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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 156: Keeping attention in class, When authority is altruistic, autism, war
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okay our first question dr. Lyle I want to do well at university but when I'm reading or attending lectures my attention wanders really easily and it's common for me to start to feel sleepy within seconds no matter what time of the day does my brain find these activities completely useless and what can I do to convince it otherwise ah first of all I know this is a person from a from a far away land because they use the term University and that's what that's they're using it in a way that we don't use it in the US so be true jeez podcasts is international alright yeah now what's actually happening is that our person here is short of sleeping the you cannot take a sleep satiated brain and make it sleepy by boredom that that's not that's not what happens so boredom will unmask an underlying sleep debt and so will some other things so for example if you have a glass of wine that will unmask a sleep debt so that will cause people to go to sleep or to be sleepy but if you're if you are not sitting on a bunch of sleep debt and you have a glass of wine it's not going to make you sleepy so the so that that's all that's really transpiring here so that means this person is sort of living their life in a chronic probably low-grade sleep debt like a lot of young people do and as a result when they get into a situation that's boring it's unmasking that sleep debt same thing is true with food so food will if you eat it'll perk you up a little bit and then if you get sleepy afterwards that's not from the digestion of the food that is a that is an unmasking of the sleep debt so that's all the real situation is there so if you want to do better at university get to sleep on time and then you'll be able to stay wide awake through the most boring of lectures and then you can make all kinds of notes on a separate notebook about everything that's interesting going on in your mind while you're listening to the stupid lecture waiting for those little jewels of what the professor may ask on an exam so that's how you do it so now Alan Goldhamer made huge lists of everything he needed to run a fasting facility all the way through school and I made lists and lists of all the places in the world that I wanted to visit I have visited more places than he's visited and he has a more successful business and this is how we lived our lives it was all right there evident even in the early years well let me start right here I thought that you are self professed to be lower openness to new experience and I made an assumption that highly open people are the ones who like to travel a lot is that my story is there a distortion there um actually no if you look at where I want to go I don't want to go anywhere dangerous where there's like snakes the UH I've heard the water in Bali's like beautiful but I've heard that there's like water snakes which really freaks me out I don't want to go anywhere where there's some bug that could bite me or some virus so all this or some government that's so weird about how they do things that they could throw me in jail or thieves that would you know leave me dead with a knife in my gut in the back of an alley for a few hundred dollars no none of these places interests me so I'm not I'm interested and not when you put it that way starts to narrow it down so I've seen I've seen Sigmund Freud's office in Vienna I've looked for Arthur Conan Doyle's office in in ed Murrow places like that so that's how open I am and that makes me a hundred times more open than Alan who doesn't even want to leave Northern California so that's how that works fascinating well so so of course let's review for for this quiz for this listeners question now the way to get good sleep you've reviewed the other podcast is is what well I mean it's basic just you have to get on to sleep on time on a decent routine and you're wanting to sleep to satiety so there is no there's no magic to to getting enough sleep you just simply take the time to do it and and that that's what it is that you have to do of the what people will do is they they want to chisel it and then they wind up you know that this is why a big reason why coffee is such a such a big hit in the world is actually because it covers up sleep debt and so people don't feel sleepy even though they are in fact sleepy and what sleepiness is it's actually a chemical this signalling that the brain is polluted and that the brain needs to be cleaned that's effectively what's transpiring there so the you want to have a clean brain you want to start out every day with your brain as clean as you can get you know you won't always do so adrenaline will be something that will essentially keep that feeling at bay for a long time even though you're you may be very tired so that's why if you're a student with a bunch of conscientiousness you could be short of sleep but you could still be wide awake listening to that lecture just running on adrenaline not a good way to do things our guy whoever this is doesn't have that much adrenaline does God gentleness is not bad I see and so as a result they've got a nice balanced life so when they're in a boring lecture they're starting to go to sleep I'm within seconds the brain starts saying this isn't worth the trouble that means that what's happening if you're feeling sleepy you've got a lot of sleep debt and the the boredom is I'm asking it the right thing to do is get to bed on time and as exercising help people get to bed on time so maybe it might it might do so but a lot of people just simply need to to make the time they need to have enough discipline to to get enough sleep and that's just what it is you don't necessarily need exercise if you're somebody that it's a hard time getting the sleep and you've got a lot of nervous tension that exercise could be useful