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Episode 241: Spouse is Great but Unhealthy, Blamed for Childs Behavior, Feel vs act
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my husband and i are in our late 20s we have no children and we've been married less than three years six months after our wedding i became a whole food plant-based eater and an ethical vegan i was already pretty healthy prior to the wedding but still lost 10 pounds and i even reversed a few health conditions my husband though he has a lot of health conditions including chronic constipation terrible cystic back acne really bad breath very loud snoring asthma low energy and is just five pounds away from being uh having a bmi of being obese my husband hasn't really physically changed much since our wedding and has always had these health problems but i looked past them because i love everything else about my husband he's seen all the vegan documentaries and completely believes the science but he has no interest in eating healthier being more active or stopping to eat or stop eating fast food daily i love my husband and he supports my lifestyle one hundred percent but i no longer find him attractive i believe it's because i know if he drastically changed his diet he would reverse many of his health problems that would that turn me off i know it's natural for couples to lose attraction towards each other over time but what do you do when you're repulsed by your spouse and their health problems yeah well this is a this is a sort of um this is a fascinating thing and the it's quite quite an interesting problem a lot of uh different perspectives we could take on this the uh you know i have a number of things that come to mind as as i as i look at this and everything that is being said the the first thing that comes to mind for me is to tell this woman don't be having kids the next two years okay so that's the first thing and the reason why i'm giving you that that information is because you don't want to be locked into this relationship well we're still trying to figure out if we want it now it is uh the relationship obviously has great strengths uh so the yeah she says she loves the guy there that they have you know in many ways a wonderful relationship however we have a a sort of a glaring hole in the middle of the living room floor and that is is that if he is repulsive physically then this is a pretty big price uh and and you know everybody's different there are couples that are not sexual at all for 40 years um and so that this wouldn't necessarily be a problem if they're just good friends and they're they're cohabitating and they may even have a couple of kids together if this is how they want to live all you know i'm not there to wrinkle my eyebrow at anybody that's how you see you know whatever's in your best interest however if i'm in my late 20s i'm a young lady in my late 20s and um and i'm with a guy that is you know got a lot of he started doing a mediocre job and he's already got mediocre results uh and i'm already turned off by by who he is physically it's really bothering me uh this isn't uh this isn't actually anywhere near what what the potential is that you could feel for another human being so here we have it you know we we have the the guys probably for you know for brains and personality he sails over the bar and so he's got great qualities etc and physically maybe the genetics of his physical attractiveness are absolutely fine as far as she's concerned but what he's doing to those uh as a result of the pleasure trap this is the pleasure trap that is raising its its ugly head and grabbing from the world uh potentially wonderful romance that's a tragedy that's why the subtitle of my book is called mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness because that is precisely what is happening here so he is a victim of the pleasure trap it who he is as a human never would have been in this trap at any other time in history on the other hand he probably wouldn't have lived this long in most other times in history so it's a trade-off we have to live with and we're happy to live with but we see the the uh the spark of this romance and the great enjoyment of the romance that's at the center of man woman dynamics sort of going down the drain so what do we do about this well uh these are uh these are conversations that we sort of have to have if we want things to have any chance of improving so the way we have these conversations whenever we're going to give anybody bad news about anything we want to flood the circuit okay you don't have to go overboard because this guy doesn't really feel rejected as a human but i would i would sit down and say listen i need to have a serious talk i need we need you know 15 minutes to really talk about something that's really bothering me and then we fled his circuit okay so we say listen you're you're a dream of a person you i love this about you i love that about you i live the other thing about you i loved it when you did this and i loved it when you did that i loved when we had this time together et cetera et cetera i can't imagine being with anybody else okay however where i'm at and what's happened to me i've changed i've become a lot more health conscious and as you know you know things have changed for me and now what was what was once okay with me about you uh is is no longer okay and the problem is i have to apologize for this because you haven't changed and so it's not your fault and it's really not my fault either that this this happened to me and so it isn't something that i can