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Episode 141: Facial cues, guess the personality, non-food potential pleasure traps
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new research shows that people can predict something about a politician's honesty just by looking at them but it's not the lips that they're noticing or the eyes or the ears a series of studies conducted by Caltech researchers show that when people are shown photos of politicians they're not familiar with they can make better than chance judgments about whether those politicians have been convicted of corruption people can make these judgments even without knowing anything about the politicians or their careers and one thing they seem to be picking up on is how wide the politicians faces are the new Caltech study is the first to show that observers have a knack for picking out corrupt politicians based on just a portrait and that observers perceive politicians with wider faces as more corruptible it's important to note that the researchers are not claiming that politicians who look corruptible are inherently more corrupt than those who look honest their research simply shows a connection between facial appearance and corruption but they say there could be many explanations one possibility is that if a face conveys a sense of dishonesty the politician might be offered more bribes more often another possibility is that the corruptible looking politicians are not any more corruptible than honest looking politicians but because of their looks they are more often suspected of investigated for and convicted of corruption yes a study which appeared in the Journal of Psychological Science consisted of four parts part one the researchers collected pictures of 72 politicians who held office at the state or federal level half had been convicted of corruption and half had clean records all of the politicians included were male and Caucasian all of the photos were black and white cropped to the same size and featured a frontal smiling portrait the images were presented randomly to one hundred volunteers who were asked to rate each politician on how corruptible dishonest selfish trustworthy and generous they looked an analysis of the data collected showed that the volunteers as a group were able to correctly differentiate the corrupt politicians from the clean politicians nearly 70% of the time based on their faces alone part to study the second part replicated part one but used photos of 80 politicians elected to state and local offices in California half of them had violated the California political reform act a law that regulates campaign finance lobbying and politicians conflict of interest and half had clean records as before the data showed that the volunteers could correctly differentiate the corrupt politicians from the clean politicians nearly 70% of the time part 3 the third part of the study used the images from part one but then asked the volunteers to judge the politicians on a new set of criteria corruptibility aggressiveness masculinity competence and ambitiousness the data from this study showed that only corrupt ability related trait inferences differentiated corrupt politicians from the clean politicians however inferences of competence and viciousness or masculinity did not predict the politicians as records portfolio in the fourth section of the study the researchers examined which of the politicians is facial structures the volunteers associated with dishonesty and corruption the faces were characterized by eight measurements that described things like distance between the eyes size of the cheekbones nose length and face width by comparing the data from those measures against the judgments made by the volunteers and the records of corruption convictions the researchers found that politicians with higher facial width ratios were more likely to be perceived as corruptible the second part of part 4 to double-check that the face width was truly the characteristic driving negative perceptions about a given politician the researchers gathered photos 150 politicians and then digitally manipulated each into a wider faced version and a narrow face version now the 450 resulting photos including the 150 unaltered originals were shown to 100 participants who were then asked as in the previous studies to rate each image according to how corruptible the politician seemed and again face width made the difference volunteers judged the wide faced versions of the politicians to be more corruptible than their thin faced counterparts the study entitled inferring whether officials are corruptible from looking at their faces was published in Psychological Science on September 12th the authors are Chu Zhang Lin Ralph Adolf's and Michel Alvarez fact fascinating I'm not sure I heard in there that they that they actually ran any correlation coefficients on corrupt politicians versus a random sample of non non convicted politicians and looked specifically for whether or not as a group the corrupted or the convicted politicians literally had whiter faces so I'm hearing that that people suspect that that's true there's some correlation there perhaps but I'm not sure how strong the correlation is so I so I'd have to really look and see what all is in their data and what can be inferred from it but that is uh it sounds like what they've found is that that people are picking up and queuing on the face width and that there is truth in it is what I'm hearing I think that's what I'm getting from from those studies I believe that's true is that is that what they're saying in the discussions or what's the what's the conclusion in the discussions that you can you know I'm dealing more a guy fortunately unfortunately the study is behind a paywall so right I'm emailing the PIA the lead author because i know lead authors are allowed give you the full you know bar right i'm so perhaps perhaps we could have another four come on meet no worries art yeah you're you're having acoustical problems again just by the way ah dang it yeah okay well now now suddenly they're better well okay well anyway that's very interesting that's a that's a heck of interesting it doesn't it surprises me that that it's not that it