Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 232: Sugar babies, appearance and personality, unconditional love, homelessness
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


all right uh dear doctors uh i'm devout listener here thank you for all the ways you're helping make uh you're helpful to me in my work and personal life i'm writing about a 19 year old female on my mind she went off to her first year of college last year she confided in me recently that she and a friend joined a sugar baby website back in the fall to just see what it was like quote not for the money although i guess that's the model of a sugar relationship she met someone on her first date through the website who fell in love with her and loved her depth as a person as she says and now wanted to be exclusive well this 19 year old wants to explore this and over some time believed that she had finally found someone to love her she says it is not about the sex and that he loves what's inside of her i believe however by this point it has turned physical as she goes to visit and stay with him the man told her at the beginning he was 54 but i googled him and learned that he was even a few years older than that so older than her father in any case alarm bells are going off for me here i am her birth mother we are in an open adoption arrangement i'm 38 so younger than her mom and someone she confides in no other adults know about this but i'm curious is this normal developmentally and i should just let it play out or is this something that's out of bounds and i may need to intervene more assertively can't wait to hear what you think well jen do you want who gets to take it uh well that that sounds like a you question let me let me defer to you since i i got the i got the deference earlier with the all right um i would say this that there's sort of a reason why we we have a legal age of 18. [Music] the what we want to do is we want to uh we want to respect the fact that young people when they when they turn of age they get to do what they want to do now in this case i think the question is a good one just because we we start to feel when there's a large age discrepancy when it's older men coming after younger women and the women are are that young they're uh we start to feel the um we feel the exploitation uh factor sort of looming over it so does the does the young lady sort of understand what's going on what she's getting into uh etc and i think that's why drawing the line at 18 is wise we can really see for example in times past when we didn't have these rules 16 is is a person that is not sufficiently mature to really understand the ramifications too well of what on earth is happening 19 pretty substantially different okay so the um now obviously if you're a parent or you're someone that cares about someone like this you certainly want to warn them about most specifically you want to warn them about or just sort of let them know to take care about pregnancy you don't want an unwanted pregnancy substantially complicating derailing or otherwise messing with your life uh that that would be a major issue the the the nature of a sugar-type relationship just in general independent of the pregnancy i don't really see any issue with it all this is a young person that has a little bit of a wild streak she is discovering her power in the heterosexual arena she understands as women largely do intuitively and genetically that that males are a source of resources protection and provisioning and so as a result you know she's she's playing with this in what is probably a very safe sort of a situation um as long as we as we kind of keep the underlying like my temptation to quote intervene would be pretty well limited i believe to pregnancy and uh and to basically say listen uh this is this is just not a road you want to go down you need to think about that very carefully whether whether the whether the person is 58 years old or whether they're 28 years old or whether they're 19 be careful because you know unwanted pregnancies in in unstable relationships early in life or in any time of life are a tremendous cost and a tremendous burden depending upon you know how one feels about abortions and everything else under the sun but uh but anyway that's how i feel about it otherwise i would exercise the restraint about common uh any kind of negative suspicious protective commentary about this i'd stay out of that and let her find her own way but with with the understanding that there needs to be an underscore about uh about pregnancy i think that's the biggest thing that i would be concerned about and i'm open for jen's thoughts on this issue yeah it i mean it's very it echoes what we were talking about last week with let them run their own show um and you do have to draw that line somewhere um and you know you you happen the questioner the the birth mother by the nature of the relationship that you have with her you happen to know a little more about what's going on in her life than um a lot of daughters will share with their with their parents or with anyone in their life and i think it's a pretty normal whether it's through a sugar baby site or just ill-advised online dating or ill-advised dating of any variety that happens in uh early in one's life and throughout one's twenties most of the time this is just a uh it's part of the calibration process it's very unlikely that she this is going to be forever that she's going to you know be with this guy forever and ever and and that this is her soul mate um i could be but it's as this it sounds like it's her first serious relationship if she's saying things like she finally found someone to love her at the ripe old age of 19. um and so i would just kind of sit back and wait for it to you know run its course just like any relationship would with someone of that age and realize that you just happen to know some details that you know she's confiding in you as a peer more than as a parent but you're reacting as a parent um and this is the kind of thing that most 19 year olds are not going to be necessarily super upfront with their with their parents with um so yeah i think everything that doug said pretty much holds um with the with the concern about pregnancy as well although you're in a little bit of a vulnerable