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Episode 157: Free time, pseudo esteem
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we've got some some interesting questions this week like the concept of free time what what should we be doing I know you don't like the word should should be doing it's a concept from the how to find freedom in a free world but the question has to do with what what about the concept of leisure and recreational activities how did they exist in an ancestral environment now this listener is asking that we like to think that we should have free time to have fun but the question is isn't watching a movie or listening to music just some sort of pleasure trap let's see now the the there's going to be there's going to be a couple of different broad motivations broad targets of motivation one of them is going to be reduced to reduce the possibility of misery and the other is going to be to increase the pleasantness of somebody's life so that's what an animal is going to be doing this animal is going to be angling those you have to run a cost benefit on the the the pain and misery associated with risk reward options in the environment and then your your mind is a gambling machine that's attempting to handicap all the different options and try to think through you know what what's the best total hedonic win and what that the way your system is designed is to actually when you get the biggest wins or you do that calculus the best your life experience is about as good as it can be and that's going to mean that you're going to wind up surviving and reproducing effectively so it's not a perfect system so the system actually wasn't designed to optimize your your well-being the stunts designed to optimize your gene survival but those two things are pretty tightly correlated and they go apart in different times now when it comes to quote leisure the leisure it is something that you know that's a word we use for a set of activities that take place when there isn't pressure to try to avoid misery so if you're like hey I don't have time to to walk goof off I have to keep working hard to make them mortgage payment well why so that I don't have to sleep out in the cold why because it's unpleasant okay so and it's potentially dangerous so when we actually look through why the person isn't doing leisure activities it's because they are essentially trying to reduce the likelihood of misery so we don't think of it quite in that way we don't really understand that a lot of action that takes place that isn't particularly unpleasant is really designed as pain avoidance action you know with pain avoid intent incite the when you don't have when you win essentially you are wealthy and secure safe enough that you don't have to be really worrying about risk mitigation on misery then your your mind starts to go to a different area of the great spreadsheet of life starts looking for what things it can do what situations that can put itself in essentially person environment situations that will that will hit the happiness circuits or the pleasure circuits so that's going to be what we call leisure you know it's really kind of a cool thing if people people actually get pleasure or pleasantness out of their work and a lot of people yeah very much would like to do that and a lot of people do but a lot of people don't so the and obviously the work that is the least Pleasant has a tendency to be paid you know relatively well relative to similarly level skilled work that is more pleasant obviously for the general principles of supply and demand for those markets now back to leisure so leisure is just a word that we use to say okay what else can you do now you don't have to be worried about the wolf at the door or to even have a door so if you know that you're going to be fed and you've got the fillings and the kids tea and it turns out that you you know you're you've got some money saved in the bank so if there's some little tragedy we're safe it's secure now it's time to turn on the football game okay so it's going to turn out but a lot of leisure activities had to do with sexual displays and so it's going to as you would expect so a whole lot of the grit and misery mitigation process has had to do with survival problems so it's essentially let's make damn sure that we're going to survive and the then when that gets taken care of you would expect that the organism would start to drift its attention to reproductive problems and you're going to find that reproductive problems are leisure so some gal that wants to go shopping for clothes that's that's that's a sexual motivation and I said is what that is it's clear we call it leisure it's fun to go shopping but what do we really seeing there what we're seeing is that she's attempting to I do things that will improve her sexual attractiveness so that's what she's doing the guy that's watching football is actually watching other people's sexual displays you might be saying why the hell would he want to watch other people's sexual displays if they're males and that is that people are very interested in the sexual displays of their own sex they're inherently interested because they want to they want to observe those people's strengths and weaknesses and compare themselves and join coalition's you know in theory and all that sort of thing and so mirror neurons actually can also help a person sim seemingly have part of the experience of the individual that's actually doing the plane that's a curious characteristic of humans that make spectator sports and movies and things like that you know possibility or listen to somebody croon about how it is that you know they lost barber the love of their life and what are they going to do now we can feel all sad about it because when we listen to the guy saying we can sort of feel the way he feels as a result of mirror neurons so we're going to find that the so-called leisure activities are are very much direct it around sexual displays of one kind or another a guy says oh