appears to not be correlated directly with I'm not you know I'm not sure about I'm not sure what I'm what there were we can infer from this because it's a little bit sometimes these studies are tricky and to really figure out what we've discovered is a little hard to do but it sounds like there are characteristics that people are making inferences about so by looking at for example a wider face which may be a more testosterone eyes face that people can tell the difference between cues that indicate ambition and cues that indicate dishonesty that if that's true particularly at the level that appears to be the case there are 70 percent when fifty fifty is the coin flip that's almost unbelievable from looking at I mean I I'm actually astounded at this evidence folks just as somebody that stared in an awful lot of data in in psychology experiments this is this is a spectacular effect size and if it is what I think it is it's showing us that you can that you can tell something some that there are are going to be cues in the way a person's face is built that and probably we're picking up hormonal issues you know that that drove the entire orchestration of the face as opposed to other variables that could have done at other genetic variables so what we're seeing is is that probably hormone levels in faces and it's very likely to be the case in females as well as males is going to enable us to make some some pretty striking and remarkably accurate entrances about their personalities so that that is that's you know I want to see more of this type of thing and I'm sure that these guys are not out there all by themselves and they didn't just come up with this out of the blue sky that in other words somebody else has been doing similar things so this is all fascinating stuff and this is the brave new world as people from Cal Tech start to get interested in things like this and now we're going to get some good science alright the B is fascinating yeah yeah it's fascinating they don't that may be able to tell your body like social science may have oh yeah Lord yeah drat I want to hear what you're saying but you're breaking up the yes the but yes the fact that that there may be quite striking correlation coefficients in in social processes social psychological processes personality issues that are that are that are discernible from vision just about how a person's facial characteristics are built much less the rest of them I mean that is I sit back and wait for a new wave of data and investigations that could be remarkably illuminating as it tells the story of individual at a in a level of at a level of elimination that I wouldn't have necessarily thought was possible you know just by looking as who was it was what is a Yogi Berra you could tell a lot just by watching you could see a lot you could observe a lot just by watching it this this may be this may this may be they have a deeper truth than we knew all right very didactic any oh yeah can you can you hear me better now yes I sure can okay yeah it's fascinating that that someday we might understand this in greater detail on that you can tell someone's personality or parts of their personality just by looking at them it seems like like social science will have nowhere to hide after after all these are figured out in more detail yeah I II learned learning theory psychodynamic theory etc a lot of a lot of dead theories in a series of individual differences that have not been appropriately buried are going to get buried by this so this is I mean that's fascinating I mean I have believed I think I've known about some of these things I've known about I think facial characteristics and aggression there's a that doesn't surprise me any I think there's testosterone cues that you're going to expect people with certain configurations to to be more likely to interrupt you to be more essentially more pushy and aggressive and so on and so forth there's a that that wouldn't surprise me you know that doesn't surprise me at all but this is this is now going deep and subtle in something that I wouldn't have imagined that the human mind would have a chip for it and it appears that there is that's a that's amazing so hey we stand by ready for the next surprise very cool just another reason to lose weight if you've got to lie to my face as well but that's just just kidding just carry good alright alright okay so our question is actually about keys to our first question from our listener is dr. Lyle since you've introduced me to the big five I've been constantly playing guess the personality game with everyone that I come across and I can't help but include facial features and hormonal cues and alike in my judgment am i right - are there shades of truth to things like phrenology well not to phrenology so phrenology was a was a concept introduced to the world in the 1800's by a pair of guys by the name of gall and spur time and they had they had this elaborate scheme of the bumps on the skull and they thought that they could tell people's personalities by looking at their skulls and and you know it's a fair fair enough I mean it was a good try but there's like no truth in it I think the only truth that you're going to see is that probably bigger skulls has bigger brains and therefore there's a tiny correlation coefficient between the size of a person's skull and their intelligence not much by the way it turns out about that correlation coefficient may be so small it would be below the ability of people to detect it it turns out that the size of the person's brain however sitting in the skull correlates quite well with what their intelligence levels so these are things that wouldn't be observable and phrenology was a was a ludicrous idea that that the sort of bumps on the skull correspond to different personality characteristics so I mean it was all very cool but but I'll say I actually have in my personal library I have one of the original works on phrenology by I think it's either either dollars per time I got a you know if anybody wants to give me a bunch of money for it now I would say it was somebody I think I got it as a gift when I got my PhD the so anyway but this person's question is obviously relate to exactly what we were just looking