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Episode 220: Tension w friends, Dealing with conflict, Mass hysteria, Self esteem
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coronavirus is you know there are some certain states here that are starting to slowly get back to work and the looks like dr. Lila I watched your talk with chef AJ a couple days ago that was really really really cool dr. Hawk I watched your talk with chef AJ I think it was was it today or yesterday today clearly you have too much time on your hands well as I state as I said in the last podcast I've been I've been doing a little more organizing and there's there's one thing that I can do while I'm or guys and that's listen to dr. Hawk speak on different topics dr. de Lisle talk on different topics but one thing that was really interesting is I found a magazine from 2016 it was Time magazine and on the front cover was a mosquito and the cover let me pull it up right now oh my god is that the infamous of virus lizard yes a mysterious illness with devastating effects is the next public health crisis in our backyard and yeah four years later who would have thought but some psychic predicted this I'm sure my psychic knew well listeners have accused dr. Lisle of having a crystal ball and soon they will do the same thing with dr. Hawk so you know we'll except I actually do have a well there have been some some comments about coronavirus stats so we'll you know I know dr. Lisle you said that you know as the more data comes out we'll know more and so everybody who has emailed me just asking you dr. loud to clarify certain little tiny statistics just keep in mind I have received those messages and and we can you know I'll consolidate them once we once we know more and then we can go over it all at once so sure but until then we've got some questions about how to how to deal with certain things going on as a result of this pandemic and sort of lockdown situations and stay at home warnings etc so let's just get started dr. Lyle dr. Hawk you guys ready sure dear dr. Lyle dr. Hawk help am I going to lose friends over this virus most of my friends are overwhelmed with fear and are just bossing everyone around seems like if I don't agree with their demands ie wear a mask even went outside and six feet apart or in my car or if I don't show as much fear as they do I get the strong impression that it could have a negative negative impact and permanent impact on the friendship I've had to lie to my close friends and I don't like being put in that position I honestly am starting to feel a bit harassed how can I manage this well I don't have any friends Jen so should take that so yeah that's Doug's favorite answer when he wants to get up get out of answering some kind of social question or some question about social processes and I happen to know that it's not at all true but yeah I can go ahead and answer this I talked a bit about this on the after mentioned show with AJ so if people want to go back and watch that we talked about this in great detail there's a lot of different components here I also wrote about this in the in the essay that we've talked about which is on my on my website my newsletter called of personalities and pandemics because what we're looking at is a crisis situation that is bringing out personality differences into it's really just putting them in very sharp relief and so if there are pre-existing cleavages and your friendships it's going to become increasingly apparent when you put them under stress just like it's gonna happen with any relationship and part of what's going on is that because people are really afraid and in in a situation of great uncertainty and bad information that people are not necessarily reacting in a way that we would call rational it is rational they're running rational estimates of their likelihood of genetic survival and reproduction but they're behaving in very different ways as a result of their underlying personality dynamics so if you are for example a very agreeable introvert you're gonna respond very differently to requirements to wear a mask in public and to practice social distancing then you're disagreeable introvert friends are they're going to be really very happy to wear a mask in socially distant since at home it's gonna kind of hit all of their circuits of their preferences their underlying preferences for what they want the world to look like anyway where it's going to come really sharply into contrast with yours so this is why no one situation no one crisis no one traumatic experience is going to affect everyone in the population the same way it's all the way that different environmental circumstances interact with personality so I totally get where they're coming from where the questioner is coming from where it's it feels like people are being unreasonably afraid making unreasonable demands and that you kind of have to misrepresent yourself or as the questioner says lie to your friends and you don't like doing that I would say you got to run the cost-benefit analysis more broadly on the friendship and you know how valuable overall is the friendship to you we've we've talked about friendship on the show before where friendship friends are essentially stone age insurance policies you you invest in friendships you you pay the premium to a friendship by investing the time and energy and in caring about that person and being part of their emotional landscapes so that they're there for you when things go badly so if that person is in your life and is an overall good value proposition and you just have some conflict over how to handle this situation then it might be worth just kind of writing it out and waiting for things to get back to something approaching normal fee which hopefully we are getting to by mid-summer the end of summer anyway I'll let Doug talk about the latest numbers on that if he wants to get there but you know there's also a very likely likely