no I just like to play tennis for fun really you're playing tennis because you're attempting to demonstrate superiority over competitor with respect to athleticism and so you're you you don't know it necessarily but you're angling for sexual cachet you collect coins you're angling for sexual cachet you don't know that you are but you probably are the and so that's why you would expect that both both performing sexual display functions as well as watching them would be inherently interesting it doesn't do any good to have a species that the animals display sexual displays but don't watch anybody else's sexual display you must you you have to have it so that it goes both ways so you have to inherently want to dance as well as watch other people dance and so that's what people do so people are both consumers of sexual displays and they are producers of sexual displays as well as they are producers of effective action in order to reduce the likelihood of you know survival problems hurting them so that that so leisure activity what we call fun you would expect that the nervous system would be constructed in such a way that when the organism was having fun it would mean that it was increasing its likelihood a gin survival it wouldn't be having that emotion for a random reason and it's not okay so any emotion that's in the system is in there for a reason so any what we call leisure is tickling the neural circuits indicating that either either we are increasing our likelihood of gin survival or somebody else is and we are watching them and we're going mirror neuron response because after all we're sitting right there in our you know Tom Brady Jersey you know in Boston watching the Superbowl and how are our dad named us Brady for dogs eggs he's have to rub it on Benji haha so we're having we're having a mirror neurons is that goes off and and so that that's so people enjoy that process so that's what leisure activities are they're not a pleasure trap they could be so there are leisure activities like gambling that can be a pleasure trap and certainly drugs and alcohol obviously can be pleasure traps so pleasure trap has to a supernormal stimuli tilting the scoreboard and messing up the matrix the motivational matrix as they as the organism attempts or in its behavior optimally you could see the possibility that theoretically great art in other words acting singing things like that could potentially mess with the matrix because it's super normal so you could see some guy that doesn't have much of a life doesn't have a job has a pension that got left owned by his uncle Louie and he's got you know kind of held problems and he's not very good shape and he's got bad skin and he doesn't you know he's not very socially competent and the guy just sits you know in it on his couch and watch the Seinfeld reruns and eat Cheetos okay this is you know so the super normal aspect of Seinfeld the fact that it's interesting people saying interesting things and interesting situations come up and it's creative and interesting and funny that that could actually sheep and his life experience and make it less than if he had to go out there you know with a sword and a chisel and actually find his own food and hustle and join a coalition for protection so it is possible that some of these so-called leisure activities could become pleasure traps in their own way but usually not so usually they're just sort of interesting tickling of the circuits can be very pleasant uh when they're kept in some kind of reasonable balance well good because I would I enjoy listening to your ideas dr. law and I was hoping you wouldn't say that podcasts are pleasure traps so you glad you ha yeah this this boss house is definitely not a pleasure trap not close know what all right yeah yeah so so in terms of people who say get addicted to video games that is a pleasure Travis yeah let's solving solving problems in wartime and right battle and such work that's not really that happening right yeah that's actually a really interesting that is a pleasure drop so these people have gotten ingenious about creating these creating video games and making them interactive to the point where people it feels inherently very productive and they're competing for legitimate like status and little group and so forth so again that this is a that this is essentially out of balance I think that it's I think it's probably clear that some people will not they will neglect and not take on legitimate challenges that they would that they could potentially improve their legitimate competitive status if they were not thinking enormous amounts of time in those in those games however we cannot be sure than individual case that this is actually a mistake so it depends on how much they enjoy it depends on what their competitive prospects would be if they weren't doing it all the time and you know what feedback they would get in other domains so we we wouldn't say the same thing probably about somebody they just love to play volleyball we'd say hey Harry really loves to play volleyball it's down there on the beach all the time he's in great shape he's just playing volleyball volleyball volleyball and we'd say well that that's not unreasonable okay but it's unreasonable that some kid named Joe Lee plays video games all the time it's like really I'm not so sure that it's that different I think I you know that's that's how I see I see that it's it's more a matter of is the person neglecting to actually compete in some ways that would be more fulfilling for them and are they making a mistake out of you know intimidation and fear that that's really what the fundamental issue is fascinating yeah I've often wondered that there's similar addictions out there but some are more favored than others like like what you said volleyball sports you know things like that whereas if someone said addicted to video games we have that stereotype of the like you said the Cheetos eating person on there you know overweight and they're and they're they're playing