that can wipe out of my mind and so it turns out that right now where i'm at is i just don't feel like being really close with you physically i don't i don't light i don't enjoy it it bothers me um and it doesn't bother me the rest about who it is that you are not one bit but this part of it i feel like you know i feel like for me to for me to be happy to be happy with you and to be uh physically tight with you and intimate with you and sexual with you and to feel all those feelings uh i i believe that in order for that to happen that that you have to do a better job and so you know i don't know i don't know how it is that you you would you know you could wrap your head around doing you know paying that price um i don't know what it would take i don't know if you'd have to be 10 better or 20 better or 50 better i don't know what it would take but i do know that where we are now is it doesn't work for me okay now i'm not leaving you i have no interest in leaving you i'm not thinking about divorce i'm not thinking about anything other than i would just wish so much that you you know that you would the that you would reach some higher potential uh for your own health so um so i don't know what to do with this and i've just kicked around a few ideas in my head but i wanted to share this with you because you've probably been picking up on this and it it you know i'm not angry or resentful or if i sometimes am it's the smallest part of it i do feel that maybe sometimes because i feel like you know this your your unwillingness to to make some sacrifices here are you know basically constrain my life enjoyment so that's where i'm at and you know i i don't know how to proceed from here but i just want to hear your thoughts about this how you feel about where we are with this and how you feel about about this uh any kind of challenge that we would have to face here and then shut up let them talk okay so then at another time probably not that time i would just sort of get that out there and get that out there in a way where we flooded the circuit we essentially place the blame on ourselves that we're the one who's changed but we don't have a choice you know that we can't we can't see it any other way we can't feel it any other way at least right not not right now and we don't know what it would take but it would it's take it would take something because with the the way the circumstances are right now you know it's not we're not looking at a great future so that's how i would do this and um and then later on i might pitch an experiment i mean maybe you do in that conversation depends upon how emotionally stable the guy is how threatened he feels how angry he gets you know etc or whether he's got any problem problem-solving mentality or anything else under the sun so we but things that we could pitch um we could pitch for example um like for example an experimental week where for a week you know you work overtime trying to make him very delicious healthy foods and his job is to see if he can choke them down okay and it should be like well and you we can we can laugh about just how bad it was and you can rate the food in this eating experience on a one to ten scale and and you could say okay well was it a one or a two okay and we can try to be good spirited about this but with the notion that we're seeing about whether or not this is even a direction that is in any way any way that it might have any future in it the um that's one idea another way frankly nathan another way is for sometimes the best way for a spouse to actually have a transformative uh mental process is for them to go away to health camp okay so mcdougall program no longer has inpatient things so that's out true north is true north i don't know where they're located or whether they would uh want to go there that's it's fine but it's kind of noisy and the food's not very good the best place i actually know is nathan's place is uh right there in yorba linda in southern california the uh there's probably other places as well i'm not sure who's open and who's doing what but uh if if he were to take the time week 10 days two weeks is probably the ideal length of time to go and eat and maybe do a short fast or not but basically get acquainted uh with uh with the the knowledge and and uh perspective and get it do it well enough for long enough that he starts to feel better physically that's why it is that it's also good to do it away from your spouse sometimes so they're not looking over your shoulder like waiting for you to nod that they have seen the light now they can be as as non-committal and obnoxious as they want to be but meanwhile they're still committed there and there they are so we see this a lot in the mcdougall program we'll we'll see some spouse that's being forced at divorce point you know what i mean into the mcdougall program and and they're annoying and and irritated for the first four or five days and then by the seventh or eighth day they start to come around they start to have eaten enough healthy food they start actually feeling better and they see that the people around are like hey what the hell why why wouldn't we try to be healthier and why wouldn't we try to live a better life and they start to get carried along with the tide and so that that can be a very uh that can be a transformative experience for some people so anyway this is a super long answer to this question it's a um i would say this to both of these people but particularly to the young ladies asking the question and that is that you you have an unusual and fabulous situation so you have someone