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Episode 240: Dealing with Narcissism, Socializing with unconventional views
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okay dear doctors i was deeply fascinated by your take on narcissism and have finally realized that my mother is a narcissist many of my friends are also narcissists or they suffer from tendencies is there a correlation between being raised by a narcissist and seeking those same traits in friends and partners and what advice would you share for dealing with these people short of running for the door um yeah all good first of all the just to be really precise here which is kind of you know sometimes we we need to be very precise um the the concept of of narcissist like a narcissistic personality disorder the the concept of a personality disorder is actually fundamentally flawed uh it carries within it the concept of types okay so it's the idea that there are types of people and there's types of people people that have a disorder or something wrong with them um that is not actually accurate okay so what there are is there are dimensions not disorders so you have a um you could have people that you you you could say hey they're very narcissistic that that's perfectly reasonably accurate what we mean by that is they're very disagreeable is what that means so the uh that's what a narcissist is a highly disagreeable person because they're very disagreeable uh what that what that word means or what it's explaining is that it's difficult to agree with them that they disagree with you often they will contradict you they will they do and and the most fundamental issue when people are attempting to negotiate a path of any kind of relationship at all whether it's buying a rug from them or marrying them the the issue is is that we're attempting to forge an agreement where we can have some kind of a trade or an exchange of some nature and so in order to do that we are both foregoing other opportunities because this is the best opportunity so we're in agreement okay and so a disagreeable person is somebody that you can't seem to accomplish that very often with because they constantly are the the what what underlies the underscores the concept of an agreement is the concept that it's fair okay so disagreeable people are fundamentally unfair people they they simply do not see the world uh accurately in terms of what is in fact fair and so i will argue there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the average human is typically mildly unfair in other words the average human at the 50th percentile is slightly but not grossly self-centered and as a result the average human being can be reasonably agreeable in other words they feel like they're getting chiseled a little bit at work they're getting chiseled a little bit in their relationship they're getting chiseled a little bit by their by the lawn guy they're getting chiseled a little bit by the corporations and they're being chiseled a little bit in their taxes in other words they feel like there's being mildly chiseled but they're not really that upset about it whereas if you were let's suppose you're 80th percentile disagreeable which means you're one out of five you're quite disagreeable you're irritated a lot more you are feeling like no i shouldn't have to pay that much and no i shouldn't have to wait that long uh etc etc and so there's going to be a uh they're going to be irritated more often so somebody that we would call a narcissist is going to be somebody who's you know probably at the 90th percentile as people at the 90th percentile start getting that label okay that's you know that's not an unreasonable description that's because they are they're quite out of balance in terms of what it is how it is that they are interpreting what would be a fair exchange so they're often really irritated and they're they're quite demanding about what it is that they think is fair and things need to go their way very often they aren't trying to quote get their way they they're just really irritated that the world is constantly giving them pushback on what from their interpretation is obviously fair but in fact is very unfair so that's a narcissistic individual so narcissists are have a tendency to be quite angry quite often if they're very emotionally stable they could be very emotionally stable very intelligent and very conscientious narcissist and they wouldn't be that angry that often but they would they would have a quiet irritation that would come up often but it might be kind of subclinical you wouldn't see it that often now if you take an uh a narcissistic individual i.e 90 90th percentile disagreeable and you take that individual and they are say average instability and averaging conscientiousness they're going to be obviously a pain in the ass okay they're they're going to be loud and irritable about very often about things that are constantly happening that they find to be objectionable in terms of the fairness they're they're walking around with you know a 98 percentile individual is probably just from my eyeball estimate you know nobody's ever done this research to calibrate it but they're probably walking around with what i would call an 80 20 chip so that when things go their way four times out of five in a relationship that feels about right to them okay four out of five times we see movies you know about killing people you know in in sci-fi murder you know warfare and one five one time out of five they're willing to go with their wife and see a movie about horses okay so the the uh so the four times out of five feels reasonable now that you can see how irritating this would be on the other side of it so uh you know to continue on with the questions i recall they were wondering you know is everybody that around them they're seeing quote narcissism all over the place i.e disagreeable issues with their parents and so forth and the question is do you if you're raised by them do you seek them out no you don't the narcissistic people can can have many reasons why they might be attractive they might be sexually attractive okay so they might be you know intelligent and have a