video games you know six hours a day whereas you can have someone playing a sport several hours a day or doing some sort of competitive process but they're not quite as shamed I guess by society right yeah it seems more it's a it's a more legitimate sexual display and and therefore we we sort of see that as as you know more legette however notice that the video game person it isn't really that far for example it's it's extremely similar mental activity to trying to be an effective stock trader so yeah if we if we that individual was in fact a very respective subduct trader then we would then we would not be you know looking cross-eyed at them and what is their doing so I think in in principle you know there's certainly dangers but those are poser traps under they can derail a motivational system but it isn't necessarily the case and I don't think it's usually particularly dire testing dr. Lisle our next question is can you speak more on foe esteem that you mentioned in previous episodes in relation to social media and cell phones what is it and how can we separate ourselves from that facade the way to think about esteem I don't know that I used the term foe esteem they I usually use that in in context of status with respect to humor but it doesn't does doesn't really matter I know what they're speaking of the speaking of what I call pseudo esteem so what we want to do is we want to think about esteem processes really at three levels so the the most fundamental level of steam that drives motivation and is is where the rubber hits the road at evolution is what we're going to call steam so that's the decisions that real live people make when they look at us and they judge and judge us and evaluate us in order to determine whether or not they want to trade with us in some way there's three primary domains trade those domains would be mating be friendship or would be just trade or exchange processes market processes ie and this these day and age we would call it employment a long time ago we would call a barter so those are those are the three main markets that human beings essentially compete in those are the markets they compete and I actually don't know of another market that they compete in the there's a fourth class of relationships that we call family I put those to the side because they don't inherently need to be competitive now sometimes they are because family relationships are effectively a special kind of friendship and families are the result of mating relationships so or in principle there would be so the so this is families may or may not do very much in the way of trade processes with each other but they might so but what families really are in a sense is that they're really friendships that are being driven with a with that what we might call a Hamiltonian kicker in other words there's an extra that value in being self sacrificial and family relationships because you're many of your genes are located inside of other bodies and therefore if you give up it may be more useful for you to give up one unit of food because somebody in your family may benefit 1.5 X 4 that where you might have only benefited 1.0 X and so therefore it's it's valuable for you to give that up and it's more likely for you to do that with families and would be with anybody else because your genes are being aided and abetted even though they're not located in your own body so that's just straight selfish gene theory you know it's William Hamilton figured that out you know a long time ago in the early 1960s so this is now so families think of families really even though we put them off to the side because they don't have to be competitive what they really are is they fit right under the the friendship domain that's what they are good special case now um God knows where was I Nate what's this question about judo especially about pseudo senior okay that's right so the so what you're going to have that's esteem so steam is where the rubber hits the road in evolution people either esteem you or value you sufficiently and all all the steam processes are inherently competitive in other words if they esteem you more than they esteem the other person then they choose you for the trade process that means you know saris leaves wood bill doesn't sleep with Stu why she values bill more than she values to plantain and simple okay Steve hires you know can instead of hiring bill why because he values Kenmore plain and simple two people are friends and neither one of them likes some third person very much but they like them so so why they value each other more okay the the reasons for those values are that there are estimating mechanisms in your brain to analyze who and what kinds of situations are better and worse for your genes survival so you know Sarah likes can better than Bill why because ken looks like a better overall mate prospect so maybe he's more handsome maybe makes more money maybe he's younger maybe he's more athletic maybe he's more assertive maybe he's more pleasant we don't know all the reasons but we know as Gestalt her nervous system runs a Seabee on you know who she thinks is the most valuable and she feels more attracted to the one that she considers the most valuable so your feelings are actually derived from these underlying value judgments so esteem processes are driving the show in motivation we seek a scheme from other people okay and other people seek esteem from us and we are trying to ferret through the marketplace try to make the very best trades we want the best mating prospects the best friendship prospects and the most advantageous and profitable trade prospects we are a hell of a lot more interested in being paid $20 an hour than we are being paid 15 if we find out that for similar week we can get 20 then we go to the guy that's 20 the alright yeah so now that that's a that's esteem now underneath the steam processes are going to be what we call self esteem processes so this particular organism has a funny little characteristic and that is that it's very