily to extraordinary defensive Ness of which you can snip what's on the other side of it now more clearly to me more formally the notion is it was she was attempting to essentially vote down in fact such discussions were legitimate and we're going to try to push them to the side and ignore their validity because they were shedding light on the very conflicts that we were having this is very much akin to the way our far leftist professor doesn't want to hear anything about behavior genetics so the remember that that a reason itself is limited that the the motivation to seek the truth is is itself not some independent floating entity out there that that guides a human mental action the truth of the matter is is that the reasoning process itself is guided by cost-benefit analytics and that people believe it all kinds of crazy things and literally do believe in all kinds of crazy things because their nervous system can sniff it's in their best interest to believe in crazy things now this is the this is well described by Sam Harris in the moral landscape about how people can can be because their minds are made up of independent neural circuits they can have neural circuits that know that kind of they don't want to know okay so the supplementing they can actually they people can actually see I'm not consciously but subconsciously see into the future not in the future out but they're gonna have to rethink so many assumptions that it's not worth it to spec's that energy actually I would not say it was the energy it's the point is is that there's going to be some cataclysmic changes in status and they're going to lose some okay so they can smell that like if you're if you're the far left is Berkeley professor and I come sitting down and I sit down with you with the information that indicates we're beyond any shadow of any doubt that individual differences in people or genetic and that in fact there is incredibly good correlation coefficient between what people actually contribute in what is if they get paid okay that in fact the economy is essentially not sexist and it is not racist okay and if we go down through and we say well you know women don't only make sixty percent of what men make it's like yeah well did you control for how many hours they worked no we didn't do that okay did you control for how unpleasant the activity was no we didn't do that okay did we control for how many years the person is on the job no we didn't do that did we control for what the person studied in school and what their degrees are no we didn't do that okay so you didn't control for what what the people are doing how long they've been doing it how often maybe with and yet we're going to say that women only make sixty percent of what men make well by the time we control for all relevant variables we'll find out that women are making just as much money as men are making okay as we would expect because if that were not the case for example what would happen is is that a brilliant entrepreneur would simply hire all women for their staff and they would pay them ninety cents on the dollar and they would completely undermine their competition by being able to sell their product for ninety five percent of what their competitor was selling the product for scrape up the extra excess profits as a result of only paying women ninety cents on the dollar what the men were being paid and absolutely put the sword to their competitors throughout Ana marketplace this is obvious that's exactly what would take place okay and so as a result that in any any concept of the free market being bias in such a way against a racer or a gender is absurd okay the free market is inherently greedy you have to understand invisible hand phenomena an invincible hand phenomena will absolutely drive drive wages except where it's institutionally haywire where we have guilds that are set up but guilds are not set up along racist and sexist lines okay so guilds are set up that you know you become a medical doctor you become a psychologist now our keys are set higher than the free market would have ever set them that's a whole different issue now so the point is is that if I sat down with that stack of evidence and sat down with that logic and started counting it through that professors of brain there would be a cost benefit down in analytics that that brain would start to see that all the books and articles have been published and in fact all the lectures that they've given and in fact all the people to whom they are heroes and that they're trying to get laid or get a chelation problem they're going to lose it all so they're going to run a class benefit and they're going to say get thee behind me Satan okay I don't want to hear it okay that's that's the reaction that we're going to hear so this is a wonderful question that the person asks we're not we're not coming at people trying to be know-it-alls the people on the other side we're wanting to get some status or some esteem for the information that we're bringing this is true we are also we have multiple agendas number one we're bringing information that we consider valuable that might be valuable for them for god knows whatever reason whenever there is a major mistake and how does the people view reality that's fantastic to discover because there's no telling what distortions of behavior have been have been resultant from these errors and therefore there's profit in this we just don't know what the profit is now along the way there's going to be some costs okay this is just like if the government decides that that we're going to build a bunch of pyramids out of the Mojave Desert we're going to tribute get people employed and we do this and it's going to turn out it's going to create distortions in the marketplace as there's going to be far too many too much money going into developing quarries for goodness sakes okay so when we finally have to stop the absurd project we've got economic dislocation that is partially tragic as it turns out but a bunch of people who train to work the stuff at quarries are now going to be unemployed and they've spent time getting education on how to run quarry equipment that we don't need people and I'll have that information so as a result there's a transition between what people you know should have been doing and what they have been doing and in there there's some there's some there's a crisis and costs that have to be finally paid as people move on and the economy becomes undistorted as we get rid of this fiasco the same thing is true when people hold information that's incorrect okay they