position because you were a young mother yourself and so she can you know she can very much turn that back around and be like oh well you're one to talk but that's where you sort of say well i you know learned my lesson without accusing her of being a mistake you know it's kind of a tough line to walk we're saying you know that that this is maybe not something that would be optimal for her even though you you of course don't regret having her at all so um a little tricky but uh but i would just be aware of those dynamics if you bring that up as an issue wonderful great thank you dr hawk and dr lyle you notice that the the order there we're back yeah yeah let's keep that up that's it again finally things are as they should be around here it's about time all right that's right all right so dear doctors is there any way to spot people on extreme ends of the bell curve by their appearance with recent news i've come across comments on how derek shovin had dead cold lifeless scary eyes and recall similar commentary on other extreme types of individuals perhaps it has to do with sensitivity and some people could have an intuitive way of recognizing red flag characteristics whether in physical structure form or expression is there any validity or basis to this and any evolutionary explanation well i'm not you know doug is probably more up on the literature specifically on this kind of thing and i know that there there is one to some degree um i think a lot of this is uh a little overstated just because people are you know you're essentially all humans are making correlations and associations all the time that's really what we do and how we move through life and so it's it's um we're we're just the the representativeness heuristic of you know sort of associating someone with lifeless eyes who um the the person that um the questioner is asking about is the um the police officer who uh murdered george floyd so that's that's uh someone that we would accuse of having cold lifeless eyes uh in retrospect but whether if you met him in a in a bar a couple of weeks before and you were hanging out with him and he was just a friend of a friend if he would have made the same observation about him is is less clear so we can retrospectively kind of look at people and certainly look at people in their mug shots or you know look at people when they're under some sort of stress and they have a certain kind of uh certain kind of little characteristics to their appearance that we associate with certain traits which i think is a lot of we're just looking for patterns where there aren't necessarily patterns but there are some things that are are markers so um you know i know in the political science literature and and i'm sure others that the more testosteronized cues you know sort of more stronger faces stronger brows more chiseled faces those those things are very much associated with certain kind of testosteronized personality characteristics that lead to more successful political candidates for example um and so you you will i mean there definitely are inferences that we're drawing from looking at faces about their what kind of personality they are how fertile they are all kinds of things all kinds of little pieces of information that we're um working with at any given time but we have to be careful to not let that turn into personality phrenology yes and i think kind of you know there is a way in which we can um in infer meaning where there is none but i i think there is there's definitely some meaning sometimes yeah yeah yeah i think the other other things other oh yeah just i'm thinking also like other personality characteristics that are going to show up in appearance or you know very low conscientiousness if somebody's not taking care of themselves or has sort of a disheveled or um you know very very high emotional instability is also going to have a have sort of a visual imprint with it so of course people on the extremes of those spectrums are going to have interpersonal markers and self-presentational markers but whether whether you could identify those out of context of watching their behavior i'm not i'm not sure that you always could yeah the i think all things jen's talking about and when you think about people and if we tie this in with with jeffrey miller people are a lot of times advertising they're trying to tell you who they are and so as a result you know the clothes they wear how they wear them jewelry hair um all these all these things are are part of it but if you're trying to just figure out you know whether or not the person that you're looking at at the bar is just a handsome tough tough guy or whether he's a sociopath yeah you're gonna have a hard time figuring that out uh chatting with the character the um that being said i have seen uh some of the worst most sociopathic people alive and i can pick it up okay but that's because they were locked down for life sentences in state prison okay and they they uh but they are clearly they are not at the 99th percentile they're 99.99 and when you're interacting with some of those people they are so oddly shifty uh it isn't that they're necessarily cold they can they could fool you uh superficially because they can be cheerful and they can be smiling and and friendly and asking you questions and and acting like they're like everything's jake and the truth of the matter is if you if you watch them carefully and you get to know them a little bit you can see an amazing calculus that they're running that they're actually they are very cold but you could miss it so just the notion of the sort of cold-blooded uh non-reactive face killer um i've seen a few of those but the the ones that i've seen that are uh and but those are obvious i mean you have you have uh this guy the the guy whatever this officer was i'm sure he was not that so i've uh whether whether he's got a coldness to him in other words he's got a high disagreeable quotient low empathy etc is you know that's a whole different issue but it's unlikely that he's the kind of individual that i've seen so i've seen i've seen some pretty cold-blooded people that were hit men for mafias and and some of them are cold some of them are cheerful and you would never have any clue so the uh so yeah what jen is saying is yeah there's correlations