chance that this is the kind of moment where you realize who you're really dealing with in a friendship and that the the fact that this person is not an insurance policy that you want to continue investing in that they're not going to be there for for you in a crisis in the way that you imagined that they would be you're essentially you're you're getting a preview of how that insurance policy pays off when you need it and maybe the cost-benefit analysis has changed because you're starting to see who this person really is and it's it's no longer a relationship that it's gonna really work for you so those are all the moving parts to kind of keep in mind but the the main thing that is going on is that people are just becoming more of who they already were when they're under pressure and that's always gonna happen in this kind of situation yeah right on target yeah I actually think about this we have a mutual French and it just OCD and and so I I deal with essentially something similar to this all the time going into his house having to wash your hands what wipe your feet get cross-examined about whether or not you stepped in any bird poop you know anything under the Sun and this is just part of the price to deal with someone who has a personality that is you know got a screw loose and so and that's so what you say is perfect sort of cinema scope of the issue the the overall CB is fine that doesn't mean that there aren't costs that are panning ass very high-value friends like he really is there for you and a pinch other than this writing behavior that he displays over his OCD like bright tendencies he's actually quite happy right now yeah I bet eeeh the whole world has come around to seeing things properly yeah yeah everybody he had plenty of that hand sanitizer stored in his in his bathroom it was all I was always in there for the last 30 years so yeah so this is what this is and and again to two ways to go either you know we write it out knowing that this is a short term you know this is a matter of weeks now that we're gonna have to deal with this or its obnoxious enough and annoying enough and we we discover that they don't really feel that valuable to us that this becomes a a periscope to look look through and reanalyze the CB one way or the other mm-hmm so yeah the other day I waited as long as I could to go to Costco to get some supplies here at the fasting escape and I finally went and I was just curious because they face masks are required before you go in and when I was at the checkout stand paying paying the bill they require a Costco membership card and I wanted to ask him like how do you know it's me when I have a mask on my face you I have to show you my picture ID yeah that's actually for people who claim that this is all a giant conspiracy deep state you know bill bill gates vaccine conspiracy what blah blah blah insert your conspiracy theory of choice here the one thing that really convinces me that it's not is that it's completely at odds with the deep state security state facial ID technology so we wouldn't have invested for so long in trying the ability to track people everywhere that they go with facial technology ID technology to just block it with masks so that comforts me you know I've got a personality that's just just ripe for for this whole you know scared of the nervous about the you know government intrusion whatnot so but thank God for the statistics and dr. Lyle and dr. Hawks analysis because that has really helped help to help to stem that tide don't do anything rash call us first all right all right next question dear doctors my issue is on conflict in my situation I always want to run away from conflict and get away as fast as I can I'd like to know how I can stop feeling this way and just deal with the conflict without going into a downward spiral anytime a conflict arises at work with a customer it's that's part of my job to help solve the problem and make them feel better and reassure them but I always feel attacked and it sends me into a spiral I feel like I can't listen to anything they're saying and I can't get past their anger I know I'll be put into a cycle of running from conflict instead of just dealing with it so how can I prevent myself from feeling like it's the end of the world and actually getting so upset that I'm shaking nauseous and light hedid I really love to be able to beat my jeans yeah interesting problem and so I would say a few things about this the one of the things that I would say would be that if if you have a recurrent situation in your workplace where you have to do something like this and you are not personality-wise well-suited to it you have really two options and number one is you get out of that situation by you know not everybody is in a situation where they have to deal with customers and they have to actually manage customers anger so this individual is not an individual that's genetically well suited to customer service so fortunately not that many people in the world have to do customer service so if you're doing customer service and you're not well suited to it then you should be in trying to figure out how you're gonna angle your way out of there the go be a librarian you know just do something else mow lawns I don't care what it is be be an IT person that isn't on the other end of the phone the now let's suppose that that's a very good job and you're you've got a lot of skill and there's substantial income involved and this just happens to be something that goes with the territory and there's no way out of it at that point there's there's a set of skills that can make you far more effective at dealing with other people's anger the it and then this will come naturally because we could see that your personality is that this is overwhelming this personality this personality is very sensitive to other people's anger and therefore highly reactive etc so this is not a good personality match at all my friend Alan this isn't