that you really like and that really likes you that's really good so we don't bully we don't threaten what we do and i don't think she would anyway she sounds like a a wonderful young woman what we want to do is we want to come with the attitude of hey i'm in i'm kind of in trouble here okay i'm in trouble here because i can't i can't bring you the person uh with the same attitude and feelings that i had before and it's not your fault it's something that i've gone through and now i have i've undergone a change and so and so we we are actually up against it because do we really want a lifetime of me feeling like i i really don't want you to be close to me i don't think that's the life we want it's not the life we had before and that's not why we're together as a couple so that's how i would see this and and i would i would approach it in that way and let's see whether or not we can get a dialogue going okay all right wow dr lyle i i'm just what a compassionate answer i really appreciate how you can take a difficult question like this and frame it in a way that that shows as many perspectives as necessary to keep it keep it uh productive yeah as best we can we do the very best we can yeah all right in this question that i was curious about is um the husband she says the husband has seen all the documentaries and believes in the science right um how might your answer change if the husband refused to see the documentaries and really didn't want to learn would that change anything about the the uh your answer um i think it would i i would want to know from the individual how it is that any anything was presented and how it was being continued to be presented um it could in in those circumstances if we have people sort of digging into a position in the same house with a very different uh perspective and and this kind of a problem in the way of the intimacy and yet uh somebody bunkered into an oppositional view and not not uh willing to learn at all then pretty well dimmed you know what i mean we're in serious trouble there and um and that that personality uh at least one side of it in other words on uh the if it's being handled as as well as we can handle such a conflict and we're still getting stonewalled then it's it's very unfortunate to say this but the individual on the other side of that is not competent to be in a romantic relationship in other words they they don't they don't understand the value of what it is that they have and they don't understand and are apparently too disagreeable and generally incapable to understand that you have to pay some prices in order to keep such a thing and so and if they don't they don't you know a lot of people a lot of people don't do very wise things in this life because of various and assorted characteristics that they have and they don't get to enjoy the fruits that uh that come with doing things in intelligently and wisely and so i have much more hope for this individual because this guy sounds bright open enough etc he just sounds like he's a you know maybe happy-go-lucky indulgent dude and and it could be that he doesn't have to come anywhere near matching where she's at it might be that if he does this thing halfway and is willing to do you just get a half of the food in him to be pretty healthy that he will look better feel better never be 100 or 80 or 90 player but it will be good enough uh that that she will feel like you know that that her relationship is on solid ground and that she can feel responsive so this this one has promise and we want to approach it you know as carefully and as intelligently as possible if you had changed the parameters on it i would say we would do similar things but our odds of success would be a lot lower yeah wonderful thank you and thank uh i appreciate you uh saying that the uh the the anecdote about dr mcdougall's program because yeah when we have couples here too the same thing is the sometimes one spouse will have the they'll be here for an extended period of time for a fast or something for their blood pressure and then they'll have their spouse actually come out for a few days just to say hello and see how it's like and then by the time the spouse is ready to go home now they're telling me that the spouse wants to come back themselves and stay there because they've met other people who have survived yes haven't died of protein deficiency and so they're they're now now all interested exactly that's right so this is sometimes uh we we gotta go through a little educational process there yeah all right excellent dr lau thank you so much sure all right our our next question dear doctors i am a single mother of an eight-year-old girl that is intelligent and highly emotional much like her biological father i see genetic resemblance of low conscientiousness manipulative and even some narcissistic traits i'm a very agreeable fairly emotionally stable high conscientious person i've recently been dating a man which i feel a strong connection with he's a single father and has a very emotionally stable agreeable 15 year old daughter himself my new partner seems blown away by my doctor by my daughter's highs and lows and i feel blamed for her behavior on my lack of discipline i feel like her behavior has to do with her genetics but is that a cop-out for possibly a lack of discipline and how would i explain to this mid to low openness mate i found that knows nothing of evolution or psychology that she is who she is and we are along for the ride if he can bear it oh yeah that uh well let me think about this so how would we educate somebody about um personality