lot of information they may have a lot of push and they may have wealth or they may have connections in other words there may be an awful lot of things about them uh including exuding an air of confidence and notion that they are going to win uh that they're going to be in charge because they deserve it okay so a lot of these characteristics can give rise to uh interpersonal attractiveness on the part of a narcissist so it isn't that is it wasn't because you were raised by them a narcissistic individuals sometimes have attractive characteristics sometimes they do not but sometimes they do and when they do um sometimes that the the cost of the narcissism sort of flies under your radar and you're not quite noticing it uh you don't really understand the price if you feel like you can join a winning team with a gen gen uses a phrase of free writing so a lot of times you can free ride on the anger and irritability and arrogance of a narcissist and get on their team and you know get your money back you know it so this is uh so this is a a reason why one could could find themselves connected to some narcissistic individuals the um but anyway the the solution is to them this is what i call the disagreeable distance and that is that you know narcissistic people i.e disagreeable people can can have value in your life uh they could be extremely valuable for whatever reasons uh that might be useful to you however they they impose considerable costs so the the right way to deal with them is to narrow your relationship to the the range of exchanges or transactions where where you're likely to wind up being able to free ride or make a profit on their characteristics whatever those are you might not be free writing there may be actually just characteristics about them that you happen to like and avoid as much as possible the the problems that that are attending with respect to these individuals so i wouldn't go into business with any of them um i might invest in one of their businesses a little bit if i felt like that they had enough push and shove that they were going to be successful and i might put a few chips in the game but i would not i wouldn't extend a bunch of credit to them you can forget about that because they'll they will figure out a way to renege in all probability in other words what you want is the disagreeable distance disagreeable distance is a conceptual distance from if you you use the concept of venn diagrams and think of your life space and who you are and what it is that you're going to do in this life as a circle and with sort of you at the very middle of that circle and that's the circle defines the the the end of your exploratory domains of life and what you want is you think that of another person also is a circle and the question is how much intersection or overlap do you want those two between those two circles with an outstanding person that you share your life with them you might want that overlap to be 75 percent you might want to go to the beach with them you might want to go to the movies you want to go to dinner with them you want to sleep in the same bed with them in other words you might love that person and even though you're not going to spend every waking moment together and you don't have every single agreement on every single topic the the overlap is huge and you enjoy the process and it's a great process to essentially have your life 75 percent of the way overlapped with them and you may want to share genes with them and do the genetic hereafter so that's sort of the ideal set of circumstances on the other end of that might be someone who uh let's say for for various and sundry reasons but the reason it's first and foremost here is the disagreeable distance is that you may have very little area of interaction where it's profitable to be on you know in the same time and place and exchanging with them that's the disagreeable distance so we we may take that down to two percent of your life space and so the the the circles barely overlap or they barely intersect but when they do that little intersection has a green light or a green tint to it in other words it's profitable whereas uh if it gets to be too far and we try to push it to five percent uh then it turns red turns negative and that's in fact going to be a characteristic of relationships with between pleasant people and disagreeable people is that very often the disagreeable people are going to want to push those relationships to higher degrees of interaction because they're going to be smelling that the agreeable person can be exploited not that they're thinking of it that way they're just thinking of hey i like to go to movies with you you're cool let's go to the movies oh we're going to go see another shoot them up again okay and i don't want to do it but they like our company because we're pleasant and agreeable and you know we'll buy them popcorn or whatever the heck it is so the bottom line is is that often the disagreeable people are pushing for more interaction you if you're going to be in relationships with them at all you have to be elegant and firm about how to hold the line to keep the overlap between your lives and their lives at the at the right amount that optimizes your life experience wow dr thank you so much um that's quite an unconventional way of dealing with disagreeable people because the you know conventional pop culture will say oh you've got to you know talk to them and see if you can figure out the resolve the issues and whatnot and yeah and i've mentioned this before yeah you've mentioned this uh the strategy before the partly you know in the book how i found freedom in an unfree world and so the next question actually has to do with that which is dear dr lyle i finished how i found freedom in an unfree world by harry brown earlier this year it's an amazing book that has radically changed my outlook on things but since then i've tried to be much more intentional about honestly presenting myself and honestly going after relationships that i see as high value and i have to admit that i have gotten a lot of negative feedback from romantic opportunities and family since updating my thinking does