the problem this isn't even remotely a problem there could be an entire gang screaming red in the face you know with with literally weapons drawn and his heartbeat would go from 47 beats a minute to 47 and a half [Laughter] so it is it's been it's been seriously questioned whether or not he's actually really alive so this individuals clearly has a highly responsive nervous system that doesn't look anything like this now what can you do well there are there are techniques there are essentially methods for dealing with interactions with other people when you're in conflict that if you learn those techniques they can make you more effective and so essentially there's this has been shown in movies before I think I don't know I'd have to think of one coming to a sports analogy again actually I think I read this story about the the super fine quarterback Andrew Luck in his rookie year in in training camp he was doing a brilliant job of attacking the secondary and the the coaches on the defense said okay well it's time to show him a blitz and he had you know he thought he knew how to read a blitz cuz he was a you know all all-star college quarterback but it turns out no he didn't know anything about reading a professional blitz and within within five minutes the kid was like demoralized has been just been hammered by a professional defense and he then went to the tapes and they said okay now you know what this it's like to actually get a professional blitz and he went to the tape room and they went over it and over it and over it and showed him the details of the interactions so that by the end of a few hours he's like okay okay I see the patterns now now I understand what I'm dealing with and he began to learn how to be a pro quarterback so in the same way the customers that come at you and they're angry there's a pattern okay it's a blitz and if you don't know how to handle a blitz it doesn't matter how smart you are and what a fine human being you are etc you could be Andrew but the truth is if you don't know how to handle it you're in trouble and so there's ways to do it and so and and so let me I could just give you a few things the some of the the beautiful words that you can give to people as you can say you're right okay I understand I hear what you're saying and you're right you know you totally have a point I just understand what's going on and so it doesn't matter if when they hear those words those are like magic words and so they start to settle down you start to break they're there they're sort of in a panic that they're not gonna get what they want and they're very angry and they feel incredibly righteous but if they hear that you're that there's something about what they're saying that you're saying that they're right it calms them down tremendously okay so as you're listening to them they will say something that's right okay they're not gonna say everything that is a distortion that's wrong so you listen for that and behind that you say you're right you've totally got a point let's see what I can do to help you okay boom we we take the wind out of the sails out of the anger as fast as we can okay so these are these are some of the techniques that we need to to acquire to learn how to run blitz to deal with blitzes once you understand what you're doing right now this person is probably just thinking on their feet feet they're using their instincts and their instincts are as a sensitive decent person when they're putting up with anger it's too much for them and so the these are situations that they want to avoid because they cause tremendous and confusion about how to say I manage it instead if you are going to get stuck in this job and this is actually something that you're going to need to learn how to do we cannot change your personality and turn you into hell and gold hammer we just can't it's not possible but what we can do is we can turn you into a quarterback that learns how to read a blitz and we can get you and you can once you understand what it is that you're going to do you're gonna want to do those things and now the next time you see it coming you'll actually be a little bit excited about watching a coming it's like here it comes and now I'm going to this in order to defuse it okay flattery reassurance explanation and of course they've got a point and yes something definitely needs to be done okay I I will do everything I can to help you okay these in other words what you having is you're starting to make sure that they understand it's not them against you it's you and them against the problem okay and that problem may be your company in your company's policy so it's like oh god they're people in accounting all I don't know I don't know what we're gonna do about this but let me see if I can help you okay it's us against them so when you start to use these kinds of techniques these are ways that we can defuse that anger and once you see that the anger is diffused very consistently in people when you use these kinds of ideas then it turns out that this won't be so upsetting you'll be somebody that knows how to read a blitz okay in fact it won't even be it won't even be that difficult so that's the we can't change you you're going to have some adrenaline and some degree of stress over these things because it doesn't fit your personality but if we can't get around it what we can do is we can get you very very good at managing this specific challenge with essentially by learning and understanding how the human being works on the other side but human being on the other side that's that's at most fundamentally feels like they've been treated unfairly it is the inference of unfairness that drives the emotion of anger anger is in fact the emotion that is a signal to the nervous system that it's been treated unfairly what it is then doing is it's actually threatening anger is a threatening anger is a threatening constellation the the human being gets bigger it sits up it