for that it can be useful obviously just in general for general comprehensive health benefits but the main thing is is that that people like to essentially borrow you know consume some more time today borrowing against tomorrow it's like a little charge card and so they'll they'll stay up and they'll try to chisel the day the next day and squeeze more hours in the day yeah don't get greedy you know you get you get 24 hours a day and you're going to need seven or eight or maybe nine of those hours for sleep if you chisel one of those hours you know it's going to cost you and it's it's not worth the you know obviously in emergencies it's worth chiseling it but if you live live your life perpetually chiseling it that's a that's a waste of time the quality of your existence drops the quality of your comprehension your mental abilities are compromised and and your your experience is diminished so don't do it make it a regular habit that you feel good every animal you know this is the only animal on earth it's the only one that shorts itself asleep and it's the only one that can we've got electric light bulbs keeping this up we've got drugs that'll keep us up and keep us functioning even though when we got a huge signal to tell us to go to sleep so we're artificially pushing this brand past what is ideal for it you know don't do it so do a better job of that and you'll get better grades and feel better and enjoy your life more so no late night discos for you then doctor why no I don't think that's happened one have you pulled all-nighters when you were in school studying never never happened to me the D and it turns out that that's a total loser when it comes to actual performance on exams so that that's been studied well so you start to get into a situation where you better get at least six hours or you've just wasted your time so you start to go into that that sixth hour and you're just going to study a little bit more and it's going to be compromising you very significantly on that exam so yeah that's a mistake to pull all-nighters you need to be planning in advance better make sure that you know one of the most important things you can do is to try to get a really decent night's sleep yeah and in the nights before exams that's a big deal I remember I I made I pulled one all-nighter in college and it was for some project it was due and I and I you know it was more of a procrastinating all-nighters because I've ended up playing risk with my roommates throughout the entire night and then two hours before it was due then I like got my act together finished it and then I'm gonna turn it in so I was like well now is the time yeah yes step sterling high conscientiousness endemic all right what else probably psychology class I don't know yeah all right what's up what else we got all right our next question dr. Lyle I've been curious about the following scene so can you share some thoughts on altruistic behavior specifically when someone in authority or in an intimate relationship finally apologizes for their harsh or abusive long-term behavior why is it that that can bring a tearful or sad reaction ha I wish I knew who they were referring to either the recipient of the apology or the person who's giving the apology and the I'm assuming that they mean the recipient but I'm not sure that that's what they mean because sometimes the the perpetrator will do this and sometimes it's because there has been a power shift and the perpetrator is now in some hot water and so as a result when they're apologizing they they are tearful and the tearfulness is a signal of their distress and they're they're essentially they're essentially they're really slipping into a I need your help childlike position and there they're demonstrating vulnerability in hopes of being treated treated better in the aftermath of a potential power shift in the dynamics so this is going to be real common with prisoners you know or some perpetrator confessing a crime and suddenly now they're tearful okay until until then they were an sob and abusive and nasty and sociopathic but now suddenly they're facing the jury where they're facing the judge and now they're also sorry and they're apologizing and they're confessing and they're tearful okay so that's a what they're doing is that they are shifting the relationship out of an adult to adult dynamic and they're shifting it to a child parent dynamic so that that would be one way that that could happen now possibly on the other side of it if you are the receiver of this you you could feel a tearful I suppose you could also just be pissed or disgusted so it's not like this is some universal process that's going to take place you you could be if you are still actually in a position of weakness with respect to the tyrant and the tyrant is actually apologizing for god knows what CD has gone on with this tyrant subtle shifts in their power who knows so what could be happening is just that the tyrant or abuser could be coming with an apology and then what happens is is that the person on the other side still feels the person's power still feels essentially subject to the abuse potential and now however is getting a signal that there's some compassion on the other side of the system and so now they fall into an expressive childlike situation and cry and are tearful and are emotional in this way we demonstrate severe vulnerability but now they've got a higher statistical likelihood that they're going to get some mercy they're going to get some kind of essential parental what he called altruism or parental concessions in a way that they were not getting these things before so that that would be you know that would be a reason for that kind of a shift so in either case the reason why we're getting a an emotional response to that nature is going to be because there's a there's some fancy shift in the CB and the dynamics somebody is making a move in order to protect themselves in some fashion and so we we now slip into a child like I need your help