truly embracing yourself and your freedom come with growing pains and time or is just that being yourself is just a more lonely experience does any of this have to do with these beliefs being less sexually attractive than more conventional beliefs around family marriage governments etc hmm it's very interesting question so i would it's a person that might have been a little overly conscientious and and maybe a little too open and uh might have taken some of harry's thinking a little too far so i remember now harry makes a big issue about honesty in that book and he um he's he obviously had a hyper conscientious nut streak in his head about this and he he basically uh made made strong comments about if you're super honest all the time then there was enormous rewards that would come with other people understanding that you're super honest and therefore they could be extremely trusting of what it is that you would say and even though that there were costs that would be imposed upon you uh from having that reputation he believed that it was such a rare and valuable characteristic that it would be well worth it okay so uh what comes along with that is a enough disagreeability and enough emotional stability to pull off that kind of bizarre personality characteristic so that that really uh that that's an example of sort of trying to do things in a way that might be counter to your personality because someone else tells you that it's a good strategy um that's okay i mean harry gets a pass because he he wouldn't have had a chance he he was well ahead of his time so he had great intuition about personality in a way that that even the you know the cutting-edge personality theorists of 1980 had no idea so harry's writing in 1973 and he's you know never even heard of a psychology book so the so his intuition though was very good in many many ways and but this is one of the places where it failed him so your your personality is going to be your personality so you're to to try to take on a set of characteristics like extreme honesty uh etc this is going to be a waste of time the truth is is that that human beings um have the human beings run a natural cost benefit on how open and honest they're going to be about anything and there's going to be conventions that are going to be sort of natural to that individual and natural to their ecological niches and so to to be to be sort of open and blunt and honest to sort of advertise how it is how oddly you think about the world or how yeah et cetera that i don't think that makes any sense at all i think uh being yourself means including in there the fact that we would be socially sensitive uh to you know what the what the circumstances are and to modify our behavior as strategically intelligently as possible and i don't think that sort of blunt uh honesty that he describes in the book really makes a lot of sense so the uh i thought about that i think i you know i was intimidated by the moral reasoning behind it when i first read it uh but i i never once stuck my foot in the water and it just never made any sense to me so i would i wouldn't worry about that the um now in terms of negative feedback about some other things the the for example concepts about marriage concepts about the government uh god knows what else that he talks about the uh my way of thinking is this i'm kind of really not out to advertise my unconventional views on anything i am here because we're what what i'm doing is we're trying to explain the nature of human psychology and within it trying to try to come up with principles for decision making that will optimize human happiness so that's what we're attempting to do that may lead us to very old-fashioned tried and true ideas that make perfect sense that may be what the logic leads us to and it may also lead us to very very unconventional thinking that is that is very radically different from where the mainstream thinking finds itself in either case i'm not really interested in any of my social circles to pound this down anybody's throat i'm really not interested so um the i don't think i don't think the concept of like so i don't talk to my married friends about hey well let's talk about marriage and what a trap it is and how much of the time everybody wishes they were out of it and how they're stuck in it because of their financial obligations and how it you know and forget about it we're not going to have those conversations and i i i enter you know i wish them well once and then no more friends you know so the point is is that that thinking is is sort of for you for your own decision making and uh harry has some you know obviously some radical and interesting ideas about government um and i think a lot of those ideas are really really good it's really good thinking you can also his thinking can get all the way to libertarian anarchy which winds up being ridiculous but that's that's a bit of him assuming that everybody in the world has his stability and his conscientiousness and that we don't really need all this oversight and we can just make agreements and so on and so forth which you cannot that's actually that's actually a misunderstanding on harry's part about how disagreeable and low conscientious and dangerous not only are there individuals but entire classes of individuals and literally clans and countries and so therefore a huge amount of not just human life but also animal life has to do with resource defense so you're uh it doesn't matter what kind of animal you are you spend an awful lot of time and energy basically vigilantly spending uh spending a lot of your life space defending your your your property your life your tissue etc etc okay your place in a dominance hierarchy your mate your children okay defense is a very very big deal and uh and so therefore harry's sort of uh i don't remember exactly i i've read i think most all of harry's books so some of these i some i'm not sure all of what he talks about a government and how i found freedom in a free world but he will also talk about government in very negative terms uh brilliantly in a book called you can profit from a monetary crisis and um so uh so harry being a a uh libertarian uh