the uh you might you might uh might have him watch uh jen hawk's uh sequence on personality uh or or we might uh in other words that that would be one thing to do he could he could listen to this question if we can tolerate uh saying that he was quote let me see if i can find it that he was like so not very open so uh so if he could choke that down that it wouldn't be a bad thing for him to listen to this this response yeah so uh one of the uh obviously one of the great illusions of history is the is the correlation between the uh parents and the children's behavior and us thinking that the children learned this or that or the other from their parents from observation and because that correlation coefficient is quite high in other words stable agreeable intelligent well-mannered people have stable uh agreeable well-managed uh well-disciplined children okay sociopathic people that that you know shoot shoot guns off in their neighbor's yards because of the noise those people's children you know are usually have a have a rap sheet you know before they're 25. okay so we all know this we've talked about this on on the show many times and we we understand that there has been an extraordinary world-changing uh enlightenment on the nature of personality here in the last really in the last 50 years mostly in the last 35. that uh the correlation between parents and their children remains so strong and so overwhelming for people that they believe that it's imitation so they can't they can't see and they don't infer that it's genetic uh there's a lot of reasons for that that we could speculate on there there might even be able to be science to figure out why this is such a difficult concept for people to grasp one of the things is certainly that if you grow up in new england you you have a new england accent okay and if you grow up in china you speak chinese so there are uh the way you might dress certainly the the way you use the language uh there's going to be superficial characteristics about you that are absolutely environmental without a doubt okay but those have nothing to do with your personality so they do not have to do with your behavior patterns other than the way you make phonemes coming out of your mouth okay so so therefore she's got uh a problem here where she's feeling this uh this guy's blown away i don't know how long they've known each other if he's blown away it must be pretty early the um one of the things it sounds that she feels like she's being judged for her lack of discipline uh is is her lack of discipline a cop out i don't think so in other words if your daughter is being a pain in the ass i'm sure you've tried a lot of different things to try to make her less of a pain in the ass and it's not working join the ranks of the staff at juvenile hall okay they don't have any influence either so the um so i think that that obviously the the solution to any problem is more information and so in this case um this guy maybe it sounds like she's inferring that she's being judged so therefore a conversation is in order and once again this conversation looks something like this like hey you know i i've just been really uncomfortable about something and i really i need to to get some of that off my chest just because i and i need to i need to talk something through with you something that you know i'm feeling kind of bad about and i just kind of want to get it a little clearer okay and so now he's going to be like oh well what's that you know he's got you got all ears now and if um if you want you could flood his circuit just a little bit it's early in the relationship but you can flood it anyway and you can say listen you know i'm just getting to know you has been a you know it's been a really exciting thing for me and i think you're wonderful and i'm really glad to be get the chance to get to know you and get to know you better i hope okay but one of the things that makes me feel self-conscious is my daughter and uh you know my daughter isn't anything like your daughter you know your daughter's like a model citizen and my daughter's a little hellion and and sometimes uh when i see reactions to my daughter i i can't help but feel guilty or feel like that you may be thinking i'm a i'm a bad mom and that course makes me feel insecure and um and i'm just wondering you know what what goes on what goes through your mind about this whether you think i'm not doing a good job with discipline whether you've you know what are some of your feelings about that or are you just looking at this little girl and thinking man i i want to run you know 100 miles from this because this thing's a wild animal could you give me any feedback about kind of what you're thinking and feeling just because i'm feeling kind of insecure about that okay so what this is is that this is this is the beginnings of crystal clear so we need to know we need to mine that guy's brain to find out what it is that he is thinking okay so let's suppose he thinks well you know the truth is i just feel like you don't do a very good job you know i just feel like you could do such a much better job with her if you set firm boundaries and were more consistent with the the disciplinary things then i just don't think that she would be you know the way she is you know look at my daughter you know i i set firm back he's gonna he can't help but take a bunch of credit for the fact that he's got a genetic you know little well-behaved star he he won't understand that it had nothing to do it had to do with which sperm hit which egg it didn't have anything to do with anything that