hold information correct about a lot of things so the person has as had a incorrect thinking that hamburger french fries and a coke or perfectly balanced meal it was in that has by the way been published many times that this is true that there's all these good things and the cheese that's on your burger and the burger is a good thing because of the protein and etcetera etcetera okay so when I was a kid this was actually touted you know by Walter Cronkite for goodness sake on the CBS Evening News that you know this some nutritionists or scientists said this was true so of course there's misinformation out there and when it turns out that we discover that information misinformation and we become it becomes clear to us that that we have been going down the wrong track it can be true that there can be some some substantial hassles and not to mention some status losses that have to I'm about as a result of us getting our heads corrected okay so the oh my god I just ran with this thing I don't even know where we where we were going at all so the radical honesty like if someone's sharing something with you they've never heard evolutionary psychology and you say oh you're just over rewarded because because your boyfriend or girlfriend is way more fancy than you are so that's why he's getting jealous you know thank goodness somebody's paying attention to what was actually out okay the now the radical honesty first of all is pretty silly the the actually amazingly enough Harry Brown was an advocate of that I don't think they had that name but I think in how I found freedom and unfree world which is one of my very favorite books of all time he talks about sort of this strategy and he tries to make the case for where it is that you know white is that this would be a good thing yet I read it I thought about it for about 15 minutes and I thought absolutely ridiculous this reason the matter is is that there's all kinds of situations where it's in your best interest to keep the information to yourself and there's all kinds of situations words in your best interest to deceive people okay the and for many for multitudes reasons and an awful lot of them are are unmistakably a mistake ibly good reasons so good reasons meaning everybody benefits by us keeping a deception in place so the so of course that's ridiculous so if we're if we're running into trouble all I can say is this when you have bring new information to the village if that that information has the possibility in some cases of being very disturbing for the people that are hearing it sometimes it's not going to be disturbing at all sometimes it will be very disturbing it depends upon what the consequences are for this information the five so the in my in my ex-wife's judgment and then the judgment of much of the prescription for human man woman dynamics it's supposed to look like this it's supposed to look like once to a to a little pair bond comes together that nobody's ever supposed to look at anybody else think about anybody else sexually consider possibly defecting to a new new relationship if a new relationship would become considerably more interesting its or that the existing relationship would not be a very interesting anymore etc okay that they the concept that that a relationship might be good for six months and not be good for sixty years is it will strike many people as bad news that the individual on the other side of it is wanting to leave is not grown up not emotionally stable not rules not fair etc etc okay so there's a there's consider an awful lot of reasons why person that's on the receiving end of enlightenment might be resistant to it they might be resistant to it consciously and deliberately and understanding that this is putting them at a disadvantage a manipulative disadvantage that that the person on the other side who has been subject to social pressure has now discovered the source of that social pressure and is in fact rebelling against that pressure and is now no longer under the manipulative came with the what they generally agreed upon social prescription the so that's that's one reason and another reason is that they may feel and it'd be more sam harris unconscious situation where they can feel the Niagara Falls is just you know a mile down the river and it's time for us to swim the other direction and so that that also can be the case the in any event the the bringing of this information if we're wise about it has a degree of sensitivity to the fact that the other person on the other side of this may have an awful lot of conflict over their ability to absorb the new information this is why it is that in my discussions of how to deal with with our understanding of the direction that helped me to take with respect to diet but what we bring is we bring a an interest and an excitement bit of humility with this so this is why I my attitude is that these are some interesting ideas not sure the experts that are touting them are right about everything but it looks like there's some promise okay and you know it's worthy of an experiment for me to think about it rather than this is the way human beings ought to be this is why you've got type 2 diabetes and you damn well ought to do it is that I say and how dare you be ungrateful argue with me over these details and what I need to do if I you push back at all is to read more text books or read more of the writings about this memorize the science and then beat you over the head with it now the the person on the other side of this is a complex mind with multiple agendas of their own and the the primary agenda isn't to simply walk away from their previous dietary patterns thank you for telling them and and then bow down and give you never at a never-ending credit for the fact that you brought them this information now the fact that they might do so okay is can lured you in to thinking that that this is the way to go I take out the hatchet any resistance should be met with aggression and if you lose a battle because you weren't prepared for the argument then lick your wounds go back to the books memorize more come back ready to kill okay don't do it the all of this new information anything new and radical and threatening the best way to manage this is from a position of humility a position of understanding that the other person is a complex being with multiple agendas and that also they have sometimes very good reasons for for resisting the conclusions that you've come to they they have experiences and beliefs mechanisms they for example just to give you one example they may not be as smart as you are