free market you know dude basically has no use for government or almost none and so that takes his thinking into a very radical space and and if harry were alive today i would sit him down and say hey chief let me just tell you love you think you're great let me give you a kiss on both of those sort of chubby cheeks ears you know thank you so much for doing so much for my life now let me explain to you where you actually made some serious mistakes and and um and i would walk him through his his lack of appreciation for just how dangerous disagreeable people and groups are and how we have to invest a lot in national defense police forces etc to protect property and you have to do so as an individual and you have to do so in groups and so that's a that's an important you know part of where government uh lives and should be so these are uh that once you have that framework there's really no reason to be talking any radical stuff about government past that point because you know that's probably the most radical thing that harry uh would ever talk about and after that the things that he would talk about would be oh i don't know you know how they how they you know steal a bunch of tax money for this that and the other thing um all kinds of other things that he might be you know specific other things that he thinks are a waste of time and resources for people but those wind ups start looking like regular old-fashioned debates about share not share and and those things are just wind up being mostly liberal versus conservative philosophy on government funding of this that and the other uh that's that's who cares about that we're not interested in in debating people about that because people have their own personal views about what they think is a fair and reasonable way that the government ought to behave on various and sundry dimensions like that but probably the most radical thing where harry gets radical is actually an in-principle argument right to the edge really an in-principle argument about government and so i wouldn't be taking that anywhere and i don't think that you can defend that and so i wouldn't bother so uh so that's a so marriage government what was that what else did the questioner ask about or comment about uh marriage family and government yeah family harry brown yeah talked about you know how he uh disowned his daughter uh because he just wasn't didn't want to didn't want to hassle with it or something no no that's not what happened no uh i don't think that's what happened at all i think what happened was uh when he got his divorce he he wasn't going to fight to the nth degree to try to keep you know custody or anything like that he i think his i think his wife wanted custody of their daughter so i don't think harry i think carrie uh being harry the openness and stability about kind of shrugged his shoulders and said hey i'm not going to fight over this and i think that's actually what happened and his daughter incidentally later in life you know they reconnected and they became very close uh i didn't know that oh yeah oh yeah his daughter is one of his great champions to this day so um so anyway yeah so harry uh yes harry's got i mean he's the ultimate of the laissez-faire man it's like uh and frankly a lot of his um i could say that he influenced me which he certainly did but i would also say that a lot of who he is is a lot of who i am and so i was discovering my own source code sitting inside harry brown uh and as he's as he's talking and explaining his view of things uh his his feeling and tone about things really resonate with me i.e everybody just leave everybody alone everybody get to do their own thing you know you want to smoke plot pot go ahead and do it you know just don't do it in my living room so i don't have to smell it and it'd be pleasant if you weren't doing it on the road and high so you're banging into my car that's not such a good thing and but basically very everybody gets to do whatever they want but nobody has to pay for anybody else that's that's a basic straight up libertarian philosophy and anybody that's trying to do different anybody that's trying to improv impose constraints on other people's freedom and trying to essentially take their property tax them in ways that seem aggressive etc harry is going to argue against that and i'm going to say hey that's no good you're you're detracting from the human happiness potential and so i feel that way personally uh and yet all of us would uh all of us that aren't quite so open and quite so radical in our thinking as harry even if you are in in the same even gross dimension as i am politically you look at this thing and you say well we can have very reasonable disagreements among us about just how many resources should be directed to what uh what you know essentially collective problem and we could have quite a big disagreement and yet those disagreements would don't need to be and aren't moral in character in other words you aren't morally wrong these are dimensions so what we we wind up the little problem that i see in some of harry's thinking um is that it it goes back to the thing we were just talking about is the concept of types versus dimensions so in some people's thinking the right type of government is no government at all and my attitude is no that's that is fundamentally the incorrect way of looking at this problem uh the correct way is a dimension uh that that under certain circumstances there's going to be more government and less government and the uh and the right way to think about relationships you know would be on dimensions i would be better unfortunately you know it gets complicated and you wind up with a sociological and historical mess on your hands thinking this through but it would be better to have dimensions of being married than than a type okay really would okay so how married are you on a scale of one to ten well i think we're about a three you know the uh so anyway that i i so i guess what i would be saying to this person is uh no need to be shoving radical ideas in anybody's face or even advertising particularly that you have these ideas these these are ideas when when you meet a