expands itself that looks larger these are all it raises its voice everything about it is part of an animalistic violence threat and of course if you're on the other side of this and you don't have any axe to grind all you are is standing in the way a of someone who is very upset this can be very intimidating unless you're Alan at which point you're not intimidated at all okay and so the and so what we want to do is we want to essentially develop a psychological judo where we understand that we're not going to use force with force that's going to do nothing other than escalate the situation we're essentially going to turn turn their own momentum and just guide them exactly where it is that we want to put them which is to have them understand listen I'm with you that doesn't sound fair to me at all let me look into this you've got a point you're right about that let me see what it can be done okay if you essentially flood them with data that says I hear you and it absolutely it sounds to me like you've been treated you know like like things are not right something needs to be done if we do this then this is how it is so we're going to diffuse situations like this so obviously there may be other trainings that you have there made limitations about what is that you can say but what we do need to do is to be triangulating on how it is to diffuse the most fundamental mechanism which is the latent aggression and anger that is trying to threaten you because they feel like they've been treated unfairly okay so one of the words that I use is not only your right but also you know I you know I need to be fair I want to be completely fair that may or may not be appropriate in this person's particular professional situation but other situations where come up in my professional life where people are upset and I've had to say listen I need to be totally fair and I intend to be completely fair with you okay that relaxes them on the other side because it's not an us versus then comment it's actually a collaborative kind of a signal so anyway these are this is how we do it this is how to handle a blitz in any form and and we do so by preparation repetition and understanding of the dynamics if we do that then you can survive it that's wonderful and I'm sure over currently with this you know the the pandemic situation I talked to a cashier at the local grocery store and they were expressing to me how how many frustrated customers are coming in just because the new new situations going on in stores and it's just you know a little bit of a stressor for the most disagreeable people will lash out and so hopefully this will help a lot of these people in these customer service situations yeah I'll just add add to it that there are particular challenges for the agreeable nervous system here which this person almost certainly is so this this question is very reminiscent of Doug has heard some of my stories of my days working at Starbucks which was not that long ago a couple years ago and I the way that this questioner describes getting into the sort of escalated spiral this sort of like you can't even quite it's all you hear is static in your head you can't you can't kind of deal in the moment because you're feeling this overwhelming anxiety and fear with the situation I I think I wound up putting some of what he's talking about into practice just sort of accidentally not realizing the theory behind it but I would do it in a very sort of passive aggressive way and I would feel myself sort of seething with anger I was like oh I'm so sorry I guess I should really look into that for you you're absolutely right and inwardly I was just like you know every every sort of bad word that you could imagine and I would get really really escalated about it and this kind of thing had really strong physical tells like I would get very adrenalin my heart would be really racing I would I would feel really sort of have this almost out-of-body experience with it so that would be the first cue that you're you know you're not triggered here not hashtag triggered from some psychodynamic childhood fear which is what I thought at the time was going on I'm like oh I mean reminded of my abandonment issues because this customer is being mean to me no that's not with what's going on what is going on it particularly for an agreeable person is that this is a this is a battle for who's the bigger victim so the the person on the other end of the register is saying that they've been treated unfairly and that they're a victim and you know that that's not true because you weren't able to do what needed to be done you're not empowered by corporate and you can't do what you need to do and and if they understood that they wouldn't be coming after you like this so if you if you put exactly what Doug is talking about into practice and you and you turn it against them the first thing you have to do is kind of tune in like oh I'm feeling this physical tell that I'm all escalated and triggered by this so I'm essentially perceiving that I'm being victimized in this situation is that actually true am I really being victimized and just kind of check yourself before you wreck yourself and take that moment before you just lash back out at them and then you can turn the energy around more authentically on them instead of it being this you know nasty passive-aggressive mess yeah another little aspect of this that I didn't didn't to mention is that whenever possible you want to blame somebody else bruh yeah this is blame Lilly all the way okay so this is you know if you're in I don't know if you're in production you bring blend counting if you're in accounting you blame production if you're in either if you're not in either one of those you blame management whatever you find we're all whatever that refers on before I want to blame the lawyers right yeah always blame my lawyers always blame the buyers that's right and so this is you know finding out who it is that you're