sensitive to feedback from other people and it needs to figure out how to do what displays it's trying to figure out how to display to other people in order to win the esteem competitions with its conspecifics so that means that it actually is going to spend a lot of time rehearsing to try to figure out and plotting to try to figure out how to win now it's going to turn out that it's been blessed by evolution with a technique for improving its rehearsals or improving its displays which is going to be an internal audience that watches its own actions so that internal audience as it watches the person behave and make efforts at trying to be more effective throw football better paint better you know have prettier hair as the organism attempts to do things that will make itself a more effective and displays its watching its own efforts and when it gives a very good effort its internal audience observes this and gives it a nod of approval if it does a mediocre job the internal audience basically frowns and it's a little disgusted those are the the internal reactions of Pride and self-loathing okay and self-disgust but that's a dimension inside the nervous system and so that doesn't come really from any other action it comes from the internal audience watching the actions of the individual and judging them really for their moral character the internal audience is not quite as interested as you might think in what your actual results are it's most interested in your effort it's a very interesting mechanism now the so that's the self-esteem mechanism so the vast majority of happiness is controlled through the self-esteem mechanism in other words the person's diligence and excellence in efforts and and whether or not they judge themselves pleasantly or negatively based on you know what what's the character of the efforts that they're making and then the other major part of happiness which is actually probably the lion's share of it is the actual esteem feedback that they get in the competitive marketplace so this is this is human nature so human nature is you have an internal audience watching you and judging your efforts as long as you work hard work diligently it'll give you pretty good feedback okay now this is very different incidentally than self confidence so self confidence is in a different concept entirely so the the individual can f to mate their likelihood of success based on cues from what it looks like you know in previous actions that they've taken they can sort of estimate their likelihood of success or failure and they will have motivation to pursue that that activity that what we would call their confidence will be a rating or an assessment about their likelihood of whether or not they're likely to be successful they if they don't think that they're very likely to be successful they feel a lack of confidence and lack of confidence as an essential mechanism that discourages the organism from attempting to do things that it's very unlikely to be successful at and people the gods terrible bad low confidence no it's not it's absolutely essential that you have low confidence the you must have low confidence in order to stop you from wasting your time and energy and pursuing things for which you don't have sufficient Talent the so can you imagine some kid that can't pass the ninth grade you know that he shouldn't you shouldn't give up his dream of being an anesthesiologist you've got to be kidding me ok he should not have very much confidence in his ability to pursue higher education which is good so now he knows to not waste his time there energy in those pursuits can you imagine if a male who is a three or four or five on the attractiveness scale sort of doesn't suffer from an appropriate lack of confidence and hitting on eights nines and tens it's a disaster okay so his nervous system would consistently find himself more attracted to eight signs and tens than the threes fours and fives but he would consistently pursue them and he would be consistently rejected and he wouldn't have a lack of confidence he just continued on and totally fail which means he would spend his life essentially is a total biological failure and as a result it wouldn't be very effective for Jin's survival so you can see that confidence is a completely different issue than self-esteem yet they are super easily confused and in fact I haven't met a psychologist other than myself and dr. Rick Seidel know the difference okay now so so anyway so this is the difference the difference is is that your self-confidence is a result of your assessment of your competitive standing with respect to esteem markets these are narrowly defined so you could be extremely confident in a heterosexual mating market and not confident all in a job market and not confident at all in a friendship market okay you could be extremely confident in friendship market in the job market and extremely unconfident with respect to a mating prospects so they are narrowly defined depending upon in fact I mean it gets finer grain than that you could be very confident hitting on sixes and not confident at all hitting on eights okay so this this gets to be you know the confidence mechanism is all about the assessment of perceive probability of success this is straight elbow bender self-efficacy mechanism that's where this belongs now we're marching finally to pseudo esteem so human beings were designed to be seeking esteem they saw a steam through competitive displays they attempted to be as sexy as they could be they attempted to be as as loyal looking and valuable and least costly as they can figure out how to be in order to be friends and they tried to have skills and produce produce either events ie singing dancing you know storytelling I don't know fortune-telling whatever uh or they actually produce things I'm gourd that you could use to go down but the river and slurp up some water whatever okay beads to put around your neck the ha no some elephant that carved out of onyx so in other words they try to do things that