at and this is the this is a you know that this Caltech study is a is a new new look at the analysis of this these guys are getting very sophisticated and I do believe that you're going to find hormonal cues in people's facial configurations that are going to tell us a lot yeah just from my just from my own standpoint just when I look at people I'm pretty sure that the correlations are are strong enough just by looking at testosterone and estrogen cues but I believe that that I can predict far better than chance whether or not a person is going to be assertive versus more passive and I could be wrong in other words I could it could be that I'm taking into consideration a whole bunch of other things that I'm saying with the person their body posture movement facial expression the way they dress everything about them you know your your computing a whole bunch of stuff when you look at people you're looking at their whole social context who are they with what does it look like who's controlling the conversation you know their height their build there's just a slew of stuff that as to being cosmides pointed out a long time ago you could have people males that are mesomorphic and they are much more likely to be in prison not necessarily because the testosterone drives more aggression but rather that the mesomorphic situation leads them to be more often in social situations where their muscles will enable them to aggressively get what they want so all things being equal more muscular men or likely to be more assertive and and actually to use that aggression and so you might say well that's not true of my cousin who has a PhD in astrophysics from MIT and he's a big strong guy yeah he's also got all kinds of conscientiousness an IQ and he's not going to use this use that didn't need to use that to deal with the disputes that he deals with however let's make him 90 IQ and make him a high school dropout and let's have him working at the car wash now we're going to find out if there's a dispute over who used the wrong rag whether or not you know he's more likely to wind up in insane fisticuffs and the answer is going to be obviously yes he's going to be a heck of a lot more likely than someone who's built thin and and slight so and obviously as a male he's massively more likely to wind up in a physical concentration confrontation than a female so yeah I believe the answer to the question is yes and I I think I think we're going to find these things in a lot of different places and a lot of different ratios in the face possibly we might even I think the length of the jawline for example there's going to be all kinds of things that you're going to pick up probably a very short jawline in females and and wide lips and so forth and arched eyebrows are going to be indicative of high estrogen levels and that's going to probably result in people that are that are less assertive and so all of this this is all then confounded by how just physically attractive people are because physically attractive people tend to be more assertive you know so-and-so their winds up being this winds at being pretty spectacular and subtle and involve a lot of dimensions they get fed into this and so that's why this Caltech study to me is so fascinating had they said that the results were 55 45 I would have said pretty good not by chance it shows us that there's something there had it been 60/40 I would have said wow that's a big deal that's such a big deal that if you're a politician with a wide face and that dimension you're going to you've got you're working against a public that can sniff out that you've that you've got a quarrel at there that indicates that you're much more likely to be dishonest okay the fact that they could pick them out 70 to 30 unbelievable so it it borders on not believing it but just the the way that you've told the story and who did this research and the meticulous nature but they went in and the fact that they replicated the same levels into samples I mean that is just I can't tell people that are listening you know someone who did many psychological experiments and ran a lot of data and never got anything because I didn't have any good evolutionary hypothesis so you know I watched more than one laboratory at the University of Virginia and social science just flounder around with a bunch of garbage in garbage out for data because we could never find anything true and we ran the studies properly so everything appropriately came back like it just AB random scatter plot okay if we had ever had anything that had a correlation coefficient that high we we would have you know we would have crowned ourselves King that is that's a thing of beauty so yeah I think the answer the question is it's just beginning and now now we've just waved the red flag in front of the ball and we got some pretty sophisticated people now realizing that they're going to be able to grind away at the mysteries of human nature with some really hardcore science and that's beautiful fantastic yeah okay well now we're going to turn the ship around a little bit and instead of talking about the facial cues and personality yeah we're going to start talking about non-food potential pleasure traps alright the first ones about casual meeting so dr. Lyle my very pretty mid 30s female friend wants to find a pair bonding to have kids but she keeps falling for casual mating guys and admits that she can't resist that they have fancy jeans and more more fun even though they don't want to stick around how can she shut off that drive in herself how can she force herself to choose the pair bond less good-looking guy so that she gets the guy that will stick around have a kid have you ever seen any females overcome this and succeed Oh oh my god this is a how many times have I watched this this movie okay the yeah so if she's mid-30s she's she's uh conveniently got her head in the sand and she she may have to burn a few more eggs before she before she comes to the party usually usually they wake up in a cold sweat at 38 and they're out of time okay so that that's what we're that's what we're observing here so all I could tell her is you know it's time to play my my favorite game which is ten paid dates you know that's