potential romantic partner you know i'm not leading with the harry brown card trust me no i'm uh that car those cards get keep hidden away quietly uh those cards are going to influence my own decision making personally about how it is that i'm going to manage my life but i'm not going to seek agreement on those decisions or those those perspectives from people who have never had the had the opportunity to consider some radically different ideas and to to basically try to figure out whether they agree with me or not and be under pressure to try to signal to me whether they like me or don't they don't like me with the agreement or not it's like forget it the uh what we want to do when we're seeking romantic partners is we're we're looking for combinations of looks brains and personality we're not looking for specific thinking on any issue okay so uh i have uh a great many uh friends of mine in the in the plant-based world obviously that i run into and talk to a lot and many of them are single and many of them are frustrated that they feel like you know i really need to find somebody that's plant-based and my attitude is you're crazy that is a that is a crazy uh position to put yourself in now maybe you need to because you've got enough sort of somehow chips in that game that it's so important to you that you know your own psychology and you you know how you feel about it and sort of if someone hasn't come to the party on that and they don't have you have that all worked out or that's not how they think right now then forget it yeah i think that's a bad move and i never even considered that as a i didn't really ever consider that a major plus on anybody that i would date and i didn't consider it a major minus if they weren't interested or they had never thought about it i just considered that i'm all i'm looking at is look sprints and personality because if the person is sufficiently intelligent and they're sufficiently emotionally stable and they're sufficiently open and they're sufficiently conscientious then they will be hearing ultimately the the argument and they will they will either be open to considering and learning uh and respectful of the fact that that there's some things that they probably didn't know and it will be part of the journey of them opening their mind and learning something okay but i'm not looking for that on like the third date you can forget about it i'm what i'm looking for on the third date is you know because i'm me i'm not looking to score which would never happen anyway but the point is is that what i'm looking for is i'm looking for chemistry around look brains and personality that's what i'm looking for and we'll worry about the specifics of how it is that we think about politics or how we think about you know government how we think about you know marriage and how we think about food or any other thing like that those are details where very reasonable people who have great chemistry as people could come becoming at any point from a different perspective and may never fully agree and that's fine okay the uh and we can listen to somebody else if someone told me they thought that you know like i don't know andrew yang thinking that everybody should get a grant i could say listen i can sort of understand where you're coming from uh but let me explain why i would disagree but i wouldn't instantly be rolling my eyes or getting in a fight over somebody like that because it's a theoretical thing anyway and who the hell cares so anyway so i would say that how i found freedom and unfree world is a is a beautiful exploration of a really open innovative thinker about life and hopefully you can take away from harry's words many ideas are ways about looking about things particularly that may influence your decision making but but you know i would say don't be thinking that the right move for you is to be advertising this leading you know leading with your philosophy chip uh or you know leading with your specificity about what you think about this that or the other that's not the right way to advertise the right way to advertise is advertise your your personality as a as nicely and pleasantly and and accurately as possible your philosophy is not your personality your philosophy may correlate with your personality in important respects but it's not the same thing okay so uh that that that's how i would look at that so let's think of it in that way uh there shouldn't be any reason why our reading of something like harry brown and the changing that it may make in our thinking should really be grounds for anybody else getting particularly uncomfortable okay if it is then we do things we do what we do when other people get uncomfortable is we back off and realize hey they're not ready to hear it or they're not that interested okay and so that that's where this is you know getting along without going along this is uh no reason to have any of these insights razor ruckus these these insights are mostly for us personally wonderful dr lyle so um as you suspected this this uh listener is probably highly conscientious and so my my suspicion is this person read this book uh probably reads more like it and is doing a bunch of village checking computer checking so what do you uh can you explain to our audience what village checking is what computer checking is yeah whether or not we think you know what they can do about it in this case because they may not be as they may not be as confident in their views as you might have been right yeah well computer checking or village checking is a is a natural thing that people would do when they're not sure about something so if you have a new idea that's particularly sounds outside of the mainstream it would be reasonable for people to check other people in the village to find out what they think of it um so that you can imagine uh essentially imagine a hundred birds sitting around in a in a pasture and then one of them hears a twig snap thinks they hear it and they kind of look around and see is anybody else flying away and we can tell how important computer checking is because if one of them starts to fly the other 99 join them okay so the uh so computer checking