vulnerability dynamic in order to elicit essentially protection and a lack of aggression or consideration from the person on the other side so I think that that's that's why it is that we see what we see no matter which side is coming from fascinating now let's let's shift the question a little bit and assume that there is no power dynamic there so for example once in a while dr. Lyle you'll go on you know you'll go on a tangent you'll say something extremely empathetic and extremely extremely just pleasing to hear and once in a while I get I get a little teary eyed like it's like I'm always curious why that's happening because I'm not right what you're what you're what you're experiencing is benevolent dominance okay so it's the same thing that what you're what you're feeling is on on that is your feeling sort of if someone in some kind of a position of authority with some strength actually demonstrates that they're going to do they're going to be very compassionate and very protective of somebody then what this can do is it can it can cause that same kind of a reaction that now once again instead of suddenly you feel like hey I don't have to sit here and fight out my situation to bill to adult I can slip into childlike mode okay and so when you're listening to me do something like this you can actually because you've got mirror neurons you're actually imagining yourself being in the position of a person who is on the other side of the sudden strength of protection and so as a result you can you can feel what would be happening in the mind of someone who's on the other side of this kind of protective display and you can feel that they might go slip into a childlike vulnerable mode and express their their vulnerability because they need help and that they could express that and feel feel a confidence that they're going to get it because of the demonstration of the of the powerful person on the other side that's that's indicating that they are coming after you know that situation and that they are willing to protect so I think that's what what's happening is is it's resonating a mirror neuron inside of you as you put yourself in the position of a suddenly protected individual who needed help that's what I think that is that's fascinating now on the same same reaction that like tearful reactions and emotional reactions I was reading in a psychology article a few months ago or so and they were making the case I don't remember the whole article I didn't read the whole thing but it was basically talking that that some people when they hear music that's express that it can be incredibly emotional and they can feel like shivers and they get a little tearful reaction what was that and how is it different you know is it yep yeah I think that what you're going to find is uh I have not followed up on this in many years but 20 years ago or so I read that that some some neuroscientist at Duke had had figured out or believed he had figured out that essentially chords chords are a listen aiding emotional response out of people because the human voice actually is speaking in chords so a human voice is not monotone it's actually if you analyze the acoustic properties of the voice the voice is actually being spoken in chords and apparently the nature of those chords whether they're major minor diminished or augmented or whatever it is that they are those are changing as the person speaks according to the emotion centers in the brain that their words what the person is attempting to communicate you know with these paralinguistic characteristics of the speech so on a person's happy and like a like that's a that's going to be essentially they are speaking in a major chord whereas if they're upset there's going to be in a minor chord or there's sad and depressed and if they are you know the the shift of emotion that you feel with our menator diminished chords is very interesting you feel an incomplete tension and a in a kind of a concern or worrying us and so you there's essentially what we're getting at is that the human voice and it's very its acoustical properties it is communicating a tremendous amount of information about the emotion of the speaker you know completely independent of the words and so music itself an orchestra what an orchestra is is it's a super normal stimulus so what we've done is we've taken chords we've got like 101 strings and they're all playing you know these chord sequences through throughout the throughout the orchestra and it's rich and layered and it goes up from you know the bass all the way to the you know piccolo and so you get an extremely rich supernormal stimuli of a whole Orchestra essentially communicating the emotion of the human voice and so you can now see why music would have such powerful emotional capabilities because it's super normal music itself is I mean just a person singing would have been the original music but actually the original music before singing would have been speech okay and before speech all you had was noise of essentially nothing other than nonverbal communication which would have been the expression of emotion through noise I had one lady thought that she suspected that the saxophone was a particularly sexy instrument because it sounds like people you know sort of in in in you know in sort of a rough intimate throaty like way that they would be if they were really sexually into each other particularly a male towards the female and so so anyway I think that I think that that's probably I mean whether or not we've got it mapped exactly the way this guy's suspected that he had it mapped or whether or not it's close I don't think it matters I think I think it's clear that that what music is is it's a supernormal stimuli of the human paralinguistic cues that communicate emotion in in speech and in singing and as a result of that it has a powerful ability to directly elicit feelings inside of people that would that would be essentially mirror neurons to what the emotional expression would be of the