and so it could be that they cannot actually integrate the logic as well as you you've got it integrated particularly on the fly and it may turn out that they actually have they're less open and therefore they have more weight that they give convention so as a result there they're essentially a brain that's designed by nature to more consistently be following convention because it's actually a safer decision-making strategy for them than it is to trust their own independent method okay so this can this can get complicated enough that my prescription for how to handle this is to not essentially do a lot of arguing if we're going to do anything we're going to ask questions Socrates who is actually from the council I can tell was actually a narcissistic bastard and loved corner people and make life miserable for anybody that disagreed with him however talk about Shakertown yeah he left us though with an interesting strategy that's worth noting and that's what we call the Socratic method which is that he he taught through essentially cross-examination questions and if we if we use a bit of that not aggressively in relentlessly but if we if we use the Socratic method we can essentially move our way out of an argument but move another mind into a more of a position where they have to open up a little bit and have to think about it and so rather than by telling we might ask and by asking and not telling we put our we keep ourselves in any of these discussions in a position of power okay so if you are if you are checkmating and winning and demonstrating you are actually you you are asking the person on the other side to use every bit of their rhetorical instincts to try to look for anything in your argument that might not be a hundred percent airtight and so that's how we get arguments and we get defensive 'no sand we get issues instead if we can shift any discussions with questions we wind up putting ourselves in a position of power like gee even you don't think that there might be the difference in sort of how men and women might look at things based on their reproductive goals because after you know women can only have eight or ten kids and then can have a hundred now actually men only have to have an orgasm and a female us to take a kid to nine months so the minimum investments are quite a bit less you don't think that that might not it might not have an impact i mean these guys are people are saying as a big impact but you don't think it might be something okay so by by Framing are our arguments with some questions we can potentially take a little bit out of the heat away you know and the edge out of these discussions and therefore potentially bring some enlightenment and improve our coalition's ability to think without causing undue stress and negative feelings for ourselves and others but sometimes that won't work including with my ex all right good enough for what should i alright we'll move on it yeah well I was gonna outright that yeah when I first got into practice I had done an internship which were north and although you know incredible remarkable things that reverse themselves after people get on a healthy diet and do some fascinate and so when I would see my own personal patients in my practice I was a little quick on the draw to tell them what the solution or all the problems were and of course that was met with a lot of argument a lot of defensive nessa oh no I already eat healthy and it's like and so it's frustrating and right you know it took a long time for me to really realize and a lot of it had to do with listening to some of the on-air sessions that you did with with you know with people here on the show that was super detailed ask a lot of questions and then really we gently introduced the idea that things are something's something's going on and right it's just fat just how to console with the patient anyway I you know I've been doing this doing this with people and just incredible how much more open they are when when you ask everything allow them to fail hmm yes absolutely that's uh that's very good also I would I would also say something else about this and about what your what you've been through and this is a I'm sure someone else has a name for this technique and and I don't I'm somebody out there who's listening is probably read this in a book somewhere and and somebody else's perform aliy you know you know put this in some taxonomy of of conversation but I call it deficit desensitize ation so there's a technique I use for you know as a psychologist or in other circumstances like this where I'm trying to educate somebody this is what we do is desensitize the fact that the other person's behavior or knowledge is at a deficit and we're going to try to we're going to try to remove that deficit but I want them to know that I'm not looking down okay so this is tricky business so for example somebody comes to me about health and and I'll say well so just you don't do you smoke no oh you don't smoke oh okay well do you drink oh not much oh ah that's too bad yeah I won't hold that against you okay the so now if I start out here now what's going to happen is they're going to be willing to tell me about the things that they do do about all the crap they the ice cream and french fries everything else outside because what I've done is they I have essentially assumed that they were worse than they are and it turns out that they have gone well above that okay so now now we can relax and now they can tell me the truth and that we're going to be fine so I desensitized them to the fact that otherwise they would be feeling that their behavior or record or it cetera is going to be at a deficit so I actually discovered this little technique with criminals that I was trying to get the truth out of when I worked at Dallas because it turns out that we didn't have national crime statistics and reporting at that time and a lot of these people I wanted to know what crimes they had committed in other locations because I was trying to put together recommendations for judges and I wanted to you know the best predictor of the future is past performance and so it's going to turn out that if you have any kind of algorithm that you're building to try to predict criminal behavior it's important that you you know the most important part of that algorithm ISM is what have they done in the past and the problem is you may not know what they've done in the past because you don't have records that go outside the state of Texas so I would tell them I would look at their record might tell you did this you did that oh god they