but don't you try to read them you know get to know people nice and slowly and if you divorce i mean the question is really about appearance characteristics like if you divorce all behavioral cues from appearance i'm not sure you're going to pick up much at all because even what you're talking about in the prison with a 99.9 percentile sociopaths like those guys if you just saw a photo of them on facebook you wouldn't know you wouldn't pick it up you would never know so yeah it's the flatness it's the it's the the empty the icy emptiness of the smile it's like these things that you you pick up in her personally um that are just give you that little spidey sense but they're not they're not purely physical characteristics i think the only physical characteristics you're gonna pick up are things that are um i mean they're definitely are i think there would be a very high correlation with uh testosteronized features and disagreeableness for example so like you're gonna you're gonna see um certain things that are in informed by those those hormonal effects and actual like the physiological process but not not to the point of being able to type anybody on the big five just by taking a quick flash picture of them totally complete agreement sounds like sounds like people are trying to get more efficient just like yeah sure there's going to be a hyper normal stimuli of yeah imagination some some kind of uh skeleton key trick but uh no i think we i think we know that it's it's basically um uh it is basically you know it's always interesting how much more informative you know 10 seconds of video is than a still oh yeah yeah and you can trust i mean because of the degree to which we are advertising our personality for good and ill all the time with our behavior um i think you you generally can trust your inferences when you're interacting with somebody and you're picking up those things so um that's going to be pretty pretty truthful um mug shots maybe not as much right there you go all right all good nathan all right our next question uh dear doctors i keep noticing current references to quote unconditional love some in spiritual circles some in philosophy some in the news people supposedly suddenly want new pets for the unconditional love that they are missing in isolation taking ketamine or psilocybin supposedly gives the subject a reference experience of unconditional love so then they can go on to cultivate that perception and achieve a new state of consciousness etc i have looked for a long time and i have not yet found any loving bonding service caring sharing etc without some kind of conditions behind it and wouldn't loving looking behavior be determined by the big five and not by altered not be altered by a transcendent experience what does evolutionary psychology say about this well i i'll let doug tear that one apart just destroy some illusion it's like raw me to a hyena yeah folks uh i'll state unequivocally there's no such thing as unconditional love okay that is a that is actually a uh it's a it's a biological impossibility and a psychological impossibility so let me explain so at the most at the center of this is a concept of discrimination so your nervous system is actually designed to discriminate uh so by by having a different sensory experience when you touch something warm versus touch something cold you have discriminated between two surfaces or two to uh you know two contacts with the environment and you have discriminated the difference between the two okay so when you see anything you see a car sitting in a driveway you are discriminating the car from its from from the concrete that it sits on so the whole process of having a nervous system is the process of discrimination and the purpose of the discrimination is because different things in the environment different features of the environment have different impact on your gene survival so things that impact it positively your you respond positively towards things that impact it negatively you respond negatively towards so there's no such thing for example as having unconditional love for the environment really how about the dog crap that i'm going to shove down your throat you have a nice nice unconditional love for that how about ebola virus how about that you want that experience like obviously you can say well no no no no no well not that well then what okay how about jumping off a building and enjoying the feeling as you sail down down there ten stories etc what if you survive the impact unconditional love for that experience obviously not so anybody that's talking about incon unconditional love is they're selling a whole set of crap that it makes no sense whatsoever uh for various and sundry reasons some of it confused some of it is you know essentially a ruse for various and sundry ends of their own like i'm more enlightened than you there's a glock follow me you know and fund my fund my program here give me your life and you can stay in the basement and work on my farm okay so let's uh let's look at what this is so now we see that all of your experiences in life are about discrimination and love is actually a word we use that says underneath it this is something that i value highly okay it's a feeling that comes a good feeling that comes the reason you have good feelings is because we use that word good to describe a pleasant which is another word in other words it's a it's a motivating experience of the organism that it wants to repeat or enhance that stimulus event because those stimuli that are involved are actually increasing the statistical likelihood of gene survival for the organism or so it believes in other words it may be eating crap on its near-death bed you know it's eating a mcdonald's but it's nervous system believes that's the right thing to do because it's a super normal stimuli that's tricking it but forget about that an animal in its environment it it is attracted to certain characteristics of the environment those the reason it's attracted to those as opposed to other characteristics is that it can discriminate the difference between the two and so discrimination is going to be the key of what is that's going to determine the different uh evaluative reactions that the organism has all the way from um you know horrific experience