he did he has no idea that that's true so just we just pause and listen to what it is that he has to say let's find out what it is inside of his head what it is that he's thinking okay then once we find out you know then we have to go from there because we we can't plot the course of action too well here until we get that information so if we get the information that he he's basically saying listen you know it does bother me because i just feel like you you know if you did this or you did that you know i think it would could be better i think you know you would you have better results and i just feel like it's important for her to learn how to control herself and blah blah okay so that's fine that's what we expect him to say because we understand that his sum total his knowledge about personality is negative zero it's below zero it's not just that he doesn't know anything it's what he thinks he knows is completely wrong it's worse than nothing okay he's got incorrect hypotheses about how this works through no fault of his own okay so now so now what are we going to do with that we're going to say well i can certainly see why it is that you would think that okay and believe me i've i've thought a lot of those a lot about that myself and i've tried a lot of different things and i've looked at different experts and i've looked at some books and i've gotten some feedback and got some help but the truth is you know the more i learn about this i hear what you're saying but you know what i've learned that kind of what they are is what they are okay and uh that that was a hard realization for me to to wrap my head around and it's still frustrating because i still feel like i want to shape her behavior and to try to make her better in some ways and i probably always will okay but i've actually uh come to a gentle partial acceptance of the fact that that's not actually the way it is and i've learned a lot about about child development and personality development and it turns out you know what we think about this it's not what we think okay she's that way because her dad was that way and it turns out that you know there's a there's a lot that has been discovered in the last uh 20 30 years about this and it's not in the out it's not in the public discourse so i can share it with you if you'd be interested and i hear you and i know your frustration uh but i want you to know that you know if if i had any confidence that there was a a set of techniques that i could use to shape my daughter to be better behaved and more like your daughter believe me i would do it but but the science that i have become acquainted with says that's not the way it is so we've just got ourselves a wild ride that's what i think would you be interested in looking at this to learn a little bit about it i'd i'd love to share it with you i'd love to point you that direction okay there we have it not too defensive we we first you know we showed our vulnerability that that we were anxious about this uh that he's very important we're giving him uh a status here as is deserved and we're sharing our anxiety about this and then we want to know what it is that he's actually thinking i'm not sure exactly what it is that he's thinking but he's probably thinking something along these lines and then we agree with him and we understand that that is how we thought that is how we felt that is how we've actually shaped our behavior on the basis that that was a reasonable hypothesis and then we have discovered not only through trial and error that that isn't the case but we've also discovered through scientific investigation that it's not the case okay would you be interested at all in looking at that science would you care okay now the uh that's what we do we lay it at his feet and see whether or not he would be interested in learning that maybe he wouldn't okay if he wouldn't fine no problem but he has now heard the fact that you've actually know more than he does about the topic and that what you've learned is is that you're just going to have to live with being frustrated okay and then when she grows up you know probably attenuate to some degree and hopefully we wind up with a with a pretty good human being at the end of it probably will but that doesn't mean it is not going to be a bumpy ride and we just live with it okay that's that's how i would sort of tell that story and see whether or not we can get him to bite on learning anything there are things there are places that i would send him uh to learn things certainly i would send him to jen hawk's lecture series on the living wisdom library that's one place that i think is pretty easy you just sit down and for about an hour or so you listen to jen wind out on this i think that's pretty good if he's more sort of technical and wants to see a board-certified expert in this ben uh possibly we uh a book that's quite readable is called the nurture assumption it's not it's kind of out of date uh by judith rich harris so it has some ideas in there that are clearly incorrect but it has it's still covering um it's a it's a readable account of how it is that the assumption that nurture is driving personality is incorrect okay the uh if he's if he's very very bright and he's technical in other words if he's willing to read a technical reasonably technical type argument if this is a if this is a college level dude that could have majored in biology or computer science and he's interested and he wants to actually know and he kind of disagrees with you or he's has some curiosity then you send them to plumbing okay so this is this is what