other people would exchange their time and energy for that's what they did okay they were also direct return they also went out there and just tried to get their own food that we don't actually put that under trade but we sort of could but nobody does that today so it's really no no no point in even talking about it even in the Stone Age trading was taking place males were trading with females in order to they were displaying to females their ability to hunt and females were displaying their ability to gather and the most basic pair-bond process was males and females exchanging effort coming together at the end of the day and trading what it is that they that they were the kind of specific food that they are that they were contracted to with each other in order to obtain so the only species in the world that does that it's only species that where the males specialize in one kind of food in the females specialized another and then they trade so in principle even at the level of hunter-gatherer subsistence the trade is still going on so we have these three domains mating friendship and trade and how good your feedback is in those domains will largely determine the emotional quality of your life in other words you feel good when you get good feedback and you feel bad when you get bad feedback that's how it works alongside it you have a self-esteem mechanism that's watching you as a shadow and it's like a shadowy coach and it's kicking you in the sternum when you're doing a mediocre job and it's patting you on the head when you're doing a good job so that's what the self-esteem mechanism is is it's a feedback mechanism for how diligent you were being in the process of working on these competitive processes now that's the heart and soul of human life and that's how human life is designed however ten thousand years ago human beings began to farm the land for the first time and when they did they found that farming was more effective than hunting and gathering so that what it was really to two ways that it was more effective in one way it was actually more efficient in other words there's more calories per per hour of expenditure would come result from farming and it was also more intensive in other words you could get many more calories per square foot so it turns out that the an estimation a good estimation is that there's about a hundred times as many calories per square foot from farming than there would be from hunter-gathering that that would have happened you know even the early days as well hot houses or anything like that so as a result of that what happened is that there would be a hundred times more people per square foot so now you had cities so what happened was is that these cities would be early these really little trading markets where one person would farm one thing and somebody else would farm something else and you can now imagine what also was happening because the farming was more efficient per you know that you could actually get more calories per unit of time it turns out that not everybody needed to be spending all their time getting food the way they did is either gather so as a result that started to be a specialization of Labor and so now suddenly you've got people who can make clothes and now they don't even farm they don't even make their own food okay they don't do anything about their food they just trade for it they make moccasins and they trade moccasins for different things that ultimately wind up and then being fed so you have the rise of markets now the odd what happened was this was very successful and there started to be not just some little trading area of 30 or 40 people or 50 people now it gets to be a thousand people so when it gets to be a thousand people or you can imagine let's just make it fun let's go out to five thousand people so when you get to five thousand people all coming into a town and trading from surrounding farmland that supports those five thousand people then it's going to turn out there's going to be a rise of something that we've never seen before which is going to be what we call reputations so in the Stone Age you could call it a reputation if somebody you could actually have direct observation of somebody who can actually do something but in a market you could hear that somebody could do something and never know that they could ever really do it you're just taking somebody's word for it okay so now you have this interesting situation where there's a whole different esteem processor that has developed so now there is what I'm going to call pseudo esteem so pseudo esteem is people may believe something is true about you but they don't even know they haven't watched it with their own eyes they just heard about it and we could actually go almost beyond that we could actually call it pseudo soo esteem but we don't even know why we think they're cool we just think they're cool because other people think they're cool all right so like I don't know what Paris Hilton or who's the other one Kardashian ever did you know so the so this is now pseudo esteem so pseudo esteem is we we have an opinion or you know a feeling and an orientation towards an individual we're giving them status and we don't even know why it's quite interesting so you can see that in this situation what's going to happen is there will literally be a competitive market will arise over pseudo esteem now in a hunter-gatherer situation there was competitive markets but it had to do with the steam you saw with your own eyes you watch people with your own eyes you had your own memories rating different individuals for their character their strengths their beauty their intelligence their their you know honor okay the deeds that they've done the creative thoughts that they've had your your scheming people for your direct assessment of their value to you in a in a city that that starts to go by the wayside now most of your life is still being run by steam processors your boss games you or doesn't this game you your madest game jewelry doesn't