and desire to avoid an escape i.e you're you're in the jaws of a great white shark and you're trying to get your leg out of there okay versus you are in the middle of sex with the most exciting partner that you've ever run into in your life and you ever thought you're ever gonna get that's the other side of it okay so we can run the gamut from you're damn near dead and it's going to be tough it's going to be an unpleasant death versus your you are your brain thinks you are reproducing with the coolest damn other set of dna in the universe okay so you would expect that's a subjective experience between those two things would be as radically different as you can imagine now which of those experiences do you quote love well we know what it is the love side of the equation is what do you value highly and why do you value it highly because it's statistically associated with gin survival so the notion that you could have uh and so for example your relationship with humans each relationship that you would have with any human or animal pet for that matter has a cost benefit analysis you can't interrelate with all of them you have to be selective about where you're going to spend your time and energy so as a result you're going to value some of them more than others okay discrimination and so what love is is a word that we use to say value very highly well that's a highly discriminating process unconditional love by definition is saying there's no conditions there there is no evaluative process there is no discrimination process i just it i just love it without any conditions at all there's no evaluation process how the hell is that possible the answer is it is not possible okay you can no more have unconditional love then you could have unconditional hate or unconditional anything truth is your feelings are always derivatives of a discrimination process so the uh unconditional love is basically uh i i think that you know by drugs somebody could activate the little chip that we can have in our head that that in a social situation in a village atmosphere we're in a moment in time in that village where there may have been great stress or great conflict between within the village or between the village and some threat from the outside there can be a tremendous feeling of relief that we are all we've all survived and we're all on the same page and we value each other greatly that's a feeling you could say it would feel like sort of an unconditional love because you could be hugging everybody in the village and crying and relief and all happy that we all survived the war but it's actually not unconditional the truth of the matter is those are people within the village as opposed to outside the village they're also anybody that you're hugging in those kinds of feelings some of them you're going to like better than others some of them are going to be old nemesis that at the moment we put the bygones aside so we could defeat the romans in other words there's a even within those experiences there's discriminations the overall experience that is possible for an organism taking into account a whole bunch of other parallel organisms experiences all of us feeling tremendous relief like oh our team just won the national title so we're all cheering madly okay why because it can be very exciting to have all the social inputs at once as we're mind reading and checking on everybody else's feelings and it's amplifying the experience for ourselves those can be exquisite intense feelings of positiveness in the organism but they are not unconditional love not even close it is it is absolutely discriminating it just feels like hey i don't feel any particular hate for anybody in this group right now at this instant but it's a very it's a short-term feeling of solidarity that human beings can have the notion that we can get that feeling and have it be this intense positive feeling and it could extend all animals people you know irs agents you got to be kidding me this is absurd so no forget it the irs agency yeah don't don't search for unconditional love it's a ludicrous concept don't think that anybody that says that they've gotten there has gotten there because they haven't if they have then you say oh well great my little kid just you know really really enjoys watching other people eat its crap so it's pooped right here in the diaper okay please how about if you do that because they really like it no i don't think i want to do that really well where is the unconditional love okay you see how ridiculous this is no this is just stupidity poor thinking manipulation and just trash no there's no such thing love is discriminating okay and and big love the most the most intense love there is is the most discriminating that there is okay so you may if you're fortunate have great love for one uh one or a few a very few individuals on this earth your love for them they are so highly valuable to you the notion that someone else is equally valuable to you creates an equivalent feeling in you is insulting and disgusting at its very core and so that's that's what i have to say uh about the principle of unconditional love i love it so cheerful thank you so cheerful so romantic lovely i i would i mean i've got you know i've got a much uh much more seriously online mystic chip and i am open to the idea i'm open to the idea particularly lately as um people who are following me know that i've been all obsessed with the the evolutionary argument against uh the fabric of reality put forward by by don hoffman and others which is all very fascinating little rabbit hole to go down but so like let's pause it let's let's let's assume let's say that it's possible uh with psychedelics or or by some sort of meditative means or some some other mystical process of some nature to attain that kind of state where you really are in a state of unconditional love for all things including including the the diaper full of poop and and it's all just bliss everything is bliss you're seeing through the true nature of reality and realizing that it's all just energy and it's all thought forms and blah blah whatever it is so i'm open to the idea that that is possible it is possible to have that sort of peak experience particularly with certain kinds of psychedelics it does not mean i recommend