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Episode 189: Introducing Dr Jen Howk
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dr. Lana I've been doing this show for probably about four years now almost four years and we're getting close to 200 episodes fresh groundbreaking information all based on dr. Lyles revolutionary approach and I know I haven't shared much about myself throughout the show and there's a lot of reasons for that but mainly it's because I wanted the show to be about dr. Lyles revolutionary approach where he combines the science of the mind and his decades of clinical experience as a psychologist now some of you may know that I was first introduced to dr. Lyle and his ideas when I was personally struggling to find answers about my own health I had read several thousand pages of books magazines lecture notes I went to conferences called up authors of books asked him to clarify some of their ideas for me I went to conferences searching for answers I was pestering speakers even doctors in the audience and researchers for answers and I was trying to tie in all this health information I had read try to make some sense out of it but honestly it just felt like someone had ripped open a big huge bag of Skittles in my kitchen and I was just frantically and hopelessly trying to collect them and then by just some plain pure dumb luck I happen to go to True North health center first day and I was ready to leave having had no idea that dr. Lyle and dr. Goldhamer had written a book but funny enough due to some ridiculously small billing er the secretary they had actually overcharged me for my stay by a few bucks and the secretary had she actually offered to give me dr. Lau's book the pleasure trap for free so that she wouldn't have to reprint the bill and so I got home started reading the book and I remember the feeling of just just calm you for mental euphoria as I read each chapter and then over the next few hours I literally read the book cover to cover just in in kind of disbelief and shock over how much sense it was making relative to everything else I had read up until that point so dr. Lyle dr. Goldhamer they tied together every piece of health information that I'd been looking into over the last few years and as dr. Lyle often says on this show he says let's back up the camera and that's exactly what the pleasure trap did and so it's changed my life clarified my thinking and my confusion in a way that I'd never thought possible so a few years into doing this podcast dr. Lai and I were talking on the phone one evening and well it's actually dr. Lao was explaining something to me and I was trying my best to beat my genes and not interrupt him but he mentioned to me about some researcher from Harvard who he had just happened to meet that he was fascinated by the topic of her dissertation and he said that she'll eventually join us on the podcast so my first feeling my first instinct even though I didn't tell him was no way I only want to hear from dr. Lisle and I only want to hear dr. Long's ideas and only his clinical experience is relevant to me but as I learned more more about her through dr. Lisle I could actually sense something as we backed up the camera sense a similar feeling of excitement from dr. Lisle about meeting this particular doctor as I did when I first read the pleasure trap and was looking forward to meeting dr. Lao and dr. Goldhamer but let's face it in reality it's probably a thousand times more because I was on my little health journey for my own personal reasons and I'd only been searching for a couple of years I can't even imagine all the work dr. miles put in for probably several decades putting together his ideas and then finally meeting someone who's done the work in this area helped clarify his thinking around the topic of trauma and self-esteem and so a few months ago we decided that it was time to introduce our very dedicated listeners to the mind of this Harvard researcher who will now be a regular on our show and today we have an entire show dedicated to her a get to know dr. Hawk if you will so I'm thrilled to have you on all by yourself today dr. Jen hawk welcome to the beat your genes show oh well thank you Nate that was a very there's a lovely intro very very sweet complete with some funny missing dr. Lyle humor so well well played and I hope our listeners can can can hear in the background dr. Lyles hearty laughter yes I sure do every time I crack a joke even to myself and is now a permanent part of my internal audience no well that's good he's a better member of the internal audience than a lot of people would be so much more fair yeah well so dr. Hawk it's the first time on the show all by yourself you're new to the podcast you've done I think it's 2 to 3 shows already with us we know that you went to Harvard but what else can you tell us about yourself yeah we can't miss that little detail thanks - we're just gonna rub that in there so yeah well what else can I tell you about myself well I find it very amusing that we're the the show where we're having a couple little technical difficulties is the first time I take the car out by myself you know of course it's gonna have run into a little bit of trouble so that's that's good so apologies to anyone for that but but yeah so the background story is that I did indeed do my graduate work at Harvard that is true but there's a long winding road that leads me to there so I completed my PhD after much much effort and much time and many sort of switcheroos on my topic because I essentially in the process of writing that thing writing the dissertation I really revised how I was thinking about the entire topic I really reversed what I what I went in expecting to find and anyone who's been on that kind of academic journey with with a big grappled with a big academic question and has kind of faced a fork in the road with a project like that where they've had to undergo that reversal knows that that's quite a process and takes a lot of time so that that has occupied most of the last decade of my life but before that I I grew up in Alaska I was born and raised in rural Alaska it's something of a middle of nowhere kind of situation you know uphill both ways you know snowy and dark a little little house out in the middle of nowhere I mean it was not quite a like a Little House on the Prairie situation but it was on the Little House on the Prairie continuum for sure we were hosting it was yeah Little House on the tundra for sure I mean we had neighbors but not many and we were pretty remote and pretty isolated and in early years it was very we were living very rustically my parents had a little bit of a back to land