this is what brains do is they are going to be checking on what the other brain what other inferences the other brains are coming up with because by checking a whole bunch of computers i reduce the error variance in my decision making so people do the same thing they they want to know and the um uh and in some cases it's the only way they can get an estimate of the truth because they don't have the chops themselves to reason down through the logic and the evidence because they they're just not trained enough in the logic and the evidence they don't have the they don't have the brains to do the logic and they don't have the knowledge to evaluate the evidence so they have to you know they have to believe dr schmo who swears up and down that the reason why you have back pain is you know stuff that happened in your childhood i.e dr sarno is what i heard about so i had two or three friends of mine come to me about saying well dr sharno you know joe sarno figured out all about that this is back pain it really helped me it's like whatever i don't know what what exercises you did that dr sarno said but it's [ __ ] okay your your uh your back pain has absolutely nothing to do with any repressed emotional pain in your life zero okay so but this is but people you know they don't know so they're going to listen to authorities and when the the arguments uh get complicated or the evidence gets difficult to evaluate they are going to look to other computers and and particularly they're going to look to other computers that they respect uh to try to reduce error variance it's a very reasonable algorithm that sits inside of human banks the uh the the more disagreeable more intelligent more learned you are in an area uh and the more open you are the more likely you are to come up with very unconventional views and not be swayed by what the pac says we're we're all very excited when people do that because when people go in a new direction that is very novel away from the current zeitgeist then we find breakthroughs okay and so then the whole pack benefits after we kill the other guy and burn him at the stake then you know after we after after we kill the pioneer then we're like hey he was right that was a good idea the uh and so but this is so so this is there's risk associated with um with unconventional ideas obviously uh usually the conventional thinking was you know the best thinking that the village could come up with and it seems to be pretty close to the truth and you know it's not often the case that the whole village is wrong okay so sometimes they are and sometimes uh the village has been there are very interesting reasons limitations uh about village talent knowledge abilities etc and as well as uh uh tricky problems in life that are very difficult to figure out the truth so very often human beings have been wrong sometimes all of them have been wrong and that the history of life on earth and the history of civilization and the advancement of human knowledge has been a very zigzaggy funny-looking thing and uh that that now it gets better and better and better okay so now you have you have uh uh scientific method now being used at a level that it was unimaginable 200 years ago and you see advances are you know unbelievably simple comparatively to achieve right alongside that by the way is a bunch of garbage okay right alongside that is a bunch of people selling snake oil under the guise of science because it sells because it has high credibility okay and what's behind the high credibility well you know or what why does that work because people don't have the ability to evaluate the evidence themselves so they have to rely on other brands to do it so this is what i call no independent method so most people today have very little capacity to to manage an independent method of analysis on anything that is controversial or complicated that they just can't do it there's there's too much specialization of knowledge there's too much iq points that are involved in the complexity of the arguments and so they're not competent to do so so instead they select their authorities uh based on personalities and the superficial reasonableness of that person's position okay so that's kind of what people wind up with so you can see why somebody encountering some of the unconventional thinking in a linker like harry brown might be checking their village a little bit and they could get some real pushback because some of harry's ideas are very threatening and unusual and to to articulate fully harry's logic first of all the other people aren't interested uh they've got entrance positions it may threaten their status in important ways and so therefore hey they're not interested in having this conversation and they can get defensive and nasty about it so no surprise that this person ran into some difficulties trying to share these ideas instead you know share it carefully is what i would say and share with humility and you know if anybody's interested in having the conversation at all with you uh which very few people were interested in having any conversations with me about this you know when i was in my 20s uh or any other time for that matter the um uh they're not you know most people just aren't that interested and they're they're not going to be interested in in attempting the process of independent method and therefore running into their own constraints and then wanting to discuss things they're just not there you know there are people that are more philosophical and thoughtful and are willing to grind through these kinds of things and there are people that are less so you could think about i think about the difference between my sister and i who were very similar in native intellectual ability but she has no interest in thinking through any philosophical nuances at all about anything not not interested no lack of brands just no interest okay this is just a hardcore freaking lawyer and she's just hey interested in and you know what what counts is who won and who lost and how much money was involved you know and there's really nothing else being considered there that's just the nature of that particular beast and meanwhile you