them doesn't mean i think that they're a good idea but i think people have had that experience but they haven't been able to carry it back with them to daily life like as soon as you come back into the matrix you're not able to maintain that peak experience like even if you're ram das so you know ram das goes to goes the top of the mountain and sits at the foot of his guru and has this blissful experience partly because of the mysticism partly because of the lsd um and is is not able to successfully convert that back into his daily life he's able to convert it into a sort of a brand um and you know moments of feeling like maybe he's sort of in touch with it and could get back to it um but and if if people are unfamiliar with who he is he's sort of the contemporary of timothy leary who is most famous for bringing eastern wisdom to the west he's he kind of gets the credit for that wrote a book called be here now in the 60s and um and and went on to have sort of a um a very tortured uh you know occasionally like like punctuated by moments i i do believe of great awareness and and great alignment with some sort of universal truth that he was in touch with that he had accessed during those trips and during those mystical experiences um but if you watch the documentary that was made of him after he had a stroke later in life um struggled massively with that struggled massively with the loss of his verbal ability very frustrated very you know had had a hard time later in his life and there's some evidence that the stroke you know some some thinking that the stroke was more likely because of all of the lsd that he did in his youth so um and you know some i think he had some partial regret about that so the point is even if you are even if you have access to that kind of experience even if you were someone like that who i it's hard to think of someone um that we could identify in the public sphere who is more enlightened than someone like ram das it doesn't you still have to live in the real world most of the time unless you just want to be high your entire life and that brings you back into the realm of um competition and discrimination and discernment and some things are better than others and nothing is unconditional so um yeah it's a bummer yeah i i would let me just just in case there's any confusion of course these things could be either naturally or unnaturally activated circuits in the brain under conditions where you will your nervous system is not aware of any negative any threats so a person sitting on the mountain in front of their guru you know in a state of bliss because they feel incredibly protected and they feel a tremendous sense of uh you know uh solidarity with the the the great teachers teachings and they they feel a a benevolent dominance coming from the other individual that can be very wash over you and really feel protected and safe and loving until the rattlesnake bites you okay at which point it all goes out the window so in other words these are these states they're talking about a peak experience this is meaningless crap okay the fact that you could manufacture a very short-term experience where you would feel you know the system could feel very good under fabulous idealized conditions and often does as when two people fall in love with each other the the truth is is that life is full of sensory experiences that are necessary to experience and constant need for discrimination between the positive and the negative as you're driving home from the greatest state in your great day in your life you've got to stay on the correct side of the road and if somebody who swerves towards you you are immediately threatened and anxious okay so yeah the so the the the concept that there were there's two different concepts one that jen's talking about which is that momentary experiences of course would be possible for the organism what do they mean oh i don't know they might be inherently interesting but they have no great meaning at all in philosophy they mean nothing but such an experience is in no way a target of an individual's life experience there's no way in other words you're not going to try to arrive there that is a an organism that would experience that is a highly dysfunctional nervous system that is destined for self-destruction it's the equivalent of a nervous system that is born without the ability to experience pain that is a dangerous highly destructive nervous system and those people die young and ugly looking deaths so the search for unconditional love as an experience that you could somehow naturally access in your mind is a total absurdity the the notion that you could get there momentarily in some state that feels like that but in fact is not that's actually a mischaracterization of the state that the person is it has nothing to do with unconditional love it is a feeling of being feeling not threatened and not in conflict with other people that is in the universe that is the state that you're in you're in a benign situation where you also may feel the submissiveness and the endorphin rush that comes with a a a a a situation of benevolent dominance which people will feel in church very often and they'll feel it in with church music uh there's many circumstances like that that can activate that feeling of benevolent dominance causes people to bow their head and feel very warm and loving and safe and protected and vulnerable it's an exquisite feeling but it's got nothing to do with unconditional love so anyway all right i think i buried that question that's enough and even even if you are even if you are a dodo bird wandering around completely attuned to unconditional love and you know you've you've burned out your circuits with lsd or whatever and you you are experiencing this all the time that is at odds with the fitness cues of the physical world so you're yeah you're gonna you're gonna run yourself extinct if that's how you're oriented so that is why that's why that we don't exist in that way so yeah it's it's it may and i i mean i will extend it further than doug does to the to the notion that it is possible to to attain that you know not not even through benevolent dominance but through through something that we don't understand like i i will allow for that possibility because i have a giant