the book blueprint is for and and uh in relatively short order uh he will he will understand that he didn't know anything about how this works so you could also listen to the answer the question here and um when it comes to difficult children i want to point something out we don't just let them run a rough shot all over our lives we have penalties just like you have for prisoners okay we look at prisoners and we say okay um yeah it's genetic you know what i mean you're impulsive you're disagreeable you're low iq you have no conscientiousness you're freaking dangerous as hell that doesn't mean that we don't impose penalties on them so that they get they basically they're they're we can influence the cost-benefit analytics uh that are driving their behavior by changing the rules and making clear what the rules are and imposing penalties consistently we can do the same thing with difficult children it's just that the outcomes are so we can make our lives work easier under those situations by imposing some law and having consequences to those actions and there's a way that we do that and on the free part of the website i go through this i think it's i call it gloat therapy and i've talked about it before so you can go there and and understand how it is that we can get some leverage over children where it doesn't have to be nasty but we can get a lot of leverage over them to get behavior better than we would otherwise get however there's limits to that personalities are the limits and so uh understanding that you are in no way responsible for the fact that your daughter is argumentative and yells and can make life difficult and and and be you know emotionally unstable particularly at eight years old uh when she's 28 what you're seeing at eight is likely hopefully to be significantly muted and she'll just be sort of a chick that's a pain in the ass but is otherwise a highly functional member of society and can function in in all capacities but what we have now is a difficult situation where it's embarrassing and so we want to unpack this the embarrassment is coming from our fear that we are being seen incorrectly by the person on the other side and therefore judge negatively as a possible mate uh we need to clarify that carefully with this with a process like i'm describing and then hopefully educate that person out of their ignorance wonderful dr lyle thank you so much all right all right uh maybe we do one more question one more let's hopefully it's a quick one okay um and uh so okay dear doctors uh following a previous podcast i am a bit confused do the five personality traits have to do more with how we feel or how we act dr hawk had said that as a high conscientious low neuroticism type of person she often feels like she wants to change her lunch plans for example but doesn't act on it um now that i'm thinking about this i had lunch plans with her a few months ago i'm just kidding i was under the impression that a truly high conscientious low neuroticism person wouldn't even have this type of feeling or at least not often so if someone often thinks that people are no good bastards and hates most of them but acts nicely most of the time that makes them a high agreeable person i'm sorry if this seems obvious i've been with the podcast from the start but sometimes i have trouble grasping the basics got it no it's understandable that there would be some con confusion about this so let's um let's try to to uh shed some light on this the let's let's try to understand what you're really seeing when you're looking at personality so let me explain what it is that you're looking at the uh personality is the is the study of individual differences in psychology it's individual differences in people's brains the um the genetic code dictates that we are 99 the same in other words all of our noses are basically the same our eyes are basically the same our kneecaps are basically the same our kidneys are basically the same so if you study medicine in india you you know exactly how to do the same operation and if they fly you five years later over to do operations at ucla you know exactly how it works okay in other words there's there's no new there isn't some little cork inside the pancreas of people in los angeles that is not true of the people in india the reason for that is is that their dna is is very close to identical so it's going to turn out that between each of us we are essentially almost clones coming in two types where there's a handful of details where there's a male and a female type and there you go now the uh however there's one percent of the dna that's different [Music] that one percent yeah winds up being the stylistic differences between two camrys so a couple of guys a couple of 20 year old boys they are camrys that's what they are um they're both what we're going to call it they're two 20 year old cameras now are they a little bit different yep they got little individual differences don't they they're not exactly the same one of them's a little fancier a little shinier been kept up better it started out as an xle instead of an le and therefore it's still worth more money okay uh the other one got in a fender bender didn't get fixed etc we see differences between them okay now they had a different upholstery uh etc so there are clones they're extremely similar except there are stylistic differences the what's giving rise the most important variable in the stylistic differences is genetic variation it's going to turn out that the genetic variation is going to be very very small because 99 of the genetic code is going to be