can also think about you know uh some scene from yentl or whatever with a bunch of uh would-be rabbis all talking you know about how many how many uh pins you know how many angels are dancing on the hit of the pen in the talmud and it's like they can't stop themselves they're so philosophically interested so these are individual differences in humans and respect the fact that other other individuals may be threatened and uncomfortable and uninterested in anything that we would have to say at this level of philosophy yeah so my question then dr lyle is if you can't talk about any of these things what do you talk about well you're served really well because you're more of an introvert uh self-proclaimed introvert but uh yeah yeah well if if you want to stir up people and make it interesting for them then and you want and you're more outgoing then the things that you would talk probably the most exciting thing in the world that that we have discovered that i've discovered over the years and then and jen has certainly uh discovered this once she once we you know joined forces people are fascinated with personality they are incredibly fascinated with personality and so if you want to like leak some entertaining interesting conversation in the world you go that direction for goodness sakes and and then b people can share their opinions about how much they think is nature and how much you think is nurture and then you can share a little bit of the data about twins and some of the remarkable things that you might find in plomen that's a good way to get a lively conversation going on something that you might be interested in so that's not a bad thing but let's not talk about libertarian anarchy and the evils of government and the marriage trap yeah these are these are things we better be careful about yeah my uh my grandmother who just recently chef aj just did an interview with me and my grandmother and my sisters uh she she's the typical you know older russian woman you know and uh i think dr hawk shared starts explaining a lot oh yeah it's genetic for sure yeah yeah yeah she did change her careers too funny enough but um but uh so so i remember one time my sister my little sister was graduating from college and we're all there my grandma's there and my grandma's pretty outspoken about pretty much everything and yeah um she meets one of my sister's friends who's uh explaining you know and we had my sister tells earlier here's her boyfriend for her friend's boyfriend and she was oh he's your boyfriend how long have you guys been together she said two years so two years and no ring drop him honey there you go yeah no no shortage of advice and clarity in her thinking yeah there you go all right so we shouldn't do that okay so we'll do personality you got it so dr lyle do you um do you subscribe to any like small talk uh i mean i i know you you know how to do it but but uh is there any value to small talk well the uh i guess what we're talking about are we talking about sort of meeting new people is that what we're talking about what are you thinking about when you ask that yeah both so meeting new people is also useful to me but also in this question i'm sensing that he's village checking you know people in his life that were already in his life but if you can't talk about evo psych and libertarian you know politics essentially yeah to me it's kind of maybe i'm i'm in all or nothing mode where it's like well it's either but i guess i guess yeah what what's the point yeah actually the weather you're talking about you know yeah yeah back pain or something right the um yeah actually the the truth of the matter is is that we try to spend time around people that share enough of our interests and share enough of our uh where there's a confluence of our personality characteristics that generates a lot of good things and um so and when we when we're not there you know what are we going to do we we can you can maybe you can have a good time playing horseshoes that's fine we can chit chat but uh and i and there's a certain value in having your your ticket punched at thanksgiving or somebody's birthday party uh to that you're a member of the coalition whatever okay this is and some people are just so naturally social and chatty and and amenable to that whole sort of thing that's a really good mood of happiness for them uh so for me not so much okay so for me uh i'm kind of a little bit like this questioner which is uh my conversations uh i'm not all philosophy all the time some but i'm problem solving all the time so that's my this sort of uh not always i can be watching an interesting show but that show better be interesting so i maybe somehow feel entertained by this for some reason probably because i feel like i'm learning something where i find some of the people's you know interpersonally attractive in some way so yeah everybody's running cbs and everybody's running them through a very through very different and unused you know their own unique minds um so i can go play a basketball game with a bunch of guys and and talk to him afterwards a little bit about the game and what we did and didn't do then we're done like i'm not i'm not going to go have a beer with these guys it's never going to happen there's there's no way that our conversations are going to go beyond anything other than that little domain that's all fine uh but if we get we get stuck with people i mean i'm personally just trying to get through those minutes to get my ticket punched to do what i was you know asked to do or called to do or what's important for me to do etc i'm not quote enjoying myself personally that's not happening the uh these are these are social obligations that i try to keep personally to a minimum um so that's just me and so i don't try to make conversations into something interesting um you know why bother if i can sniff a bunch of intelligence and people are nosing around and they're you know i might open with something that's interesting about personality because that's inherently interesting to people uh not not too much i might even talk a little bit about uh evolutionary psychology in ways that are very unthreatening to