back to the land kind of thing that they were doing and they were sort of there they were a little too young to be true hippies but they had some hippie sentiments so we were pretty far off the grid and it was an interesting way to grow up I have I have one younger brother who some listeners may know or who have seen me at true north or whatever he's he's a in a very successful band these days so he's well known for his musical adventures so we're still very very close so it was just the two of us and the various domestic animals and farm animals that we had in the family growing up and my parents who were both journalists they were my dad was a radio guy mostly he was the director news director of public radio in Anchorage for many years and dabbled around with a lot of other AM radio and various other things over the years my mom was mostly a newspaper journalist who did everything from you know police beats to covering the Arts feat for the Anchorage Daily News so so yeah very strange little rural childhood we moved when I was in high school to our middle school I guess to the town that is now infamous for being the hometown of the esteemed Sarah Palin so who actually we knew fairly well had some direct connections with so that's what's really put Wasilla Alaska on the map is its claim to Sarah Palin so yes there's that much much else you can say about it little town you know about 50 miles north of Anchorage so and grew up but you know I'm a technically speaking an open whack job on the big five so I'm over 90th percentile open and so as soon as I could I was out of there I was off exploring I was doing all kinds of weird things I managed to finagle my way to study abroad my senior year in high school I went to Germany and this was right after the Cold War I mean this was the mid-90s so it was a very fascinating time to be anywhere near the Eastern Bloc and I pretty much just kind of did that I just wandered and did weird jobs and met weird people and had open experiences until I was about in my mid-20s I think I was 26 when I finally had had had enough you know want global wandering and chasing guitar playing Jimmy's and getting my heart broken by guitar playing Jimmy's I finally settled down in Seattle which is where my brother was living and I happened to be chasing a boy who lived there and I in Seattle and did a couple of years in AmeriCorps which national service program did a few more weird jobs and finally finally finally wound up at the University of Washington to finally get my bachelor's degree and I felt about a million years old by that point because I was 26 or 27 when I started and I still at that point really wanted to be in politics I thought that politics was my calling my technically speaking my first job had been as an intern in the United States Senate and then I had worked for many years in Alaska in the Alaska State Legislature and in the governor's office and I was really just fascinated by politics really loved campaigns just loved everything about politics so once I got to the u-dub I I fell right into political science and fell in love with it and followed it all the way to grad school and that's how I wound up doing a PhD in political science of all things which Harvard calls government which is a little bit old-fashioned of them there's only a couple of other places that do that but yes essentially the study of power the study of institutions and power and who has power and what why people obey and why they don't and it's it's a fascinating discipline because it's it should embrace evolutionary psychology if it actually wants to understand these age-old questions about human political behavior but it's absolutely not integrated with evolutionary psychology whatsoever so I found myself kind of in a strange position having this skeleton key to the universe with ep and still kind of having this home and a discipline that the closest thing that political science has to evolutionary thinking is what we call a rational choice which comes from economics which is just to kind of look at individual decision making from a very rational actor point of view trying to maximize it's any any given cost-benefit analysis but it's not grounded in any kind of theory of human nature there's no Concilium sits it's missing the whole big picture but that's the closest that we had so yeah that that brings us pretty much current - you know when I stumbled into my dissertation and the work that I wanted to do and then many years of angst while I came to grips with the truth of it and had to reverse the way that I was thinking about the whole problem and yeah a whole whole process around that and eventually finishing and coming to true north and now doing this full-time just like taking a deep dive into the EP world and really really finally feeling intellectually at home now now did you understand evolutionary psychology or EP or is this something you kind of stumbled onto or was it a feeling that something just isn't right or tell tell us about how you got interested in like the formerly evolutionary psychology it was one of those things where just a lot of different forces kind of came together at the same time so I I think I had first heard of evolutionary psychology with the moral animal which came out when I was in high school so it was it made a big splash it was a big sensation you know you heard about the claims that were made in this book and they were really scandalous and I remember hearing a couple of these these ideas and I don't even remember I don't think I read the book then but somebody had a copy because I remember the picture on the cover and I like there was a copy kicking around somewhere maybe my grandma had it or my dad had it or some somebody had a copy someone gotten their hands on one and I remember like pondering this idea that were just animals and we behave in these predictable animalistic ways and that's what's actually motivating us and you know like yeah that sounds about right like having that awareness as the teenager never in ever as in touch with animalistic impulses you are when you're a teenager so I was like yeah I think this is actually what's governing human behavior but you know I was crazy open so it's not like I was gonna dr. Lyle you know heard the Sermon on the Mount when he was around the same age a little older and that was it you know he's like oh my god that's the truth that's it I'm forever convinced I'm just gonna go deep on this for the rest of my life and I I was too open for that I recognized that it was really valuable and that that was something that was going to kind of run as a track in the background of my life but it wasn't an ideology or a set