that's what you got to do and if you don't want to do it no problem but nobody cares this isn't a moralistic thing nobody's telling you this the right way to live you can it sounds like she's enjoying her existence just fine however she has other agendas and the nature of life is that our agendas are inherently in conflict okay so we don't we don't have a seamless integration of Medivation where a whole bunch of things that we want to do are all seamlessly integrated with each other and a beautiful benign balance and we don't have any conflict your your brain is inherently in conflict all the time you always have alternative courses of action that the mind is is grinding away and thinking that that alternative course and action may be better than the course of action than the one that you're taking and so this is the nature of life so she is she's following her Stone Age agenda and and and this is it all feels pretty well right to her and there's nothing in principle wrong with it other than that if she wants a modern you know if she wants to pull off a modern coup of the modern female which is to have a male that sticks around indefinitely and wants to be there the and that's unlikely to be somebody that's the fanciest guy that you can get in the bar okay so the sexiest guy in the bar so it's exceedingly unlikely to be that guy so there's trade-offs and and so what what she might want to do is I don't know about how much heartache she has at the end of these things maybe not a lot all depends upon how sort of open to experience she is and so on the but if she does if she's got any significant amount of heartache and his feeling she's feeling the the grim reaper of age forty sort of out there wavering you know in the distance then it's time to play ten paid dates is what it is and it's time to you know that that's what i would tell somebody to do and i'd say hey listen experiment with it see what it feels like dodge bullet when he makes an aggressive move on date three you shut him down pleasantly and then he doesn't call you back see what that feels like okay and then he calls you back a month later hey babe you know kind of going to now put into sense a little later just to see whether or not he can get back in the but you know try playing that and see what it feels like to let one go and if it turns out that you feel like you dodged a mess then you'll feel like i feel when i'm almost goaded into a fight with somebody okay when I'm almost goaded into an argument with with a heckler and I do the right thing instead of the instinctive thing and the instinctive thing is to cave in their skull and the right thing is to flatter them and give them Pat them on the head and give the little narcissist some nice feedback and then then then they're my friend and then we don't have a problem and then then I don't have to have that rattling around in my brain for the next four days about how I about how I you know teed off on somebody and of course crush them because believe me I will okay it's like I'm not going to come away without that without the victory but I come a whether we want when you do that by the way this is so good it's just so self-indulgent okay and but when I do that whenever I do that which it's down to usually you know less than once or twice a year these days but when I whenever I do that you know I paid the price for four days so I have way too much baggage in my head and in the same way if some girl is has got baggage that she reverberates behind to you know to pay dates in a dump you know three weeks later then it was fun while it lasted but she I'm disappointed and I'm lonely and I'm frustrated and when is this ever going to end it's time to play a new strategy and that's what I would tell this person to do now I've often thought that you know I understand the pleasure trap when it comes to food because there's unnatural foods in the environment I understand it when it comes to pornography but as far as casual mating I know it's not I mean I always suspect if it's some sort of pleasure trap because it nowadays there's access to so much more casual mating than there ever was in the Stone Age I can't help but think if there's some sort of unnatural process there that makes it difficult for people to escape um that's a good that's a good observation I I'm not I'm not sure about this but I would say that there is I would say that the following is true the I would say that people that are on the attractive side of the scale the for them remember that as you get as you get in the upper reaches say in the upper 20 percentile the distribution you're you're getting a situation where people that are quite attractive can find people that they find very attractive often will find them acceptable that's not going to be true in the middle of the distribution okay so in the middle of the distribution of five is yet you know fives have their eyes we now know scientifically where they've got their eyes set they've got them set at least at the 75th percentile okay so I never knew what those numbers were and I'm just I just feel very fortunate you know to live in a world where a lot of these questions are being answered quantitatively because I knew that this was the dynamic but I didn't know the extent of it and it's actually worse than I thought so the so as a result you can imagine if what suppose you're an eight and a half whereas an eight and a half there's no such thing as setting your sight to 25 percentile higher it's not possible there isn't 25 percentile higher so as a result you're you're in a situation where you're very often in circumstances where people that are damned attractive you might find you attractive if you're a five you're almost never in that situation and so if you're if you're an eight and a half or let's just for fun quit calling it and help let's call it a nine okay so that's a lot of people so if you're if you're a nine you're in situations happening constantly where you're running into people that are superficially reasonable in terms of their personalities and their personality cues that they give off and you find them physically appealing and they find you physically appealing okay that's a formula for casual mating and the and so not a lot of the food chain winds up there now we're going to add something else to it alcohol okay so now we're going to add normal care and concern for females guarding their eggs now we're going to reduce that okay so now that's interesting we've now altered the brain and distorted its mechanisms so now it's going to be essentially risky with its with its jewels and so now we've now we've contributed a major factor in making this far more likely okay you can think about I want you to think Nate about if you if you have the same situation exactly that you have today except there was no such thing as alcohol there was no drugs no alcohol now what would it look like okay I think that we can agree that a huge percentage of casual mating processes would be reduced substantially all right so that that I don't think that that's a trivial issue all right so well now what I think so now if you if you you say okay it seems it may seem to us that the casual mating is a fairly rampant fairly you know pleasure trap a little bit distorted look at the world but let's take away two things out of the equation we're going to take we're going to completely wipe out the top twenty percent of humanity out of the equation and all the alcohol okay if we do that how much casual matings traction do we really have and I think the answer is probably not a lot okay so I think we're good then again yeah that makes a lot of sense okay yeah so I think that I think you I think those two factors alone probably account for a lot of what it is that you're seeing that looks looks like a distorted view of what humanity ought to look like and it is a distorted view because I think those are those two features give rise to you know the motivation for pursuing causal meting strategy you can imagine the spectacular difference in motivation if you're a nine male or female but suppose you're a nine mil okay with with good social skills and nothing bizarre about you personality wise you're not you know living with your mother in the back of her house because you can't get a job okay you're actually a competent human you have good social skills and you're a nine let's think about this and you're comfortable with alcohol in a scene that involves you know people drink it and dance and and so on if you look at that situation you're perceived probability of success is extremely high okay so as a result of that you're motivated to to look for those circumstances in order to execute on casual mating strategy so therefore you know fair amount of reasonable amount of time and energy is going to go into pursuing that which is which is clearly a quite a novel evolutionary situation oh I forgot one of the things that I meant to mention which is the birth control you know has arrived on the scene since you know 1970 in a way that's reasonably convenient so when you add birth control high attractiveness alcohol all in a one swirling cauldron you you get a situation where we're going to get you know a pretty intensive amount of casual mating strategy in a subset of the population okay I know that that perspective makes a lot more sense than was floating around my hedge got it okay so that so now we turn to a different potential pleasure trap which is masturbation and the question from our listener is dr. Lau does masturbation make somebody lazy sort of tricking their brain into believing that they got laid and they're therefore relatively successful this listener says I realized that such an effect would may may have been quickly weeded out in the Stone Age but I'm wondering if this super super normal stimulus of modern porn is different when did Stone Age people even masturbate play you know this is very interesting question and you know I would say that I don't I don't know the answers to lot of these questions now my understanding is that that for male masturbation I understand that this has to do with the general this is essentially straight homeostatic drive theory that that there are there cyclical processes and homeostatic processes involved in in you know survival and reproduction so whether it's breathing or whether it's temperature regulation or whether it's hunger whether it's thirst whether it's sleep whether it's physical rest from exertion or whether it's masturbation that I believe that the biological purpose of that drive for orgasm is is going to be to clear out essentially aged sperm and to make it so that any sperm that hit a female are more likely to be vigorous now that was that's something that I read quite a long time ago and I don't know where this just feels like I read it this says David buses stamp on it but that's my that's my memory of that now I never probably because I'm a male and I was probably probably relieved there was very high and mighty it's been for this the the however I don't recall that I that I remembered anything analogous in the female arena and I also remember I believe that if my memory serves me correctly I believe that only 50% of females masturbate and which is which is quite interesting the so I don't and I believe probably male percentages are higher and it makes sense that they would be higher based on this biological process so I'm a little now as to the other questions this is so number one I do not understand female about masturbation I don't understand if there's a if there's a physiological advantage what it is and whether or not any drive therein is anything is anything other than an artifact of the fact that that orgasms are not only beneficial for grabbing the sperm backflow of an attractive male so in other words the female is more likely orgasmic if they find the male sexy and they're more likely to find the male sexy if he has better gins in other words if he's more physically attractive as you have facial features that indicate to high levels of testosterone as well as obviously then if his sperm actually are are more motile so the the female orgasm is not random that that doesn't mean with with great technique some of this might the Apple to compete but the but the bottom light is that that sheer sheer sexy Delta for the female feeling like the guys fancy relative to her is a useful thing to cause female orgasms which are are therefore increasing the