your kids your friends etc most of what matters to you mister hey dr. Lyle sorry about that looks like I got some technical difficulties in your call got dropped yeah so okay are you there back on yep we're back on now so we'd like you to continue we were going over there well yeah I kind of dropped off a little earlier than you did so yeah I know what happened you'd listen to me talk for long enough and he said enough already let's give him the cue all right sorry about that yeah so now where we're going now is pseudo esteem so you can see how seductive pseudo steam would be if you could get a bunch of positive reputation and not earn it if you could trick people into it this would be a very very cool thing to do we'd be very smart to be savvy and you can wind up influencing people's decisions towards you in a way that would be positive if you could do this okay so this is now what the modern world has turned into this is what you know social media has has now become social media has now become a competitive social it's become a pseudo esteem marketplace where people are attempting to earn a steam in ways that are effectively not legitimate they're just they're just finding ways to try to display correlative cool in order to win a steam now that doesn't mean that as as we can understand that there isn't some legitimacy under the process so people can be making legitimate displays they can be earning legitimate esteem by doing things that are potentially legitimately impressive you can also imagine that in pseudo steam markets it the data is a lot flakier and so what this is this wine set being and can be a little bit like a you know it can be a dominance or climbing trap and it can also be a pleasure trap in other words it you can you can get an awful lot of excitement over indications that you have won a bunch of pseudo a steam because somehow you did something that everybody thought was really cool or they thought you did something that you thought you were cool so you can imagine for example some guys showing pictures of himself on the top of Kilimanjaro it was done with you know you know I don't know cut and paste what you call that thing Photoshop okay so like how amazing is that or you can have someone looking over the gold like there's what's that Photoshop yeah yeah Photoshop and or you can have someone looking like they're a lot more attractive than they really are and so they they're getting all this whoo whoa you know good feedback but it's not true and so this uh so it can feel good to get pseudo esteemed feedback but at the same time the internal audience is watching this process and knows it's bogus and the self-esteem mechanism is aware are the esteem mechanism is aware that you don't have any real esteem that were bluffing and we're trying to hope to get some real esteem out of it so the so you can see how this would be a very very enticing enticing prospect there would be legitimate reasons to try to go after pseudo esteem so if you're tied you know you want everybody to think that you're the best laundry detergent so you say oh no no four out of five dentists think you ought to be you know got to be washing your clothes with tide in other words everybody is going to be trying to use pseudo steam processes to try to angle for different kinds of decisions and so of course pseudo scheme we can't say that it wouldn't be valuable the bucket line dip I hope you don't brush your teeth with laundry detergent because yeah maybe I should maybe whiter the so but the point is is that that that pseudo esteem I think I can't remember what the original question was but I think what you want to do is the following that the pursuit of pseudo esteem should be integrated with the suit the pursuit of esteem and the pursuit of a scheme should be integrated with the pursuit of self esteem so the correct way to you know to go about the esteem process of life is to integrate them with the self esteem mechanism so that means paying attention to the internal audience as it watches you and judges what it is that you are doing and how it is that you're going about doing it this is you know obviously there's different names for this across history including simply conscience okay now so so that's why there are ways that are more legitimate of pursuing esteem and even suicune so if you earn pseudo sua scheme through the legitimate processes of earning esteem and it so happens that the market finds out about you and a lot of people give you credit because of something that you legitimately did that other legitimate legitimate observers observed accurately and they give you feedback and they value you and they essentially want to tell the marketplace this individual is an outstanding human they did find things I witnessed it okay then when people come come up to that individual and say my goodness I'm just overwhelmed with what it is that I learned about you mother Theresa better say you know what a human now if you're legitimately Mother Teresa and of mother Teresa was legitimate and her own internal audience observed her do things that it was that it admired then fine whatever pseudo is steam that you happen to get along the way you do okay but I think it's a bad idea to pursue it for its own sake okay I think the thing to do is you know you may want to you may want to win an Oscar if you're an actor but that's the wrong motivation to go into acting you go into acting because you have a love for the process and you you want to do it as well as you can and when you do whatever it is that you can do and you do the best you can at being the best that you can be then your self-esteem mechanism says you know what you did it as well as you could do it good for you now nobody cares your movies bomb and you never become a star oh well so you didn't get a lot of steam for it and it was kind of a little bit bitter in that department and you finally had to go back and be a broker fair enough okay but you did it the best that you could do the that's that's how to do this in other words we do things the best that we can do and we do them in the right way and when we earn so we will by the way incidentally earn self-esteem in that process there's no way for that mechanism to misfire it's going to work okay now we may not Ernestine that if we fail to earn esteem that we will get feedback mechanisms about our competitive standing and the feedback mechanisms will tell us you know what you don't have enough talent to compete at that level in this domain you need to do something else or you need to reset your sights on what you're capable of that's fine every eighth grader finds out that they're not going to be Jerry West or Michael Jordan and they readjust their life path accordingly it's not a problem it's not a crisis it's not even close it's a necessary process of life to accept negative feedback in competitive domains and then be able to recalibrate where it is that we're going to put our time and energy this is essential to the computer program that runs your winter life the not a problem so what we do is that we continue to look inside and earn the self-esteem and we get sensitive to watching that mechanism and its functions that's probably the most valuable thing that I'm never going to tell anybody get sensitive to the self-esteem mechanism because it's not super loud I'll tell you what drowns it out pseudo esteem pseudo esteem completely unnaturally the organism and a bunch of people cheering you but you've cheated at what it is that you did your Lance Armstrong how about that did you talk about one of those most haywire nervous systems you're ever going to run into and one of the most haywire tragic bizarre lives ok I don't know you know what that's like to live inside that nervous system and I don't want to know the much better to be somebody that plays right place where does your bet does your best adjust your goals accordingly relative to your talent and on the esteem in the right way from the people that matter that's the right way to do it and if it turns out that your reputation goes further than that which it probably will on many domains to some degree then will you enjoy the process of pseudo esteem that the market assigns to you because you deserved it and it will help your competitive process I just hired an electrician yesterday to do something for my mother now the reason I hired him is because a guy that I trust that does air conditioning work for me told me this guy's good that's it pseudo esteem ok and he came and he did the thing perfectly and he was really nice to my mom and my mom just loved the guide my mom wanted him to move in so a pseudo esteem was the reason why I did not open up the phone book and just pick a name and try to deal with it I found somebody that had some pseudo esteem and it worked nicely so that's the that's the story of esteem self esteem and pseudo esteem and in my judgment the proper way to view those from as an integrated process from the appropriate angle which is self-esteem first it's fascinating because when you first explain studio esteem maybe a year or two ago on the show I took it to mean I'm sure you explained it more detailed but I took it as simply you know the extra likes you get on a Facebook post on Instagram and other social media but now you know I'm starting to understand a little deeper that it's not just that it's it's the pursuit of something you didn't necessarily earn yeah but in the market will the market will assign it to you you know as a matter of course but the pursuit of pseudo esteem and the in its own right is a little bizarre the the appropriate pursuit in life is self esteem and esteem that's what we should be focused on so the pursuit of pseudo esteem we're getting trapped and as a result if you are attempting to optimize your pseudo esteem you will not be optimizing your self-esteem and your esteem so it's it's kind of a pleasure trap it's it's like processed food it's hyper concentrated and trying to have a big hit on the nervous system and it can cause you an exhilaration that the system didn't earn and the illegitimate esteem was not earned and the self esteem was not earned but it can be so loud because you can sniff the efficiency about how much esteem that might you know that might win you okay that it can be a thrill you can really tell sorry to interrupt you Newton but you can really tell the difference when you when you listen to people that are very accomplished and really went through the mill to earn what it is that they be the abilities that they have they're not that wild about pseudo esteem that's not their and they'll tell you you know what I watched some of the great athletes now these days are really getting this straight they're getting increasingly sophisticated it takes a lot to be in a white hot glare of the public light the way many of them are and you'll listen to the way they talk I think a lot of them are talking to each other and the the brutal competitive nature the tension the tremendous media attention that a lot of these guys get I think they they basically get it they have to work so hard these days to be successful their attitude is you know I don't really care that much what what you all think I care about what I think and I care about what my teammates think ok that's what I care about and you'll hear that and what you hear is echoes of John Wooden and that is that and you know it goes right down through the last 50 years this is why you'll see I think a lot in athletics you'll have a guy like my sous-chefs key that has really promoted this this is the notion of look you know you work hard you do your job and whatever the result is is the result you can't control that and that's a you know that's the way not just for outstanding highly accomplished people to look at things but they're they they really need it or they need that compass more than anybody because the tremendous temptation and the tremendous both criticism and adulation that comes a siddha esteem and what they really need most is the self esteem that