of values that I was ready to really hitch my wagon to because there was too much open exploring to do so I had to just go wander in the weeds for a long time and I went deep in the weeds I mean I spent years deep in the Enlightenment trap deep in New Age thinking all kinds of confused thinking about what was really motivating human action and what relationships were about and all of that so I had a lot of distortion a lot of confusion but I could never really shut down completely the that voice in my head and I would think about these these observations that come from evolutionary thinking like these when I remember one of the very first things that I heard that just blew my mind was somebody pointed out and I don't know if this was in the moral animal or if it was just if it had come maybe from the blank slate or somewhere else that women's makeup is mimicking arousal it's it's the the reason that they put on makeup is to to not only to send signs of fertility but specifically signs of sexual arousal and I thought about that and I liked my 19 year old brain was just absolutely blown by this information and the truth of it like the like oh of course that's what it is you know you've got big eyes and pink cheeks and you know inflated lips and this whole thing and I I just remember thinking oh my god like if we're if we're beholden to that and this is underpinning this whole makeup industry like how far down does this rabbit hole go and then I would come across other little pieces of information here there you know that women are attracted to different different men at different points in their cycle depending on whether they're ovulating or not different you know more testosterone eyes males when they're when they're fertile and you know more Horace's when they're not and then also and also that they're like literally their faces change and their scent changes and their voice pitch changes when they're ovulating and all of these signals some of which we don't even know what they are we just know that men find women more attractive and they they actually tip waitresses more when they're fertile than when they're not there all these studies that have replicated all of these kinds of things and we've only pinned down a few of the actual mechanisms like we don't actually even know what kind of invisible signals are being thrown during that time so all these little tiny cues just as a woman who is dating and it was interested inherently in these things I just found this inescapably fascinating and then as a social scientist I kind of that just kept churning away as I was thinking about what are these forces that are influencing social institutions and politics itself like politics just seem to be you know as something if you're talking about power it seems like you would have to think about these these base animalistic impulses that people have and it just seemed like there was something missing from all of that analysis so it was always kind of in the background even though I was I was getting trained classically in political science which absolutely is uninterested in all of this stuff all all that classical political science really cares about is institutions and the design of institutions so the notion is that you can if you just get the constitution right then and you you develop sufficient rule of law that you can it's all portable it's all in principle portable to a different context so it's it's very blank slate environmentalists thinking that it's all about the institutions it's it's a democracy is something that is you know portable to all kinds of different contexts if you just get the components right so I just there was this inherent clash between those two things and then a couple of years ago I became aware of the work of Jordan Peterson and I'm sure a lot of the podcast listeners are familiar with Peterson he's he's you know made quite a name for himself recently and I actually had known about him for a very long time because I had encountered his his first book maps of meaning back when he published it so I'd known about him for nearly 20 years because I think that that first book came out in the late 90s and I had been one of the things that I was really enduringly interested in was Jungian psychology and symbolism and archetypes and all of this mythical stuff that kind of intersected with my New Age Enlightenment trap and he was very conversant in that so he was like a blend of evolutionary psychology and this this crack-cocaine of Union symbolism and Union thinking and the hero's journey and all of the stuff so I found that very appealing I really really liked that combination of things it was like oh here's a little source code and a little mysticism just to take the edge off it was really really speaking yeah totally Oh completely speaking to my source code and you know he's he delivered it in this in this really beautiful ways he's a great speaker and a great writer Matt selenium is a really dense tome but he he does he has a lot of interesting things to say even in that book and then he rock gets back into the consciousness the social consciousness a few years ago I want to say maybe 2016 it was right around the election it was right around the Trump election because of the the so-called scandal that was happening in relation to his his claims around compulsory language related to non-binary gender expression or so so he got himself in all kinds yeah he got himself in all kinds of trouble he's a he's a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist who works at the University of Toronto primarily and he he went on record repeatedly and quite vigorously about how how he was anxious about the idea of the state requiring the use of any kind of language so the fact that it to be about gender expression was almost incidental to the claim that he was actually making and this gets lost in all of the debates because he he's a scholar of totalitarian regimes about of the Nazis in the Soviet regime in particular and he's very sensitive to essentially the state telling people how to speak and and if you do not say words particularly words that have been invented which was the case with these these gender-neutral pronouns that are not necessarily in in common use in English but they're being prescribed by the state as now you will say these words he he saw that as an early step on the road to sliding into totalitarian practices and he spoke up about it it's a very interesting claim that sort of lived in a very rarefied academic space for a while until a teaching assistant at another university in Canada used some of his arguments found him on YouTube and played some of his arguments for her class