identical so nathan and i are literally if you went down through the billions of pairs of nucleotide pairs you would find that his and my code was exactly the same it would go on for days you'd be reading you know the same base pair in the same spot over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for weeks as you were looking at them one by one okay and you'd be like well these two are the same person the same animal exactly it's like no nope you just gotta wait okay once in a blue moon in there there's a little pair that's different there it is okay so now so what are we looking at those tiny tiny tiny little differences it's going to turn up turn out that you are designed by nature to be incredibly sensitive to those individual differences incredibly sensitive they are extremely similar but you are a world class genetically built expert to detect those differences those differences um we can actually look at the world and look at the typical issues that people have with each other for example and the decisions that they make with respect to their environment so a class of decisions that they make with respect to the environment is how far should i go from my really safe foxhole before i go out into the world and looking for some oranges those two people that are facing that question both equally hungry and have had an equally similar environmental experience for how often they find orange trees those individuals sit with a one percent difference in their genetic code about how they're going to compute this so your question about is their feeling different or is their thinking different or is their behavior different the answer is is that their thinking is fundamentally different and the thinking then drives feelings and it drives behavior i actually don't think you said thinking so what you wouldn't realize is that what the genetic code does is it changes your thinking so if you happen to have genes that have built a machine that is a more tolerant of of unknowns then even though all of the animals are going to be similar in how tolerant they are of unknowns some of them are going to be more tolerant of unknowns and some of them are going to be less so the species is very similar but one of those toddlers is fine running 50 feet away from its mother the other toddler stays within 10 feet okay neither of them goes 800 yards okay so they're reasonably close but one of them is bolder the reason that one is bolder is because their genes for generating anxiety under those conditions are la are are are built to cause neurotransmitter differences to wind up in a machine that has less anxiety anxiety is a device inside the head that will become activated under conditions of threat one of those kids feels a threat at ten feet away from its mom the other one does not feel the threat at ten feet doesn't feel it at all fifty feet the system gets activated now so it's going to turn out that you're not going to find it on a gene by gene basis you're going to find it in tens of thousands of genes so it's going to turn out that these are tiny tiny little stylistic differences it's like looking at two different camrys except they built them in a different place and so they use slightly different materials and in little places there was a little gold golden chrome around the headlights and the other one they didn't make it that way and another one they the the wheels were a little bit different and they had somewhat different tires one of them had firestone another one had bridgestone okay it's like okay okay big deal little tiny differences little tiny differences that's exactly what you're looking at except you are incredibly sensitive to those individual differences you're like a race car driver that can tell the difference of of the the tire quality and its structure you can actually pick up because you're so sensitive that there's a little bit of a problem with the left rear tire okay a normal driver could never pick that up but if you're a race car driver for a living you could you are incredibly sensitive to individual differences in in psychology so those differences are a result of structural differences uh in the person's brain as a result of the dna that they have that's a little different than everybody else is on earth okay now so god knows what was the question nathan just tell me what the question was just read it again [Laughter] if someone thinks that people are no good bastards but asks nicely doesn't that make them a high agreeable person no it makes them it makes them probably quite a disagreeable person but very emotionally stable and highly conscientious okay so you can you can see how we use the words of the big five plus iq in order to describe huge swatches of the genetic code they are they are nothing other than the roughest of estimates so let me let me explain uh what for example 80th percentile conscientious looks like let me tell you first what it doesn't look like if you give me 25 people that all scored at the 80th percentile for conscientiousness those people are going to look very very different in terms of their conscientiousness that's because that score on a test is nothing other than a rough estimate of the genetic code of how those people are built so for example if you if you gave me uh 20 young men there were at the 80th percentile for athleticism do you really believe that they're all going to be equally good at basketball football baseball track gymnastics and swimming you know they're not there's going to be very very significant differences in their athleticism okay a bunch of men looking at