person who would be singing or talking you know with with words or sounds that would be that would be being generated from their the feelings that they were having at that time just fascinating I mean there's some songs out there that you know I start listening them and it's just you can't stop until they're done and it just makes your whole day afterwards yeah like I can remember I don't remember a lot of songs where I can remember the very first time that I heard them I liked them but one of them I can remember I can remember the first time I heard your smiling face by James Taylor add the very first time I heard it I was happy and and that's you know obviously the story and the words go along with it but the the sound is extremely positive and happy and optimistic and yet it is completely consistent with what the words are on the music and so it's a beautiful fit and it was an instant hit with me it just you know there was and so it reached the music itself reaches right down into it also think about if you think about some intimate syncopated slow beat of some of the beginnings of songs it's very reminiscent of the movement of a female okay the sexy movement of a female walking taking their sweet time swaying from side to side and so this music can definitely communicate things that people feel and essentially communicate you know beautifully that the internal experience and therefore cause that to be resonated in a listener so dr. Lyle uh any chance that we'd ever get to see you karaoke they wrote a gig in Las Vegas a chef a kitchen yeah yeah no there yeah I don't drink and if there's not enough Scotch in the world to make that happen so no no no no happening a lot of car when you're alone yeah that's a whole different story then then I'm then I'm Frank that's how that works well you do hear your ways you got it all right dr. Lyle is autistic behavior or aspect Asperger syndrome meaningfully different from being low agreeable agreeableness and low neuroticism the more this listener reads about high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome the more it seems to sound like someone low in both of those traits um you know I think it's completely different and so I think that a lot of people are probably you know at diagnosis in in the world are are there's two possibilities for diagnoses one of it is the something true has been identified and another thing is that it's a social contagion and so it the the widespread diagnosis of Asperger's for example I think can get close to social contagion the of course there's people that are disagreeable stable etc and they they can look like they're they are not particularly interested in what's going on in other people's nervous systems and they can be a little blunt etc that's not the same thing as an Asperger's the so there's a difference so let me kind of explain a couple things there's a difference between something wrong with the brain and simply an interesting combination on the bell curves so there's a so you think about kidneys there there's going to be a bell curve of kidney function so every 25 year-old that hasn't had damaged their kidneys as a normally functioning kidney but the kidneys differ in terms of their filtration rate okay they're just what it is that how many nephron cells they've got and how much how much you know filtering that that kidney can do however there would also be somebody that has some genetic condition and there's something wrong with their kidney so it doesn't fit on the bell curve so everybody normally functioning even though they're on the bell curve you could have a very you could have a healthy kidney that it doesn't have a lot of stamina it can't handle a lot of sodium or a lot of toxins but it's fine there's nothing wrong with it and it's not in a disease state whereas someone else could actually have more filtration rate more capability but their kidney is actually damaged it's got a genetic flaw in it and they're in trouble okay or it could remain stable but I mean this is the difference between normal bell curve variation and a pathological condition okay now so I was very interested to read when I read spent the Geoffrey Miller was speculating that that psychosis was actually part of that he was dabbling in the notion that it might be extremists on the bell curve I don't think he has strong feelings about it and I think it was a you know essentially a very open-minded very smart guy starting to think along a dimension that nobody else had really thought of before I'm essentially certain that he's wrong and I'm not even going to say these wrong so I'm not sure that that's what he believes I think it was it was a speculative kind of an idea and I think there may be little hints of truth in it in other words it is possible that people that are schizophrenic for all we know that may correlate with some open-mindedness you know in some fashion but it's not the same thing as bailing highly open so the notion would be if you're schizophrenic you believe in all kinds of things that are actually ludicrous like for example there's little green men on Mars that are listening in on a conversation etc etc okay and that you're seeing things that aren't there and hearing things that aren't there that's not openness that's a brain pathology it's not the same thing as openness that's not like 99th percentile openness now there's a reason I say 99th percentile about the base rate for schizophrenia in the United States is about 1% it's about 0.8 percent so about one in a hundred twenty people evidence this problem those people are not quote just really open-minded people that isn't what they are there are people with a brain pathology whose openness is come is actually quite unremarkable before it is that they evidence it psychotic break so in the same way as burgers is not normal there's something wrong with the tracking of what we're going to call the theory of mind module which is a device inside of people's heads I believe it's actually been identified or generally located in the brain at this point the there's a device in your head that allows you to try what other people are thinking and to make really good inferences about what they're likely to be thinking about Asperger's folks this doesn't function well at all and in autistic folks as burgers so I think a light low-grade light lightweight version of I don't even know if that's true there there could be 20 different things because what is that we call autism in you know and it may be very poorly understood at this point probably is or it could be just a few things and it could be that Asperger's is a lightweight version or it could be that it's its own specific thing that is only influencing is very highly specific set of neural circuits but I have met really high functioning quote Asperger's folks and they're real interesting to me and they're not particularly disagreeable they those those characteristics fall along you know they fall along general personality characteristics they could be very friendly Pleasant easy to get along with etc so no they it's not the same thing as a as a disagreeable stable you know high conscientious introverted guy that's just freaking brilliant the computer doesn't want to talk to anybody okay and it has only a few friends and just a few interests that in is not open okay that that is not an Asperger's person that's a normally functioning person with with a you know an unusual set of characteristics on the bell curve and as burgers I believe is a there is a specific likely to be genetic abnormality that is not part of the normal bell curve functioning we're essentially quote that kidney isn't working properly and so it doesn't mean that it's not pathological in the sense that it's not progressive it's not getting worse it just is what it is you know it doesn't in principle hurt anything except that they can they can do some things that you know if you're a Martian looking at them you're like what's the problem okay but if you're a human you're like woo what could you just do you just put your elbow in the soup of a social situation on really weird way buddy but you know no other animal would bother the dog would care dog wouldn't think such a person's behavior was strange at all so yeah good good very very good question and it goes wider than just the oz burgers question it goes the question of variances and personality what variances look like like I don't think I don't believe that there's a pathological condition called the psychopath I don't think that there's some quote something wrong with that person's brain I think that they're just I think that's a normal bell curve distribution of an extremely disagreeable low conscientious individual I don't think that there's a thing that a pathological genetic flaw and something that we would call a borderline okay I think that's an astable disagreeable person so and I don't think that there's a pathological flaw in something that we call narcissism I think that's just a highly disagreeable individual so etc in the same way that with mental retardation there's a lot of people that are the second percentile there's nothing wrong with their brains but there's people that are at the second percentile where there's some the reason they're at the second percentile is that there's been some pathological condition so you could you could have two similar looking things but one of them would be due to pathology and another would not okay so you could have had somebody with encephalitis and it could have wiped out a bunch of their brain function now there's the second percentile but that's a pathological second percentile where somebody else's is not and so anyway very good question I had one other oh yeah like bipolar disorder so bipolar disorder is not a simply somebody that is inherently very unstable okay that's not just a high instability human no that's a very specific brand dysfunction carried along a specific genetic line that causes this bizarre you know occasional disruption in you know emotion emotional functioning so that's a that's how you look at that problem that's how I would look at that that question fascinating well speaking of swings and Ivan emotionally the next questions about why countries go to war okay all right well why do countries like the United States go to war are we just fighting against Russia and China and every hot war as we did in Vietnam and down the middle east how do we stop to get arms race ah why would you go to war well you obviously go to war because the cost benefit analysis to somebody who's in a position of decision-making winds up convincing them that it's in their best interests and so that so a country per se doesn't go to war individuals decide that we're going to go to war so this it isn't a it isn't a collective decision because there's no such thing as a collective mind what there is is that there's decisions of specific individuals and then you have a decision-making system and the aggregate of a certain number of those individuals or an individual in the case of the president being able to essentially start a world who wants to you know obviously if you didn't have a lot of public support then the Congress isn't going to be supportive and we're going to have problem okay in in a Western democracy the but yeah the United States goes to war because a certain number of those individuals the five hundred individuals or so that are essentially you know running the bit of the leadership of the United States federal government they're a preponderance of those individuals believe that it's in the best interest really of themselves and what we hope is that when they are computing what's in the best interest of themselves we hope that they are that they're actually looking out for the best interests of of the United States and they probably are so that doesn't mean that they're not making mistakes they could easily make mistakes but and it also it is not the case that that this decision-making process which is the result