she was teaching I think grammar some sort of a composition of grammar and they were literally having a conversation about pronoun use and she said oh well here's this guy has interesting thoughts on pronouns so it was a little bit of a stretch to kind of impose his really political argument onto discussion about pronoun usage and language use but she did it and she was roundly punished by her University you know stripped of her teaching credentials got into all kinds of trouble and she actually recorded she was she was brought up on a hearing and censured by this group and she recorded it and then she published the recording and then it just blew up then everything went crazy and all of this was coinciding of course with the with the election and kind of with changing political priorities and a little bit of a backlash around identity politics particularly that Trump was able to really you know capitalize on and also a couple of other things like the protests at the Evergreen State College which was actually right down the road from where I happened to be living in 2016 I was living in Olympia Washington which is where Evergreen is and those protests were about you know professors that were sort of refusing to toe the line in similar ways that Peterson was refusing to toe the line so all of this kind of came came rushing back into my consciousness around the same time that I'm essentially finishing the dissertation and I'm coming to grips with the the evolution of the argument that I was making in the dissertation which began as I was asking I was very interested in Alaskan Indigenous Alaskans and how they are coping or not coping successfully with the effects of climate change because we can have a big debate about climate change if you want like there's lots to talk about with it but the fact is that the you know the climate patterns have changed in the Arctic and these their populations that are very vulnerable to these effects particularly these Native villages Native Alaskan villages that are one way or another going to have to relocate entirely away from the coast where they are because the permafrost is is eroding and the storms are stronger and they're just completely imperiled by their environment in a way that they have have not been in their current positions so so I wanted to I wanted to ask you know how can we make these places more resilient and this was like I was looking at this question in the in the way that I had been trained to look at this question and this is what all of the literature was asking this question in the same way like how can we create resilience where does resilience come from why are some why to some institutions this again is all about institutions not about personality not about cost-benefit analysis but what are the institutions that make people more resilient or less resilient and the deeper I got into that research the more I realized that it was not really about the institution's at all that you can't create resilience as much as you might like to but there are entire state departments and bureaucracies that have been created to do so despite the fact that they cannot do it that all resilience is like I was talking about on the podcast last week is that it's it's it has everything to do with what we might call the the opportunity structure that is facing different people in different contexts so it really kind of goes back to that rational choice actor/model like I'm a rational human with with a cost-benefit analysis on my situation what are my opportunities what are my constraints how am i filtering all of that through the lens of my my personality and my immediate personal cost-benefit analysis and that was a paradigm that made me very uncomfortable if it felt very impersonal it felt very cold it felt very it was really at odds with my social justice commitments and my own environmentalist thinking so that all of these things kind of came together at the same time and I was just I was confronted with this the the reality of the rational underpinnings of the utility of essentially if you are if you're in a situation in in the dissertation I'm pointing out how if you're in a situation where your economic hierarchy is disrupted that you're in chaos your things are uncertain the process of being in crisis itself can become strategic so it's it's it's again kind of what we're talking about yesterday if you're facing a competitive problem that you don't think that you're going to be successful confronting the correct choice becomes to game it somehow and so in this context these populations have become essentially strategically vulnerable and this is a two-way process that the the state has something to gain from that as well as the communities so that's a very long-winded explanation of how I got there but the the evolutionary psychology was kind of there the whole time but it was a combination of of coming to terms in in in some kind of intellectual honesty with the work that I was doing in my fieldwork and in my dissertation the rise of Jordan Peterson and then I'm sort of like on the cusp of this and and writing this and and trying to articulate it and I moved to Santa reso to work at true north and I meet dr. Lyle so that's you know then then that's the end of the story then I have this this intellectual person that I can that I can really run these kinds of ideas by who can give me really meaningful feedback and we start to really shape each other's ideas through those exchanges and it's just been incredibly it's incredibly rich intellectual exchange and really really amazing so just to pick back up I mean I I came to true north and I met dr. Lyle and we just you know immediately had this really rich intellectual exchange because I was sort of developing some ideas that were useful to the way that he was thinking about things in ways that he hadn't quite sorted out and then obviously he's enabling me to really get much more much more clarity around my own theory and how evolutionary principles are working on the observations that I'm making in my dissertation and you know grounding everything in just a richer Concilium so it was a really beautiful exchange it's absolutely fascinating because I I can only guess that politics is where evolutionary psychology becomes extremely practical from when it's dealing with more than one person mmhmm yeah you you would think that it would be and I think whether they are aware of it or not it's definitely you know in regular use in the campaign world and in in the actual political world but the the academic the ivory tower perspective on political science has completely got its head in the sand and has has no awareness of these