people um so talk you know how i do things i talk about animals and animal behavior and cats and chasing strings and so on and so forth and then talk about humans and their love of certain environmental characteristics so i i'll do that why it is that we love trees why we love rivers and water and fountains and golf courses uh in other words things like that that's not threatening so i'm not gonna say oh by the way the waste or hips ratio two to three [Laughter] so you know this is so there's ways to make some of this conversation make some of these ideas sort of interesting but i'm not really that interested in sharing this information with people that don't know anything because the truth of the matter is you know what's in it for me uh unless i'm trying to impress somebody at which point now it's a whole different story so the um yeah i had a uh i had a partner once uh who remains uh one of my she's she's actually my best friend in the world and uh so but she we were an item for a number of years and no longer but we're still best friends and she she's much more social much more open to experience kind of a character so she would drag me you know into things that i wasn't that wild about doing but you know it was an appropriate compromise for my introversion and curmudgeonly uh behavior and so we would we would go to social events from time to time and apparently i've never seen this movie but there's a movie uh with eddie murphy that there's some i guess a monkey that uh speaks spanish i don't i don't know that i haven't seen the movie and yeah i don't know what it is but uh and every time eddie murphy wants to tell everybody hey listen this thing speaks spanish it won't say anything it just keeps his mouth shut won't say a word and it drives eddie murphy crazy apparently because he's the only one that knows and she says that was my life experience with you i would tell everybody all these interesting things that you have to say and all the stuff that you know and we go somewhere and you wouldn't say anything and i'm like the monkey speaks spanish it does but i'm not you know i'm not saying anything so yeah whatever we we find our own way you've got your own personality uh to deal with but remember on the other side of it there's there's people that are are limited in their interest they're limited in their range they're limited in in in a number of ways and they've got their own agendas and uh the last thing i personally need to be doing is is offending anybody or you know getting into any argument or making it uncomfortable not interested okay so uh alan wood that anybody opens up with anything about health and he's stuck in one of those things here it comes [Laughter] bring it on you better you better you better bring your best shot buddy because you just just walked in with george foreman yeah but that's uh one time yeah go ahead i remember one time with alan uh we were having dinner somewhere and someone like recognized him yeah and he came came to him and asked him you know just the typical questions and then they go what's your feeling on on chocolate and coconut oil and all this and he goes well i'd have no problem with it just you don't want to eat it you want to put it on your hips and rub it on your hips and then you can wash it off without having to wear it all the time sure it's classic just yeah just write disagreeable just the just sort of a snarling you know interchange just like that but yeah he got up and left yeah then he got up and laughed yeah it probably didn't say goodbye but i didn't you know i just couldn't believe it that's that's alan just one of a kind the uh yeah anyway i think that's sort of the uh the notion here that these are here both here and in the readings that we talk about many of the ideas striking unconventional really you know new brilliant you know this is uh if you you read human diversity uh by charles murray or you read blueprint by plummen uh you're you're talking about conventional cutting edge you know if you if you if you're if you're real sharp and you got just enough determination and you really are trying to feel just how deep this goes pick up the adapted mind and see if you can wade through how many pages you can go through of uh tubing cosmetics without getting mentally exhausted okay your this stuff is is extraordinarily powerful uh the tubing cosmetics in particular are are the ultimate of high concept so they're they are they're so precise and so deep in their thinking uh you're looking at the limits of the human ability to comprehend themselves in the universe right there uh david bess new science of the mind super readable you get to absorb this information in a way that's very palatable for normal homo sapiens uh bright homo sapiens and you can absorb it and understand it and and make make use of it in your understanding of what you're looking at in humanity so this is uh this is extraordinary stuff and it's a it's a joy to know it and it's a joy to watch our understanding in real time as other people as we interact with other people it's also super useful when we run into conflicts with other people and we understand ourselves and understand them better as a result of this uh we're not looking at you know somebody that we uh i was talking to a a young person today that was having uh early obvious conflicts with a romantic partner and it was obvious that the romantic partner was russian [Laughter] okay it's like okay listen that's called a disagreeable net case that's what that is and no there isn't going to be any fixing it okay so uh this this is not this is not something fixable these are we now understand that this is not changeable what you're looking at is you're looking at the human personality that's super useful okay particularly for nice people to understand uh oh that's personality that's not changing time to get out okay don't try to fix it i don't care how hot that guy or girl is so the uh so anyway these are there's all kinds of useful information that we're absorbing and learning uh but we don't we don't need to make our social processes at all unpleasant no reason to you
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