gonna blame allows you to quickly agree and appease and yet you don't necessarily have to give ground because the the line that goes with big Lilly is gee I wish I could but I can't it's totally fair you've got you completely have a point I understand what you're saying and I wish I could do something about it I can't do it okay that that takes the edge off of their anger they understand they've been heard and that they understand that they're seen as a victim and that it's and that you see the fairness but there's nothing you can do about it I wish so much I could I just can't understand etc these are this is what I would tell guys by the way in prison so I would have guys that would would come to me and that they were in a serious bind that the prison gang was telling them they had to put a knife in somebody and they they didn't know what they were gonna do like they were they were in a serious bind about you know they didn't want to commit another crime or be involved in it they didn't want to be in the gang etc but at the same time they're under tremendous pressure they're under a lot of threat and so what we would try to do is exactly this I mean this is where blaming big Louie was literally born in my repertoire was how is it that we're going to take the edge off of the other person's anger and the way we're gonna take the edge off believe me it isn't that we are going to make the gangs okay with it they're not going to be okay with it they just need to be 10% less angry than they are if they are a hundred percent angry and we get defiant or tell them to get lost or whatever it is that's that's very dangerous but if we have some possible big Louie that we can blame that's what we do and so very often we might have used religion so we might have used I made a promise to God that I would never do this or be there to their mother okay so their mother and God were my two favorite vana big Louie's with my guys in the prison okay uh and so this is a way for them to say you know I really wish I could but I swore to my mother that I I would just not do something like this and they'd be like well we're gonna they'll threaten the daylights out of you they're threatening the daylights out of you they're snarling at you they're swearing to you that you're you spent your last week on earth okay but the bottom line is you say if it is it is you know I hear you you're right you know this is yeah you're you guys are in charge I know this but something I'm supposed to do but I really wish I could I can't I just can't do it when they see that they realize wow there's some internal moral high-ground that the guy is not arguing with me about what's right it's just that they can't so this is a super important distinction about what's fair okay I'm saying it's totally fair you're right you know I'm saying you you I don't know you gave me a new pair of shoes last year and said it doesn't wasn't gonna cost me anything and now I'm supposed to bump somebody off on the prison yard that you guys don't like okay and so I understand that it's totally fair and I should do this for you and I wish that I could do it for you and I want to do it for you but I can't do it for you because I swore to my mother that I wouldn't okay this is the very very thin veil of insulation that a guy might have it might be the difference between him surviving we're getting dragged into a mess that he's never gonna get out of and so this is the same kind of a thing that we use in conflict situations like this we find a big Louie we find an excuse we agree with them all the way down the line we understand we agree we understood they deserve they've got a point there right etc I wish I could but I can't okay so even a a steamrolling you know completely out of control nutjob we keep feeding to them that they're right that they've got a point we see it their way it's we wish we could but we can't if we do that they will they will calm down so hopefully this is a you know just a little a little set of instructions on for this individual and anybody else about how you give anybody bad news about anything whenever you get people bad news like the dogs we tell them we wish you we wish you could but you can't and that's the best you know that's the it may not be totally satisfying it's not like they're gonna be fine and shrug their shoulders to say okay but the issue is they're going to take it's gonna take an edge off of their anger and that's the biggest thing that we need to see yeah and then they take it to your manager who submarines you yeah that's right that's fine that's fine that's what the managers for surely exactly but that is also something that in your position with your personality you need to like train and not taking personally like that's that that's the chain of command that's the that's how it's supposed to go disagreeable czar going to escalate to that point where you don't just don't be too attached to your your particular outcome with that customer you're just a cog in the grater complaint machine dr. Lisle would you say that and dr. hawk would you say that every time the person escalates them to say I want to talk to the next supervisor is that one standard deviation of disagreeable yeah very very good yes sir right on target Nathan yeah alright our next question does the fear that has gripped the u.s. qualifies clinical mass hysteria or since it has been driven by poor health statistics and media reporting is it justifiable I don't know if it's justifiable it certainly is it's explainable like it makes it makes sense that this is happening I don't know if there's such it I don't think there's such a thing as clinical mass hysteria are you as an actual psychologist I just played one on TV Doug doesn't know other thing yeah I don't think that's that's there's certainly activity that resembles something that we would call mass hysteria happening in sort of a political sense like I think that's a fair accusation and