realities and rational choice which again is like the closest we have they're really kind of pariahs in the discipline they're there they're their own little their own little group they kind of just talk to each other there's not a lot of cross-pollination between the rational as evolutionary psychologists are Enterprise yeah and I wouldn't even call them evolutionary psychologists I would call them more economists they're cut their political economy people so they they're they're bringing in principles from economics that are really useful to politics that are that are based around the idea of individual rationality so it's it's like mmm it's it's next door to evolutionary psychology and evolutionary thinking but they don't have any evolutionary theory they don't have any Concilium so they don't know it works the way that it works they they don't really care they just sir they just say well we're rational actors we behave in rational ways and so therefore we can we can build a model about what's going to happen under rational conditions just like an economist would and they get it right sometimes and sometimes they don't because they're not they don't actually understand all of the different traps that people can get into you know the limits of rat of what they would think of as rationality essentially it's fascinating because because the ones who are more successful than the others I'm talking about setting up you know systems that are actually that help people get happy and accomplish their goals they're just doing it by accident just just happen to be are you saying you're saying that they just happen to do it accidentally mm-hm and they might get it right in spite of not knowing these things mm-hmm yeah well I think you know economics as a discipline is just a little closer to the truth then a lot of others are just because it's it's made it it's a business to eliminate distortions and it's thinking and really it's basically the whole discipline is founded on the idea of a cost-benefit analysis and market process like an undistorted market process and so if you import those ideas into political structures and political economy you wind up sort of like a broken clock let's write twice a day you're just sort of like on the right track but you don't know why you're on the right track you're you're you just you're sort of close and then so you know political science also has there there are political psychologists or so you know there's there's a division in the American political science association for political psychology and some of those people are looking at political problems through something like in evolutionary psychology lens but some of them are looking through a completely haywire psychological lens that's drawing on psychodynamic family systems kind of BS so so there's no real coherence and in the discipline around any of that there's no agreement there's it's it's kind of a free-for-all but as you know the classical typical standard poli-sci is is about institutions that's the end-all be-all it's it's radical environmentalism Wow are there yeah I was gonna ask you if there's any common myths as to why but I guess the institutions I guess that's that's the that's their payoff is to keep the institutions alive are there myths that you think are I mean I can't you know it's hard for me to I'm not in this at all so this is just me as a layperson just kind of thinking out loud it's hard hard to imagine that that you've got people willfully ignoring the truth in failure you know what will actually work I don't think they're willfully ignoring I think they just don't know I think I think there's a lot of inertia that happens in academia where you get very like this happened to me I got very siloed into Poli Sci and you especially if you're pursuing it at the graduate level you are you're in a lineage of thinkers that is is a consistent way of looking at the world and that's just how you're trained to see the world and so you're you're well-read on a particular Canon you're not reading other books you're reading like exhaustively within the discipline as it exists and there's just this is not unique to Poli Sci in any way that there's you're not you're just not there's no interdisciplinary discussion really anything interdisciplinary is kind of just a lark that people embark on for some sort of special project or something but there's very little systematic interdisciplinary work so you know it's it's amazing to me that I was a couple of buildings down from Steven Pinker's office the whole time and the whole time and never never thought to take a class or to sit in on a class because I just wasn't I wasn't in that place yet with with my thinking by the time I really started to dial in on what we could call evolutionary principles that were at work in my dissertation and in my thinking I was already you know out of Boston and I was doing my work in Alaska and elsewhere so I kind of missed out on that opportunity but it's it's also just not it's not in anyone's awareness as an option it's just not the way that grad school works kind of go to go very deep in into your discipline and to be surrounded by the Giants of your discipline and to learn to think like they think and so it's not willful willful ignorance as much as it is conviction of the idea that you're right and everybody else is wrong and you have a way of thinking about the world that is you know the most correct and everybody is kind of operating under the same notion no matter which branch of social science they're in and everybody is confused thank you for explaining it that way it kind of I can I can sniff that it's it's very similar to in in the healthcare system right now very no one's really talking about diet sleep and exercise as much as they were as mo no one's talking about it at least they weren't twenty years ago and so it's and you can go ask like the average medical doctor and they're just gonna be they're gonna shrug their shoulders and say dad's got you know very little to do with the particular condition so this makes that makes sense thank you and there's all the quiet little incentives just like there are in the medical industry two of you know if you want to be successful doing this it's it's publish or perish and the journals are only gonna publish certain kinds of articles and you can go out on a limb and you can write a crazy dissertation and you can you can try to get your article published somewhere but it's not going to be very noteworthy and so you're not gonna get a very fancy job and you might have you might struggle more to get tenure and so people are just you know they're they're subject to all of these normal