of an awful lot of people isn't going to have a lot of untoward influence in it so don't think that there aren't people selling missions that aren't like real interested in in you know seeing some conflict continue or you will be extended you know and they can justify their pressure on a congressman by saying listen we really think it's a problem we've read with the Joint Chiefs have to say we think these people are going to be a problem better to crush them now etc and by the way it's just and only going to caution other three billion dollars of our stuff to do it okay so of course you know that that is going on so there's so the decision-making people that are in the position of power to make those decisions have an awful lot of noise in their ear and at the end of the day you know we reelect these people because we hope that they that they are keeping in mind know that they're wise enough to take enough counsel and to get enough enough of consideration of the overall cost benefit of the whole enterprise in their heads that they that they make good decisions you know sometimes they undoubtedly make good decisions sometimes they undoubtedly don't so I look back you know I I don't know much I mean I don't know how you don't get involved in World War two I think seems me obvious that it would be wise to not get involved in world war one world war two looks a lot more problematic to me I don't know how you stay out of that I think you're in deep trouble and I think the country's fighting for its life the we get Vietnam no reason to be there that was uh that was a bit but a generally I think a fairly honest misunderstanding of the threat of communism around the globe the I believe that the leadership of the country conceptualized communism is essentially a contagion and they felt like the more places that leaked in the more little little third-world countries that adopted it the more dangerous and dire the United States situation would be and we'd be surrounded what they didn't realize is that we'd be surrounded by incompetence and a bunch of third world economies that would never get off the ground and produce anything so they were not the threat that we thought they were so we didn't need to be digging around in Southeast Asia trying to defend American interests they're worried about the spread of communism but it's clear to me based on you know what I've read of the actual actual transcripts of what we know went through LBJ's head that he was very much worried about a contagious process and I think a lot of those people were and it wasn't stupid that they were it was just incorrect in my in my judgment so mistakes why did we go to war cost benefit analysis run on the people that are in charge how do you stop it well you you have to understand that whenever you have something of value people are going to want to take it and that's the law of the jungle and so we have unbelievably valuable things in the United States we have a mass tremendous wealth and therefore we have to protect our wealth and our citizens from those threats and so you have to have a national defense whether or not you go to war or not depends upon the cost-benefit analysis of of whether or not it's worth doing what the threats are etcetera and you you elect officials and you understand that that they are hopefully you know making the decisions with their conscience as best they can by listening to a lot of really smart people they're being checked by a tiered level of government that can can give a president a tremendous signal that that a huge number of other people think that that person is wrong and so you know this is a process by which hopefully over time a country makes enough good decisions of these very difficult order that you know the country survives and things work out okay so far so good with 200 plus years in and we've got a good thing going now you mentioned in a earlier episode about what the future might look like is it your belief that as we get as the world gets more economically free and everybody essentially rises up out of poverty and they're they're all having essentially enough resources to compete for fur mates that that the threat of war we'll be finally over or will we all know yeah do that now oh yeah I think though the the truth is is that obviously it's in people's best interest to trade the but it's not necessarily in your best interest to trade if you if you don't have any knowledge or abilities or resources and all you can get your hands on is some guns then then your best move may be to just take so you know the world is in a is it in an uncomfortable place and it's going to be in an uncomfortable place for a long time long after I'm gone and that is is that the westernized democracies and economies have hurtled forward so fast it is so successful to be free and to trade that we are wealthy beyond the imagination of most of the world most of the world cannot imagine the the extraordinary standard of living that takes place in the United States now you may look at it like hey I don't see what's so great I work pretty hard I work forty hours a week you know in my in my air-conditioned office but I don't have I can't go out to dinner that much and my car's not that fancy and I live in a know pretty decent apartment but it's not the greatest it's like oh my god you're out of touch with the actual economic circumstances in the world economic sense circumstances in the world is that in decent functioning people somewhere in the middle of Asia you know in some someplace in Calcutta you've got five families with twenty two people living in 700 square feet so the world is poor compared to where it's going to be and as long as the world is poor people are desperate a lot of harsh things happen and the world has has the disparities of wealth and situations that that give rise to a great deal of consternation ND and that's a problem and so eventually you know eventually that's going to work out but or if you don't blow yourselves up or some some