gave you this / they gave you 18 months for that to shut up geez battle you did crying out loud that's nothing yeah okay the and then I'd say things like you know I haven't really looked through your file here and looked at the Nationals that's your national record but you know - too much to look through now but when I'm gonna have to look through it later but what what sorts of things have you ever been arrested for at other places so I already I basically let them know that I did not think badly about all the things that I'd know they've been arrested for in Texas and what they're on on probation for now uh and now I'm gonna of course I'm gonna look at the National stuff and and and I'm I'm a pretty easygoing guy so you just go ahead and tell me cuz I'm an abscess I'm going to see it anyway I would watch these guys hesitate like uh okay I'm watching them run the cost/benefit on whether or not they should come clean then I hear about you know the three rapes that took place in Oklahoma okay this is this is how it is that that we try to get information out of people so it's uh its deficit desensitize ation now fortunately I don't have to do this with with criminals I just do with regular old people that I'm trying to get trying to alter the CB in their head for honesty and so this is how it is that we would go about doing that and we could do that I do that in a variety of ways I do that for for people who may have some information that that would be very useful for me to help them but they have a but they're anxious about the the status loss that's going to take place if they reveal that information so if I sniff that out I I work around that defensive Necedah sensitization strategy and then everybody relaxes and then I get the truth so that's how we do it all right absolutely paradigm okay all right so our next question you've answered this before but I liked the twist on the question which is the flowing dr. Lisle regarding our health I've heard it said that our genes load the gun but our environment pulls the trigger in other words it looks like we have the ability to beat our genes when it comes to things like developing heart disease or cancer why isn't the same true of our personality I'm a boy if I am born a district English muck why can't the environment in which I'm raised or live influence what personality characteristics lay I ever beat by jeans and be less of a disagreeable schmuck oh I want to meet this person this person got a great sense of humor all right first of all the personality problems are are not they're not diseases so it's not something that goes wrong so if you're disagreeable it's not because something went wrong it's because you're disagreeing turns out that you're not very smart it isn't that something went wrong Isis you're not very smart the the personality is more akin to tall and short or more and kin to skin color so if you've got dark brown skin there's nothing wrong with your skin if you got light skin and nothing wrong with your skin the these are gene variances okay you're six foot four there's nothing wrong with that the if you're five foot two there's nothing wrong with that so there there can be inconveniences so if you're a 5.2 inch male in this society that's inconvenient or you're six foot four inch female it could be inconvenient but there's nothing wrong with it so what let's begin there so it's not anything close to the same thing as health issues so health issues the person has some genes that make it more likely that they're going to get heart disease and then they eat a bunch of stuff to promote sartre disease and they're more likely to get the problem than somebody that doesn't have the genes but this is not we're not talking about the development or or epigenesis of disease here we're simply talking about the emergence of personality characteristics and the emergence of personality characteristics is to the best of our knowledge not subject to environmental influence or if it is subject to environmental influence that those influences are very small and incidentally they do not appear to be systemic in other words nobody knows what you can do to make a person more open or make them more you know extroverted or make them more conscientious they just are what they are so the if you are a disagreeable schmuck the question is can you out think your genes and the answer would be probably on occasion you can the not not reflexively not over the hundred thousand interactions that you'll have in your life that you will bring to it a disagreeable mindset that you can't help but there may be moments that are important that you can have a red flag up in your brain and do things against the way your genetic code would be telling you to do them an example would be for example uh don't sue particularly don't sue the psychologists because you might some marriage therapy and your spouse got some support from this you know sob psychologist who said you know what doesn't sound like you're very happy if you should think about taking the experiment and leaving for a little while see what happens and your spouse lights up and then leaves you and then you feel like suing this guy yeah it happens to be a guy by the way and you lives in California don't sue yeah likes to run a guy alright so with your friends you know if you find yourself in a situation with a good friend who if you got a good friend and you're disagreeable you should understand that there's probably the word Saint painted on their forehead you just got to look at it from the right angle so you find yourself locked in it in a pissing match with your good friend who's a saint at which point you should realize you know what I'm disagreeable a good strategy is for me to go more than halfway okay to good strategy for all of us to have in our back pocket but particularly if you're disagreeable you you ought to grit your teeth when the going gets tough and you're about to try to ramrod your position through a friendship that's valuable back up and go more than halfway okay thirdly I would say that if you're in an argument which is essentially this is a more specific prescription for the what I just talked about it go more than half way if you're in trouble in an argument with your boss your coworker the IRS agent you know remember give a steam in an argument the person on the other side of an argument is is arguing with you because they are feeling like you are not giving them enough steam if you are a disagreeable person it's very likely that that it's quite possible their feelings about this are based on some legitimate