motivations to climb the dominance hierarchy that they find themselves in and the way to be successful in that dominance hierarchy is to play by the rules and to you know not not question too much and it's not as if people are generally exposed to evolutionary thinking too much in their undergraduate careers either so it's it's I was in an unusual situation where probably because of my openness I just had I had read widely and I had encountered these things and they were churning away and I am just the type of one of the reasons I am NOT an academia and I would never really fit in academia is I'm too I'm too busy grabbing ideas from wherever they're useful and wherever I can pull things and integrate them and that is very much at odds with what it actually is required of a six full academic to be a successful academic you were you're going deep on one thing you keeping your head down you're basically writing the same article over and over again with very slight permutations you know you're gonna change the statistical model model just slightly to get it like different parameter and different results and then you're gonna you're gonna go over here and you're gonna test it out on a different case and see how that works and you're gonna tentatively make some conclusions about how that might have some implications maybe in theory for some imaginary population in down the road so you're not if there's not a lot of practical on the fly hey there's this really cool idea over here let's pull it in and see how it fits and how it might shed some light on a really big problem that we would all do well to understand that just doesn't happen in academia mmm-hmm and it's fascinating because when we first started this podcast it was that's what drew me to dr. Lyle is is the fact that he was you know whatever works you know what makes sense I mean the the the clinical experience along with the science was what made me the most sense it's just fascinating that that you know here you are mmm basically in a different part of the world all the way across the country coming to very similar conclusions or at least watching the landscape of the world and seeing this whole thing whole thing unfold and now here you are mm-hmm I know yeah it's a it's almost enough to fuel a person's mystic chip so I guess you believe in destiny then I don't not believe in destiny well speaking of destiny because you mentioned a little bit about climate change and and I know there's a lot a lot of you know different debates going on in climate change so I'm not actually asking about debating climate change here what I'm actually curious about is what what motivates people in this debate mmm yeah well you know we say it all the time but if you don't understand something look for the status it's really just a it's one of those guidelines to kind of make your way through the world and there's so much status in the climate change debate just all over the place once you start really looking at it and even even not as a debate just in the in the general in the way that people are people are talking about it just in general this is I mean it's even down to Al Gore getting the Nobel Prize is basically a concession prize for losing the presidency you know it's like this is all it's all status all the way down and there's a there's status in there's grip I'm just processing that hilarious I've never heard it put quite that way I leave it to our government PhD to just yeah well yeah I've talked to dr. loyal and I've had that conversation so that he may I may have gotten that from him too so I'm sure it's like we should we definitely share that sentiment but so there's a there's a the just there's a lot there's there's one of the most useful roles that anyone could have performed in a stone-age village was the person who gave early warning of something really really bad about to happen and so that's what a lot of this is is we're running this this Stone Age script to be we want to be very useful we want to be useful to the village and so feeling very worried about climate change in this urgency that we have to somehow change other people's Seabee around it and their behavior and to you know stop the terrible thing before it starts all of that is is very it's it's very advantageous to our utility to the village and to our sense of esteem from the village and the fact is that you you can't you can't change anyone's cost-benefit analysis the only thing that is going to change anybody's cost-benefit benefit on anything is either a really delicious carrot or a really sharp stick and you know sharing yes or carrot cake there you go that will definitely work for yep yep there we go very delicious carrot so yeah so but sharing a Facebook post an alarmist Facebook post about you know the the crisis that the world is in or you know the latest news about in the rise and temperature that we're looking at by 2050 or what its gonna how it's gonna affect the crops or the Amazon or anything like this this is all its all very long-term abstract thinking about people that are not in our immediate village we don't they're they they don't really exist outside of this myopic human village thinking and it's and it also feels like way too big it's way beyond anybody's ability to affect any of these things directly so there's no CB in it for for people to shift no matter how alarmist you are but there's major incentive to be alarmist and so there's no there's no incentive to be climate change denier there's no status advantage to sitting back and saying it's fine relax don't worry no problem all of the status goes to the prescient sage who brings who warns everybody that the the you know enemy enemy village is coming in and attacking in the middle of the night or that the volcano is about to erupt or whatever it is that's that's who's really reaping the benefit here so there's a great I don't know if people are familiar with the xkcd which is a great little cartoon it's a cartoon for nerds especially math nerds and it's all stick figures so it may be where dr. Lisle draws some of his artistic inspiration from but there's there's one there's one where it there's a there's the stick figure says something like he's sitting there and he's reading the newspaper and he says something like you know it's been a really long time since Earth got hit by a really big meteor and someone in the background says oh my god don't say things like that and the caption says I see this kind of thing from time to time because I know that it can't really affect the outcome but it gives me a tiny chance of looking incredibly prescient and that's and that's what this is it's there's it's it's this is such a gardener