a bunch of women that are 80th percentile beautiful are all those women's beauty in the same location or do they have assets and liabilities that are moving around the chain there with respect to their attractiveness every aid is not the same in fact they're all different so an 80th percentile in conscientiousness god knows what it looks like okay but we do know that on average if we compile a large amount of variant of different kinds of behaviors that people face we're going to find that somebody at the 80th percentile is on average if we looked at a thousand of their behaviors uh where conscientiousness was at issue we would find that they would be well above average when we compile those data which ones they're conscientious about and which ones they aren't conscious about it's a total mystery we're not going to know what it is all that this score on a on a big five inventory does is tell us you know kind of where it is that they're at it's interesting that you know when they're selecting um uh athletes for the nfl or the nba or major league baseball or soccer or whatever else they are incredibly focused on on their everybody that's there is a 99.9 percentile athlete every single one of them okay so uh so the question is where is that 99.9 percentile where do they have you know where are they at 99.99 and is that an asset that we can use in this sport okay so uh pro football is notorious for looking very very carefully at the particulars of what that athletic capability is because football is much less to do with skill than basketball for example so basketball we are looking at the neural circuits inside the organism and seeing you know what you know what is the capacity in there for extraordinarily fine uh motor behavior because shooting a basketball is is a finer uh process that almost anything that ever takes place on a football field and yet it's the dominant problem in playing basketball the um uh now please let's not have a bunch of football players telling me well wait a second of course at the quarterback position uh it is the same type of fine motor skill and throwing football as is involved in shooting a basketball so you need somebody back there that has extraordinary gifts ability to do that as well as catching a football and kicking a football but after that you know shoving the other guy off the line sorry to say not super fine grain skill okay so it's going to turn out that in the nfl what general managers do at some point in the draft they quit looking for a particular skill or a particular slot and what they say is okay at the end of the second round we are now selecting the finest athlete available we don't care what the skills are we don't care what position we know that for the standpoint of a catchment of athleticism in our organization and whether or not we may trade that individual for a skill position later et cetera et cetera we want to figure out who's just the finest athlete period fascinating that's what they do okay now so uh anyway so the issue is is that the way this all works is we we use shorthand by using descriptions uh that come out of the big five for describing personalities and it's useful to do that because we can look inside as we use those those labels we can understand why the neural circuits that have been built by the different genes we can see how it is that combinations of those different neural circuits can fire in a given situation and one part of the the mind being for example dominated by a 90th 99th percentile intelligence for example can can actually override a an 80th percentile instability under conditions where there's a significant amount to lose okay so the person may be they can be damn disagreeable and they can be damn unstable but if they got a high enough iq and there's enough on the line they can hold it together when somebody else couldn't with a lower iq for example um i've actually witnessed this many times [Music] i've watched i watched my good friend john mcdougall uh in a in a beginning an argument with john mackey and mackie was giving him some [ __ ] and john knew he was right and he knew john mackey was not right but john mackie had a point and he was going to push it and i watched john look at that and boy [Laughter] you're looking at an angry alligator lizard like whoa okay that uh john mackey has a great great marketing power and has been wonderful to john mcdougall in in many ways and it's been a mutually beneficial relationship for probably 20 years but at that moment i i watched the the edgy disagreeable john mcdougall and watched every iq point in there saying don't do it john okay so hopefully hopefully that will help uh help help clarify this that that inside your mind there's a clash of different perspectives about how to handle every situation in your life sometimes you will feel those different clashes you will you will find for example your emotional stability getting rocked by the opportunity of your high openness as it sees something that it look thinks you ought to be excited about but nobody else is okay so and then it's got to be tempered with your conscientiousness etc so your your behavior is a is a vector could be thought of as a is a vector analysis in other words if we're going to analyze your behavior we have to consider that you're in a tug of war with with call it six different uh features of your of your genetic code pulling you somewhat in different directions and where you wind up in a given situation is a result of the interplay of all of it and that's how it works you
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