knows that they did their best and they need a steam from the people of matter which is their teammates and their family okay did they do things really well that's what you need if you did a really good job and you have a few people to really know what you did and how hard you worked and how honorable you were what the hell else do we care what anybody else thinks that's the most important thing that matters and as these explanations come out more and more do you think that people will find it less and less fascinating to watch sports as they simply are observing people with with with just as much hard work as anybody could have midgets just more genetic talent or just genetic genetic you know positives that allow them to compete at that level well I think we're inherently fascinated with outliers so the because we like to see the we like to see extraordinary ability that's that we like to see it because it's it's potentially valuable and in theory it's touching some you know Stone Age circuits so we got a bunch of people watching Miss America because the these pretty women are in principle valuable because they convert is pretty pretty children okay the on and so you know all the women are staring at that thing trying to figure out how these women got these competitive advantages we watch sports because we're watching fitness indicators of extraordinary genetics but those genetics aren't just weird or bizarre so this isn't somebody that can do a handstand on his finger okay this is somebody that's doing something that looks like a hunting or warfare proxy and and so we're looking at relative abilities there in order to assess the underlying gene quality and also and also in and in sort of respect for a lot of the effort that it took the conscientiousness and effort drive that it took to to learn the details not just the genetic extraordinary gifts so now I think I think we're always going to be interested in those things I think there remember we are both we are both displayers of characteristics and we are our consumers of them so our life is a yin and yang between making our own displays and also enjoying other people's just was so the story of the night though is once again my favorite story it's the center really of my career which is the self esteem is the is the only thing that you have control over but you have absolute control over that sucker self esteem you can earn and if you do earn it you will get it esteem is out of your control but you certainly have some indirect influence on it okay the harder you work the more determination that you have a new better you do things and the more that you learn the more competitive that you're going to get in the more esteem that you're ultimately going to earn some people will be more talented than you and they're just going to get more steam the handsome guy a pretty girl just walks in the room they get all kinds of steam that's just how it is okay the great athlete gets a bunch of a steam the you know the people of great ability you get a lot of esteem that's just how it is okay but so we can't guarantee that but we can guarantee that you are very likely over the long haul you'll get this you will get enough esteem in order to satisfy your life because you're you are constructed your nervous system is constructed that way the you will do well if you do the work you'll do well the we can't we can't tell how well you'll do but as we you know this is the John Wooden notion will be satisfied with the result peace of mind comes from knowing that you didn't leave a lot of potential on the table okay that's where the peace of mind comes from did I do a good job at actualizing my potential if you did you made a lot of good moves you didn't skip steps you worked hard and diligently the game may not have ultimately come out as well as you would have fought but that's fine you can live with that what you won't live with well is the idea that you did a mediocre job that you took shortcuts were lazy and didn't face the hard work that was necessary to compete effectively in the domains that you needed to now you won't have peace of mind when you do that you'll have you'll have relative degrees of unease and self-disgust okay and and those feelings are there is a guidance system to tell you that you are letting your competitive potential go down the drain behind either an ego trap or just fundamental distraction and laziness that's the way is and so the d what we will we don't want to do is get trapped by the the multi look at it a lick sir of pseudo esteem say that that's and so you know Facebook is potentially and things like this are potentially fiasco and so I read recently I guess couples fight once a week over Facebook what the hell is that that's a very strange very strange thing I have people family members fighting with each other you know I have people fighting with best you know good friends all kinds of you know rips in social fabric behind frickin Facebook okay and what is that about that's peep about people trying to you know finagle pseudo esteem that's what it is mostly not entirely but that is certainly a large part of the appeal there and if it's causing you more angst and then it's been it's benefiting your life get off of it that's one of the better ideas a lot a lot of people could adopt all right then it might waning Jeffries what was that I vented my spleen what's a good alright for your upcoming book speaking of pseudo steam right I mean yes is now they made other words a major component yeah it was fascinating to hear you lay out this logic of it so this upcoming ego trap up so we're looking forward to to hearing this mind map of where this coming from but in the words of Jim Jeffries the secret to happiness is to be good looking it looks like and and in the words of dr. Lau the next best secret to happiness is to do some hard work and something you enjoy and don't let the pseudo processor steam processors gets better at you yes very good
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