it's absolutely being driven by an informational free-for-all so and and people you know who have listened to me rant about this in various forms know that I blame social media for a lot of this sort of the fact that we live in this post fax post authority post credentials kind of world where everybody with a Twitter account gets to be an expert and so there's there's a lot of there's just a lot of different interpretations of reality a lot of them are being delivered with with great authority and conviction and people are very confused about who to believe and and again we're seeing it filtered through personality where people who are more prone to believe conspiracy theories are going to attach themselves to experts that are proposing conspiracy theories to explain things and people who are more prone to being fearful and stressed out and and Vince that everybody needs to stay at home until we have a absolute zero death count they're going to be attached to confirmation bias in that direction so I I think the the first thing is with that question is to again just kind of interrogate whether it's accurate or not I I don't think there is a wholesale fear gripping the United States I think there's a lot of fear gripping a lot of people who are sort of predisposed to being fearful but I think there are a lot of people who are not very fearful at all the people who are stormy in the state house in Michigan are not very fearful the people who are who are the disagreeable extroverts that are sort of driving that campaign and and who are you have had enough already and our hashtag open America those are not people who are gripped by fear so so you're watching some part of the bell curve that is and they they are having that psychological experience in some part because of the information that they've exposed themselves to but it's it's a combination of the information that they're exposed to along with the predispositions and their personalities so I don't think particularly now that this whole thing has mapped so perfectly on to this pitched partisan battle that we're going to be watching unfold for the rest of the election season we're not we're not gonna get to some kind of consensus about what the truth is there it's just not going to happen there there's too much competition in in the informational space and there's too many incentives for the for the struggle to continue happening and for people to continue grandstanding and and making declarations and doubling down in alignment with whatever flavor of false information that they've chosen to to to support I just apologize to listeners for the crazy background noise on this particular podcast we're just doing one track with one mic and so we can't edit it out and we're in the room with the dog steward occasionally announcing themselves I can tell you that the dogs are not gripped by mass hysteria but they're doing just fine so yeah this is it's it's personality meets environment all the way down yeah I think actually occurs to me that I just had an example come to mine of a just how do politics aside just the extraordinary differences in personality about with respect to threat and and that is that I've got a friend of mine that is so so Punch interests and fastidious that she basically does not want to ever drive just doesn't want to drive if she gets into a car like she knows in theory how to drive but even backing out of drive way she's thinking about people that she could be hitting even though she can look at the plain street behind her and see that there's nobody there so this sounds to us like it's quote crazy but it's not crazy this is a normal completely high functioning you know reasonable looking human that if you taught her you've realized wow this verse is pretty smart pretty interesting very productive does excellent work for her boss and yet super careful and worried about backing her car up out of a driveway contrast that with Marit Mario Andretti's son Michael okay who would speed through Pasadena and blow away the little old lady in other words no problem going doing 170 miles an hour down down an open street so these are the the vast disparities of risk tolerance depending upon you know domain so the the corona situation is absolutely as Jenn has said which I stole the other one day by the way on ages thing I called it the big Rorschach test that's dope but that's what it is as Jen said this is a beautiful Rorschach test what is which is now completely you know essentially entwined in also political issues one of the things that I think is a little bit ironic it is that that just to give people a little step back with the political implications of this is that just ironically because we happen to have the president that we do and we have the situation that we do it turns out that the right is now all about hey let's let's let everybody do what they want okay which is of course exactly what they don't feel about when it comes to terminating pregnancies but physical sovereignty right of course so in other words there's it isn't like this there's no there's no principle involved here yeah this just happens to be who's siding on what side of the problem so if you happen to be on the left you're all about let's put our masks on and everybody be responsible now ironically if we if we hop across the pond we see Sweden who is then notoriously essentially socialistic and have a very peaceful kind of a socialistic ish society they're not socialists but they're they're a European socialist is what they are which is it which is a model for our political left when our political left talks about socialism they're not talking about the socialism of the USSR they're talking about Northern European left-wing admits that's what and it's a it's highly respected and valued in our political left and that's where they think America ought to be except they wouldn't want America right now to be doing what the Swedes are doing that would be a