statistical likelihood of pregnancies so we know that the female orgasm is definitely biologically useful as something akin to a mr. right detector the however what that would have to do with female masturbation is mysterious to me at this point and I don't know maybe somebody knows but I don't know okay now as we move on to the issue of could this good masturbation in a modern environment with pornography make people lazy I don't think it's tricking the brain into thinking that you're successful any more than it would have been tricking the brain in the Stone Age into thinking that you were successful so I don't think that's true I think that any supernormal stimuli at all can result in addictive like processes that any supernormal stimuli by definition is going to potentially move a person's life out of out of balance relative to where it was before and the supernormal stimuli could move their lives out of balance in a direction that is not entirely benign okay so I have no in other words that the overall balance of their life winds up not being as good as it would be without the super normal stimulus now that's not true of all supernormal stimuli so for example movies are and comedy or television can be these are all supernormal stimuli so you know when you watch a movie you're watching a story written by very smart writers generally they did the best they could after the director hacked it up okay but the point is is that you've got actors beautiful faces you know you have music for goodness sake by professional musicians you've got a supernormal stimuli and yet it puts your you know it puts your life for the hours that you're watching it into a reverie that can be a magnificent experience and it's it's a super normal process and yet we wouldn't say oh well that's a terrible thing that's a supernormal stimuli and therefore this is wrecking your life okay music we can get closer and say wait a second you know music is marvelous and can be a beautiful addition it's definitely super normal and but we can see situations where it looks like it's it's got a hold of somebody's nervous system and it's pounding the daylights out of it okay so we can we can see that there are occasions where it looks like music yeah by virtue of its super normal quality can actually disturb someone's life processes to the point where it's not ideal okay some teenager that's in the garage blasting their head you know with 120 decibel music is this is a life out of balance and they may well have essentially an addictive process it's a problem okay the now in other words not generally generally very benign supernormal stimuli food we can see we know there are problems with the supernormal stimuli food drugs definitely okay pornography for some people it's just this would be I would say that this is the equivalent of wine you know Alan would wrinkle up his nose dr. Alan Goldhamer all of us knows that even the mere mention of Chardonnay yes but the truth of the matter is is that if we're not being stuffy about this most people can use alcohol on occasion and it's in addition to their life and it's not a problem for 5% of people it's a disaster okay and I would probably also say that something akin to this is going to be true with pornography with potentially music I can't think of other supernormal stimuli at the moment I could television ok so there's people that are who are sufficiently entertained by television that they could sit there and watch unbelievably insipid things for hours and we can look at this and really say you know what this is a problem okay is it destroying your life no but is your life impoverished and actually not as good a life as it would be because we are feeding you with a supernormal stimuli that's just tickling the circuits into thinking that this is productive activity yeah ok and you'd be better off shutting it down and so the so I think that that's where I would that's where I believe that's going to be and certainly I have treated people in my career that were addicted to pornography not common but but it's been there you know and and for a few people it's a real problem I'm something like video games where I've always assumed that video games can be particularly addictive because yeah the person playing the video games gets immediate feedback if they do something right in the game and if they don't they die and they have to start all over again which is kind of similar life but it happens so much more efficiently with video game that yeah I can probably be more pleasing there's no question I think video games is a fantastic example of a modern supernormal stimuli and once again as we look through that lens we're looking at something that is not heroine you know I'm saying it's not cigarettes it's but it's it's got a porn like quality to it and the in other words it can be very compelling and in certain nervous systems you know can't leave it alone and it can swallow up their existence and I'm not going to say that these things will lead to terrible lives but what I'm going to say is that they lead to lives that are out of balance and that the person is is essentially now now not actually having probably as as as satisfying an existences would be possible for that nervous system and the laziness that this person refers to is involved here in the same way with the video games these are shortcuts to the feeling of productive action and and in the same way that pornography is shortcuts to the feeling that that one has obtained very very fancy mate and and it is you know and this is this has been accomplished and and so and therefore you know there's a feeling of productive reproductive action so the yeah I think that you know I'm not thanked ammonius or Methodist or anything else about any of this kind of thing I look at each of these things including processed food including wine including pornography all of it I look at it with a with an eye of mild concern until I look at evidence of a specific individual words more than a mild concern where I see that it's that it's grabbed ahold of their motivational system and it's twisted their lives into significant imbalance and that's can that happen absolutely
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