biological workers wipe out everybody on the planet but the bottom line is is that if the future continues to unfold in a way that it's unfolding you wind up getting wealthier wealthier wealthier and wealthier and the world gets way better and it's more people are able to become educated and to have industries and be able to trade it becomes so worth it to not destroy and take it becomes so worth it to just exchange that's how everybody wins that better off and that you know that's clearly you know we the north and the south the United States aren't going to war with each other and Alabama and Georgia aren't going to go to war with each other etc but Northern California in Southern California might yeah you people are taking our water that's what I do the but the point is is that obviously exchange winds up being the path to freedom and prosperity it will happen that you know it's going to take time and now but we'll get there fantastic dr. Lao you got time for one more question not one time for one more all right dr. Lao my husband and I are business owners and one of our biggest challenges is finding employees who are have high conscientiousness on a show on a previous show dr. Lao you mentioned that you find myers-briggs test to be useless does not identify whether someone is lazy narcissistic etc so I'm wondering if there's another test that you recommend or some other way of assessing whether a job applicant has high or low conscientiousness ah I could do it off the cuff I there would be better ways to do this undoubtedly and there'd be ways it would be legal that you could sneak this in somehow so it is a test for conscientiousness but what what we're looking for is if you're looking for conscientiousness there's certain things that that you're going to be interested in so you're going to be interested in kind of what their job history is how long they've been on different jobs etc also you cross-examine them very mildly and pleasantly about you know how it is if they left and why and you'd also be interested in their living circumstances so just sort of how long have they lived where they live what do they like about it you know just sort of out and then where did you live before that and how about before that so in other words uh I'm not sure what the legalities are but what I'm essentially talking about here is I'm talking about the same questions that I ask criminals for five years when I I was a psychologist for Dallas County and so for the criminal courts so that this was what I was doing was I was asking questions that were triangulating on major life decision and circumstances so that I could track how conscientious the individuals were so by just a few little questions over the course of you know three four minutes I'm asking them about and who they live with and where are they they're and how long they've been there and then the previous jobs and what how many yeah if it had quite a few different jobs they know a lot of different staff or no I only worked at no Walmart well how long you been there for years okay gold star for that person stable same employer you know showed up didn't get fired those are these are huge cues to a person's conscientiousness also living circumstances yeah I live where I am for a while how long you been there now uh you know about three weeks ago okay that you just got fake on your forehead so what that is so also you know how far get school oh well you know tenth grade okay well no star on that person's forehead so we want to know how far they got in school and you know what what did they like about school and you know what subjects did they do well in we're just trying to try to get a little feel you know and then and you know what said awaya you know how far did you go did you find anything else that you'd you want to study more edge Hayek had kind of enough okay so we're trying to get a feel for their scholastic history and what kind of student they were and so by the time we we get that plus we got living circumstances and their stability their plus their job history and stability there were you know in five minutes you can get quiet a little feel for how conscientious people are what you're looking for is stability stability stability stability flakes wind up getting kicked out of places and flakes also leave so that that's what you know if you had an overall general score of stability that would be or you know up my off-the-cuff as opposed to some verified instrument that might be better incidentally a super good instrument depend upon what who you're hiring it for what would be a credit report but I'm not so sure I don't know that it's legal to run them I don't know that you can do that but that's a that's it also another really good score to tell you kind of what's going on with a person none of these things are perfect no one no one thing will tell the whole story but as across an interview there these are the cues that we're looking for we're looking for anything that that doesn't quite hold together and make sense and inform all the other parts of the story so that's how I would do it fantastic and how about clothes like clothing when they come into the job yeah I would say all of this I mean certainly these would be obvious things so their clothes their hair you know how hard are they work in it at trying to make it look like they're clean-cut and responsible if they're not trying to look they're not trying to work very hard at it then we got a problem there they're probably not your best candidate so if you're looking for conscientiousness and that's what you need just you know ask these very reasonable questions do it in a way that appears extremely non-judgmental okay and just casually open it up so that the flake will tell you they're flaky story and then you know you've drawn that one out and on to the next one that's how we did dr. Lauer we love it we'll talk to you next week have a wonderful night alright thanks everybody
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