realities and so when you're if there are costs associated with this argument it's a good move for you to actually back up and give them some esteem ie go more than half way try to go against your instincts now people listening to me might say come on you said that you know personalities personality instincts are instincts etc etc you you cannot beat instincts as a chronic issue but you can build beat them periodically with great focus let me give you a fantastic example I don't know fantastic it is but it's a perfect example the the the genes will have built the male brain to be constantly looking at attractive females and thinking about having sex with them this is you know can be inconvenient it can be annoying to partners etc etc the the fact is we will not change that fact and there's no possible way change that that's off the table okay that's however here's something that you can change you can change the the desire if you're about to have sex with somebody you're attracted to you can put on a bloody condom that you can do so you can momentarily halt what the jeans want you to do and put in place a barrier between you and an outcome you don't want to see that is possible okay that's how it is that we can beat the jeans this is what I call wisdom forks this is about when we when we when it's okay to follow the genes and then when we can become aware when it's not okay to follow the genes if you are a disagreeable person and you have listened to this and you understand that that disagreeable chip is in your DNA it's just how you're built then one of the things that you can do is you can learn will watch out for times when there are possibly considerable expenses on the other side of you giving your DNA its head and don't do it don't sue don't lose your friends and be careful in an argument to give the other person esteem these would be places where you can periodically puncture the the potential disaster of a balloon that you are blowing up behind having DNA that is essentially in conveniently disagreeable Wow alright stick we have time for one quick one from a law she wants I know she was just shot okay so doctor I just listener just messaged me and was really curious about this it's just reconnected with us with a very close friend and they haven't spoken for years and now as they've gone closer there she's helping him with something but telling her well are you ready for the upcoming you know financial crisis are you ready about this and all these worst-case scenarios that he's all worried about right i suggested her that she reads how freedom and unfree world but but we wanted to hear from you about you know about this issue Oh about because he's kind of bombarding her and she feels sort of bombarded by his his person there's a crisis and a burning it there's burning issues okay yeah the he said that that says she's feeling pressure behind the burning issue the I would yeah it was this this person this this guy needs to understand that he's in a burning issue trap and so that's part of what's going on I um what would I say I would say I would probably give the person a little bit of status with respect to this for example I mean I'm just trying to think how I would do this I would say I'd say interesting what you're saying it's probably something to it but I'm a bit of a flake and I'm just not going to worry that much about it so this is this is what I call going upside down so this is this is how we are going to take statics away from ourselves and and in doing so not follow their prescription and signal to them that we that that what the great information that they are trying to bring to the table to get status is something that we're not going to be following and that we're not going to buy it on but the reason we're going to do this is because we've got some some essentially suboptimal sort of personality deficits now when we do this their brains are sophisticated it up to pick up that that there may be a little bit of truth in what we're saying but actually we're just simply not volatile Ewing their message that much and they will be mildly frustrated but they won't be but we will not be sending them a signal to educate them when they are so determined to educate us so we will display some degree of mild openness towards what it is that they're saying but we're not going to be taking any action and getting feverish we're not drinking the kool-aid why because we're a little bit of a flake okay so that's off the top of my head that's actually how I would personally handle that and this goes under the line of where we started this tonight was I what do they call that radical honesty or something like this I'm not going to do that I'm going to be pre slick about this because really what this person is needing is they're needing a scheme for me and what they really need what we need to have is this relationship sort of reconnecting us analyze whether or not how much we value each other's people and we want a process to sort of develop and in this process we want this relationship to have some time and some leisure and some interaction for us to find out how much we value each other and so this is a way for me to give give the person feedback that says and I'm not going to argue with you and I'm not going to join your band I like you and I'm listening but please don't be offended when I don't grab my pitchfork and start hunting for communists you know behind my garbage can I know it in my garage okay I'm just not going to do it so I hear you and I understand the great red threat and you know it's kind of interesting what you're saying and you've certainly done a lot of research and that's pretty cool but but please recognize that although I find it interesting I'm not I'm not convinced enough to worry and one of the reasons I'm not worrying is probably because I'm a little bit like okay so we let that put put that print that rebutting friendship in a position to give us some time to analyze who the person is while we will we find other ways to signal to them that we've you them and then we let the whole process emerge and then find out what the whole relationships work it turns out that there's some survivalist in that case that just won't let this go and they're like a you know a a paranoid dog with a bone then we may find that we have to pull away anyway okay so but we could certainly give them a little bit of a soft touch well we see if if a relationship can develop without them needing to bring that as the ace that they lead in this card game
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