such an advantage yeah yeah and there's though and it's it's not falsifiable to be a denier because you can never sit back and say look disaster has not happened just the human race is not over with like you know everything is fine there's there's always all it is is false positives all over the place so in some of those are some of those are legitimate causal correlations where there's you know there's there are some changes that you know are linked to climate change processes whether there may made or not and that there you know there is there is a causal process here but a lot of them aren't a lot of them are just weather and volatility and vicissitudes and the fact that there was a forest fire in California this year does not necessarily mean that its climate change-related maybe it does maybe it doesn't not all of them do like there's it's it's all false positive so if you're on the side of alarm you're you're being bolstered all the time that you have more evidence that you can point to to document how oppression you are and so this is you know it's it's very I think it's really well documented that virtually every generation in throughout human history has been convinced that it's the last and that Armageddon is coming in its lifetime this is like a this is built into the universal value system of the human code to the end times are coming and this is just the this is another another way that that that that tendency that that Universal value system is playing out in this context it doesn't mean that there is not some cause for alarm there there is some cause for alarm so I mean I my interest is my interest is that there there pretty clearly some real effects and you know my dissertation research showed me this in in real time I mean I went to these villages I I spent time in them I saw the erosion with my own eyeballs so the there there are climate effects that are unusual that are disproportionately affecting vulnerable what we might call vulnerable populations and there's not necessarily anything new about that phenomenon you know vulnerable populations have always been disproportionately affected by changes in the environment and you had more erosion and they would have to move away and all kinds of things like this so we can have we can have that conversation about you know broad causality and mitigation but I'm I'm not I'm not a climate scientist you're not the motivation because you know what you just find actually it reminds me when I was a kid I asked my dad I said do you believe in God do you believe in heaven and hell and all that and he said he said well III don't know he goes but but he said he said but publicly he goes why not you know if I'm wrong and there is a God then then I can't you know then I'm going to hell but if I'm if I'm right then I'm gone [Laughter] yes he's got that he's got the calculus right yeah that is how it works it's it's amazingly beneficial to to be sounding the alarm especially when you're surrounded with all these false positives so so I you know I I think it's it's on us as you know relatively privileged people and I say I use that term with you know some tongue-in-cheek like because it's been overused and redefined but we we are privileged in the sense that if we find ourselves living you you and I if we find ourselves living somewhere that is becoming difficult to live in because the environment has changed in any way whether it's because it's hotter or there's a sea level has risen or it's just gotten less comfortable for any reason we have the capacity and the ability to pick up and move to somewhere more comfortable we have those means but not everybody does and the the ability to do that does map on to you know these identity politics and these groups of people who are systematically less able to take advantage of that mobility than than we are and so for me it's a moral question it's it's what does this what does that demand of the people who are more mobile if anything and what what would that mean for what kind of policy we would need going forward so it's really it's more of a it's more of an ethical debate than a practical one the way that I look at it and this is the kind of ethical debate that you'll see on the fringes of libertarian thinking all the time because you know you can have unfettered free market processes and it's more efficient which I put in scare quotes like it's all more efficient but you do have your pain some human cost for that and we are social species and we do have perhaps some responsibility to each other and so what does that responsibility look like what is the best way to to shape that responsibility and to put it into action and my dissertation research just showed me that though that responsibility is really misconstrued misunderstood badly invested in these in these entire bureaucracies that are trying to build resilience so that's what they think they're trying to do but they have it completely turned around so that's that's my that's fantastic so so in an effort to find out these these vulnerable populations which are not the majority of populations you stumbled on to finding out how resilience works in general with with other people as a from there mm-hmm yeah I think that's that's not an overstatement yeah yeah I think that's true because resilience is you know like I said last last time it's it's where personality meets the Seabee it's in the Seabee is being convened by the environment so you you can't create it like you can't create any kind of blank slate you know personality condition you you have to look at the political opportunity structure and the motivational structure that's facing individuals who are looking at a given problem and what would be the the best thing for them to do for their life experience and why they're making the choices that they're making and that that is just not at all how policymakers are thinking about this problem right now absolutely fascinating well all right well can you so I understand that you do concert so you have dr. Lisle has said before and that you have a therapists you know personality essentially you're you're very warm on the phone I just want to tell our listeners here I run the fasting escape here and I've had a few patients who have told me that they've had phone consultations with you doctor Hawk and they just said it's like a weight got lifted off their shoulders as you explained to them that's really some of these processes that were going on and they feel in a much better position right than before than before so so yeah tell us a little bit about how you got into you know phone consults and and doing essentially these these guiding people with their problems yeah well I just I my CB on life in general is that I also want to be as useful as I can be to the village that's what everybody wants you know you you want to you you want to find the equilibrium where you're getting the the the right esteem and the right ways from the people that matter as dr. Lisle says and and you you want to be getting that esteem from giving your best to the village whatever that is and so I had always had you know among my many crazy jobs that I had over the years one of them was as a student counselor at a really kind of evil for-profit college one of these one of these little these little terrible exploitative places that's selling very high interest loans to these little hapless people who don't know any better and enrolling them in these very expensive useless programs so I think this particular school had like a hospitality program that they were charging like thirty thousand dollars for a certificate in hospitality so you could go get a job as a hotel concierge like really exploitive shitty stuff and my job was as the counselor the student counselor so I totally i inhabited this role like I had the I had the office with the soft light you know I turned off the fluorescent and I brought in the lamps and I had the sweaters and the the plants and the macrame and totally totally and because you know I've always I've always had I guess you could call it a therapeutic personality where I've wanted to solve problems I want to help people work through problems and understand what's going on with them and of course when I had this job I did not have the the understanding of evolutionary psychology I do now and I had a mandate from this terrible institution that I actually was supposed to be convincing them to stay in the program at all costs so they would come in they would come in just miserable hating everything feeling like they were way in over their heads and they were they you know it was basically a hundred percent admissions if you could pay the bill and you could pay the bill just by signing on the dotted loan of the promissory note so you were taking out this like you know credit card interest rate loan of whatever it was like fourteen percent nineteen twenty nine percent to to get this useless degree and so they would get into it and they would struggle and their nervous system would be telling them that they were in trouble and that they should probably get out and quit and do something else with their time and energy and they'd come in and my job was to convince them to stay so that was like a you know soul-sucking kind of reverse of what I do now which is that I really I find it so fulfilling to talk to people about the problems that they're facing and to find find the path out to freedom you know like what what is it that you're dealing with where's the distortion in your thinking that makes you feel trapped that's so often what people are dealing with they feel overwhelmed they feel trapped by things and really it just it can be very helpful to talk to anybody who but especially somebody who has the skeleton key to the universe that evolutionary psychology really is to to help them sort out why they why they feel overwhelmed what their options really are how they could take systematic action on those options and that brings with a great relief I mean I've experienced that personally once i what I understood the ego trap when I was in the middle of the dissertation process and I was deeply ego trapped with the dissertation deeply I had written the first chapter and gotten really really really positive feedback from my committee which sounds like a great thing like everybody wants positive feedback from their committee but this was too much and it threw me it tipped me right over the edge into the ego trap so a little bit of praise is good but more is not better so you everybody has a threshold where it's too much because I just was like I can't live up to their expectations there's no way I don't have the chops and so I'm just gonna procrastinate this thing and and quote-unquote self-sabotage and not deal with it so I recognized those dimensions and when I understood the ego trap I realized that that was very much the situation that I was in and I experienced that feeling of profound liberation just by putting one foot in front of the other in attending to the fundamentals of getting out of that trap so I know how powerful that can be for people but it's not me it's the it's the skeleton [Laughter] you sound so pleasant right here on this podcast and in person so my question is apparently the the solution to get people out of the ego trap from as we've heard from dr. Lisle is sometimes to slightly insert them so how is it how the hell are you going to slightly insult them when you're such a nice pleasant person doc I am I am I'm congenitally pretty agreeable and I'm a highly agreeable person but I can I can muster some disagreeable skittles when I have to so although I will say that I I have never used that particular strategy to get someone out of the ego trap I just kind of explain the mechanics of it and hope for the best I don't think I'm oversimplifying this the strategy so dr. Lau's did it probably well no I mean it can be very effective I mean you you will even feel you'll feel the change in your own nervous system even even if it's not real if somebody says I don't think you can do that like like any problem even a very hypothetical situation if I say and you know that I'm just doing this we're just talking this is just a game and I say Oh Nate I don't think you could actually do that you'll feel like a surge of motivation it's almost like an abstract random like like yeah I'll show you like yeah yeah you think I can't do it's amazing it's just mechanical process and so of course it's exactly the opposite where it's like oh you can absolutely do that that's no problem for you what are you talking about you do that in your sleep it's like I don't want to I don't think that's a good use of time I think I better go like clean my house again so yeah it's a it's very much just a mechanical process but yeah I don't I'm not a doctor Lyle and I have very different personalities and I have trouble insulting people although some of my ex-boyfriends are probably disagree with that well doctor doctor Hawk it's been a pleasure having you on we've had a wonderful wonderful interview with you I hope our listeners now get to know you just a little bit more it for those listeners who are just curious about you and I know you do phone consoles but there's also you've got quite a number of videos and some information on your website which is
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