mystic chip right um but even if even if that is true it it doesn't it doesn't work in the real you still have to pay your taxes you still have to run your errands you still have to live in the physical world so unless you want to check out completely and well in the realm of the mystical but then that is completely incompatible with being attuned to the fitness cues of the physical world so yeah you gotta choose one i'll i'll let you live all right all right i wonder if these uh spiritual people have more unconditional love to their paying customers versus the nonprofit [Music] no no doubt very i mean something is always being sold so that is you know if there if there are two things there are two sort of axioms of life one is you know when in doubt look for the status and the other is follow the money like follow the status follow the money so who's selling something to you and what like to to what end what are they trying to gain from it financially and status wise and everything else and i think you're going to find in most cases of people selling you some story of a peak experience and access to it um or or to anything that would facilitate some constant state of unconditional love they're they're hitting both of those things the old guys are feeling unconditional love for the hot young followers at the ashram nobody saw that coming at all oh my god yeah we'll see whether or not i could run a correlation coefficient on any of that and see if there's how just unconditional it is because if it's unconditional their their behavior should be completely unpredictable in other words i should not be able to know which female they're hugging and for how long i'll bet you i can figure it out all right well speaking of peak experiences i had one a couple weeks ago i was listening to this song by this jimmy the guitar player called uh repeat it that was pretty fun that was that was pretty excellent all right what else do we have nathan all right our next question dear doctors my husband and my family members joke that i have an irrational fear of homelessness and logically i know it's unlikely that i will ever be homeless but that doesn't stop me from worrying about it on a weekly basis how does somebody become homeless and if in some imaginary reality you were charged with decreasing or eliminating homelessness by any means necessary what would you do [Laughter] well i happen to know that jen is like flooded down the yangtze river she's done she's she's got more tattoos than i'll ever have you know let's let's send the homeless question to jen that she said yeah well well yes i mean i i have been i put big quotes around the word homeless because i was i have been homeless but not i i have been houseless i will say more than homeless so i have never i have never been in a situation where i truly had nowhere in life to go there was always somewhere that if i needed to go i could couch surf i could i could crash with various people and even even in the depths of my crazy misspent youth so um i would say that this person this is really this is what we call the nature or what robert plummer calls the nature of nurture it's that kind of question that homelessness is not something that just befalls people um it is something that you wander your way into um through a intersection between personality characteristics and circumstance um and so the fact that this questioner is is worrying about becoming homeless on a weekly basis is telling us that you're you're sufficiently conscientious that it's unlikely that you're ever going to be truly homeless um the the sort of its own that's its own little test so there there are people you know i i don't believe that i would ever be truly truly homeless no matter how bad my luck got no matter how terrible my circumstances became because of the the sort of social connections and the personality features that i have so i'm highly agreeable um i i'm uh well i'm fairly conscientious i'm connected with people who value me like those those are things that can always be leveraged to um to down arrow your way if if if things were to get really bad if you were to lose your job uh what happens next whose basement do you move into and then what happens and then what happens in my case because i have sort of access to uh some external resources in the form of my community but also the internal resources in the form of my iq and my personality characteristics i have a fair amount of confidence that no matter what external circumstances were to befall me that i would not be in that situation but you can also think of people who no matter how good it is no matter what kind of access to resources and what you were to give them um that they would not be able to skillfully use those resources without without um being directed in some sort of uh some sort of more constructive way so um you know you could either all these there's this kind of notion this blank slate notion um that you know if we were just to house the world's homeless if we were just to give everybody an apartment then it would just be fine um and you know we we know from looking at people who've won the lottery and sort of other examples that personality the nature of nurture wins the day here like just because somebody gets a windfall and they have resources for one moment in their existence they sort of are going to return to the baseline of who it is that they are and how they're able to manage that um and uh and so there are people who no matter how you know great the circumstances were they're always going to kind of find themselves homeless very low conscientious very unstable very disagreeable um we could come up with some caricatured example of somebody who it would be almost impossible to put in stable uh housed circumstances in their life or you could you could be like my dogs and just like you know sort of be parasites and be housed because because of you're they're very cute and very agreeable um even though they're barking so so yeah i i think that the the it is an irrational fear for you to have it because it's not something that the universe is just going to deposit on you and there's nothing that you can do about it there you you have capacities just by the fact that you're here and you're asking this question and you're asking it in