terrible political you know crime etc so we're seeing that the views here that are coming out the fact that they're highly politically tinged and charged makes no sense with respect to the facts that are on the table these are these are arbitrary and it has to do with particular political issues the truth of the matter is as we find in those things is we have uncertainty sitting in the middle of a mess so it appears that the mess is not nearly as bad as everybody feared but the the mess is now looking like it's a bit worse than the best-case scenario was looking two or three weeks ago but one thing that for people that I have a lot of people that talked to me about wanting me to do an update tonight but I'm not going to do it but I do want to point something out that remains almost completely undiscussed in the media and that is that the vast majority of victims everywhere are over 70 years old and most of them most likely case would be that you would be over 85 the next most likely case would be that you would be between 75 and 85 people that are 75 to 95 are the majority of the victims in the United States not by percentage by raw numbers people under 65 or a very small percentage of this issue and if you're under 55 your odds are extremely low of being a victim of Corona so I mean you may be a victim and be laid up for two weeks but you're you're not going to be a fatality so this is a country that that because of the political issues and yeah the the the uncertainties that remain remains on high alert with an awful lot of charged feelings about this and what we're going to find at the end of the day is the truth is in the muddy middle and it's in a place where that that perspective isn't getting a lot of reporting wonderful so yeah maybe hopefully in a future show we can kind of get an update maybe maybe in an upcoming show we get update and answer some of the other questions that have come in about some of the stats as well dr. Lyle sure yeah well by the way is one thing that irritates the daylights out of me is when I boot up and I try to learn about were Sweden's at and I see all kinds of big headlines about how terrible it is in Sweden and how it's all falling apart how it was a terrible mistake there is nothing of the kind like that going on in Sweden Sweden is doing very well in this epidemic and and and incidentally the head guy in charge had a beautiful interview that I read here in the last two days he said let me talk about a non-politician he said I'm not sure we did the right thing what a mensch in other words he's saying hey if it turns out that the evidence shows that we're making a mistake then we'll change course we have to be open to the fact that there may be new information we couldn't we can't possibly do that any other way the reason why we did it the way we did it is because based on the information and I had at the time I believe that this would be the best course of action and quite frankly the data is supporting him very well but I loved the fact that he has the humility as a scientist and a public servant to actually recognize that he might be wrong and it is not never too late to put the genie back in the bottle you can always go at any point at whatever expense and change direction if you need to and so this is a remarkable country doing a remarkable thing behind a remarkable man so hey we'll see we'll all learn from it that is not a display that you're gonna see in American politics you're not gonna see it I mean the left to be very quick to say well that Trump would never admit if we can talk about something but neither would gavin newsom like no nobody in American politics American politicians are not rewarded for intellectual honesty and humility it is not this is this is sort of a bonus of parliamentary democracy that we don't have here so yeah that's where we're gonna push each other to extremes and we're gonna double down even if it means hoping for the worst-case scenario all right Nathan let's see what else we got all right we got one more question and this is a topic that it seems to be a very interesting topic for a lot of listeners and dr. Hawke wound out on it yesterday so hi they're doctors we're very interested to hear about some of the theory around self-esteem resonated very strongly with me in the current situation as I definitely struggle without meaningful work I was wondering if you would be able to develop on this and perhaps the role of status in an anxious mind well there's a I'm not sure that everything in that comment is necessarily clearly related I think I see the relationships the the the theory of self-esteem that I don't know one of these days I don't ever want to change the way I've got things defined and you and I'll be talking this over as we write our book but what people the term people use self-esteem they're confuse it with the what is the phenomenon of self-confidence and self-confidence and self-esteem are in my judgment they are interrelated but they are completely different there are very different things self-esteem is the the internal audiences judgment of your effort now a self-esteem is effectively a moral it's an internal moral code is what it is the self-confidence is your perceived probability of success with respect to some endeavor you know worth worth seeking I used the example last week on the podcast of preparing your house for a big party whether in you and I and had talked about that at some point so you've got self-confidence if you're having a big party that your house is clean and everybody's coming over and it'll be fine but you've shoved everything in the closet and under the bed your internal audience is very upset with you whereas if you had had spent the day doing very careful work and cleaning things up even if your house is not yet quite presentable yourself it seems very high even if your self-confidence that the house is presentable is not that high right yeah there you go great so that's a that's a great way people can keep it straight yes the now so let me get back to the person thinking that that in in the what do you call this thing the lock down so the lock down may be what they're saying is is that they're struggling without meaningful work which means that they're not the self-esteem issue it's more complicated because you've actually got three different important feeling dynamics that are involved in human action one of them is self-esteem in other words the internal monitor of your own moral code second is your self-confidence which is your perceived probability of success in a display and third is the feeling of getting esteem from other people which is actually the loudest most important feeling that goes off inside of human beings in other words so if you're not working you're not getting esteem signals feedback from other people if you're not actually trying to do anything productive at all with your life your self-esteem mechanism is tapping its foot rolling in size and is feeling disgusted with you okay your self-confidence mechanism is only relevant with respect to whatever target targets that you're pursuing as goals so the so what I would say is if you don't have anything to do and you are feeling the lack of a steam in your light because you're not getting any productive interplay between other individuals signaling to you that you're valuable then one of the things that you can do and should do is work diligently at the deep cleaning of your life whatever that is get in shape clean out the garage you know I'm saying get rid of a bunch of extra clothes that you don't need organize your taxes there's plenty to do most people's lives are behind there one of the reasons they're behind is because there there's there never seems to be a correct cb4 establishing deep order a lot of times a business just gets into business if you're just opening a taco stand and you sort of know what you're doing pretty soon you just do things willy nilly that seem to work well enough and fourteen years later you're still doing it that way and it's not as efficient as it could be because it turns out it was never really thought that well through at the beginning so things weren't organized that well if you don't have any tacos to sell right now and so you know you aren't getting esteem signals from the world for your productive activity what you can do is you can organize your whole taco stand so that when you reopen that your life is better and more efficient and more effective so I have many people that continue to call us trying to get their act together with respect to food etc etc well this is a perfect time for example one of the most important things that you can do is actually organize your kitchen pantry freezer menu lists etc so that you can have a continuous stream of healthy food that is organized you go get your Tupperware containers organize get little labels essentially if you have struggled with this this is a perfect time to establish outstanding order in an area of your life that has been sort of chaotic and inefficient it could be in other areas as well it could be a time for you to take a little visit to fasting escape yeah ban away from all time that fast escape where we make fasting a little less miserable there you go there you go that's a great slogan so so anyway yeah this is a perfectly good time to there'd be no reason for your self esteem to do anything other than be a strengthened and enhanced in a situation like this if you are without quote things to do and demands from the world hunker down and do things that your internal audience is aware will be effective and useful for you long term even though this is this is the time when your your whole psychology is is stacked against you and telling you that the next best thing to do for your genetic survival is anything other than clean up your taco stand its to go eat the tacos it's to go to go like avoid competition and we talked about this last week as well so this the this whole thing only works if you really recognize at a deep level the the innate rewards of tapping into the self-esteem mechanism which is a very subtle process and it's very unless you've kind of lived there a little bit it's hard to remember that it really is its own reward to get the attaboys from the internal audience but that is something that you just kind of have to you have to trust us when we tell you that that's a worthwhile emotion to experience and then you have to find out for yourself that that is true yes you have no I mean what do you have to lose a couple hours in a clean a clean closet yeah yeah yeah well what's what's interesting about all this is that what's pushing against you is energy conservation right and so there's if you realize that you you've just been handed a massive excuse as to why it is that you just get to stay inside and do not much of anything and and essentially your view and the rest of the world has been given a free pass this is a this person may be feeling some anxiety and essentially feeling some low-grade tension but they're not doing enough productive activity and they're leaving some risk factors on the table this is a perfectly good time to actually do the deep-clean watch your self-esteem respond to it for its own sake and put yourself in a better position to essentially lead a better life at the other end now this is only going to go on for so long folks whether it's you know whether it's a few weeks or a few months this this entire fiasco that we are dealing with here is going to be over and when it's over life is going to return very much to this normal that it did before so anybody that's dreaming about that things are going to be dramatically different a year from now is completely up this this is uh this is going to return to a great deal of normalcy and when it does we want to be just that much better prepared for the new season
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