this way it tells me that you're you you were better equipped to manage that situation than other people might be um and i don't think that there's any sort of broad prescription um in in the in the second part of the question to eliminate homelessness by any means necessary i don't think there is any kind of broad policy prescription that we could come up with because people are individuals and it's not it's not purely a resource management issue as as the you know sort of blank slate policy makers like to think of it as yeah all fabulous the uh i would add um a few just a few little things that come to my mind and that is that sometimes the fear of that one is uh in the imagination of the hyperconscientious individual they of course don't see all the steps that it would take for them to actually get in those states and then once they're thinking about being in those states they're sort of feeling defenseless like it's this disaster and keep in mind that that that's a dynamic in other words okay well so you're homeless so big deal truth is is that your job you can be homeless all animals all over the world are homeless so all you really need is to not die of exposure which you just need a jacket that's being thrown out of the back end of a salvation army that's not a problem and then we just need some food which there's there's plenty of food in a mcdonald's trash can it's not a problem at all so what is the problem the problem is temporary and it's a problem of inconvenience okay so at that point it's like okay well it may be you may be in tough circumstances temporarily but but you know you're going to have time you're not going to starve to death you're not you're not going to be out out of gas in three days with nothing nothing to do about this and as as you know you've got assets of some kind you can trade with other individuals uh various and sundry you know efforts and sell your hair to you know a cancer place or whatever it is in other words sell your blood like what can we do answer there's a lot a great deal you can do um i've done i've done those things okay very well volunteer to go get on the list at the at the psychology lab that's doing weird experiments you know that's that's right yeah those are those not a uh yeah not a very good not a very good index for making a living but definitely can get you through a tough moment there's always um the when i was really down on my luck you can always get a job as a street canvasser maybe not now in a post-covered world but you know the people who come up to you and ask you know do you care about the environment or do do you care about do you care about animals or do you care about you know it's like you always the the first thing they teach you in canvas in school is you ask a question that people have to say yes to right oh that's interesting yeah the uh i i i long ago god this is this conversation brings back something that takes me back you know more than 30 years uh that alan and i goldhammer and i used to have conversations of this you know these bizarre kind of conversations and um and i remember us thinking he was thinking what a great game show it would be to have people just let loose in the environment no credit cards no social security number you just dump them down in the middle of kansas city you know and it's like okay what are you gonna do how's it gonna work out for you in the next month and thought that it would be a fascinating thing uh just what would you do if you didn't have any credentials no resume et cetera and i remember thinking i remember we talked about it remember thinking alan is so so you know sort of relentless and knows how to sell and just so i thought you know what i would take allen over steve jobs or bill gates in that contest if i if you if you had to go no credentials no connections nothing and alan goes yeah all i take myself against anybody zero to a hundred thousand dollars you know i would i wouldn't take allen and the gambit about trying to who can make 100 million first because that's a that's a different level of skills and risk-taking etc but zero to a hundred thousand yeah just relentless you know find what other people are are what are they willing to give up for you they're always willing to give up something for you to do something and then pretty soon alan's got six people doing it for him and he's taking the brokerage and there it is oh yeah this is mona this is i mean this is monetizing your personality yes and monetizing what you have to offer in the village i can't tell you how many times i would have been jobless and houseless and in some city i didn't know and yeah you just wander into a bar and strike up a conversation because i'm an agreeable extrovert so it's like i just pretty soon i i start talking to somebody and i mention that i'm looking for work and they're like oh well hey you know i'm we could use somebody and no we're renting out our basement and it's just it's these things just emerge from the ether um and it's dozens of times i got myself in that kind of situation and i and you know came to sort of have this unshakable sense of self self-efficacy with it where it's like oh yeah i can i can spin gold from air like it's possible it can be done and so you know i just never feel completely stuck no matter how bad it gets but that's that's coming to terms with what i have to offer the village what my personality how my personality can be leveraged to get me out of a difficult position and that's going to be it's going to look very different for me than it does for alan who's you know much more sort of masculinized and slightly coercive about it well said oh my all right nathan i think that's right maybe we're good huh absolutely that thank you both very much um had some fun discussions sugar babies sugar daddies you know unconditional love life that's true that's always an option too if you keep you out of homelessness go register on a sugar baby you may have to get in advance though i [Laughter] my guess all right very good well thank you guys so much we'll look forward to talking with you both dr hawk first and dr lyle next week ah as it should be the reporter of the world very good all right folks thanks everybody we'll see y'all soon you
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist