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Episode 243: Erectile Dysfunction, Pleasure Trap, Ego Trap, Opposite Blame
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dear doctors my wife who's 54 and i'm 61 have been married for 30 years and we couldn't be happier i feel like i'm the over rewarded one and she feels the same way the only problem is is that my high blood pressure medication is causing me to underperform in the bedroom to the point where i get extremely anxious i feel embarrassed and guilty that i'm losing this part of myself to old age my doctor says it's either the meds or a stroke so i have to follow her advice my wife of course the angel that she is is very supportive but i can't help but feel guilty so my question is is how can i help her understand that i do love her and that it's not her physical appearance that is causing my malfunctions well oh man well i know the answer and it's pretty simple the uh uh doctor treat the cause sure the symptom sure dr goldhamer and i uh did god knows how long ago it was more than 20 years ago we published uh a major paper uh detailing i can't remember how i used to know these numbers exactly but i've i finally forgotten i think it was 173 consecutive admissions over 12-year period at true north people that were admitted for high blood pressure and 173 out of 173 achieved normal blood pressure off of medication so we literally had a 100 success rate for 10 for 12 years the uh then right after that time i was real smug with somebody uh and it said that we were going to fix this problem and it turned out it didn't work [Laughter] so the uh that's because you had a hypertension that was not due it turns out to the normal hypertensive causes so uh just shows you just when you think you know everything then you then you get it so hubris brings down every empire doug yeah she's just got a way of saying things nathan pretty soon you feel like you're talking to some roman scholar of the 14th century so just true yeah that's true so uh anyway the solution is to to go to fasting escape do a 10-day water fast eat the food afterwards and your problems solved so that's it that is the solution you could you could do it with diet maybe if you were exceptionally diligent it turns out that the diet is not going to be as effective but it could probably get you there if you did a if you did a superb job for six months on your diet you would probably uh spring back as it were but the the most effective way to to do this is going to be through water fasting so if you can if it's convenient enough and it's affordable and fasting escape is is a very reasonable place for if you if any of you out there are interested and you want to look into it but this gentleman uh should definitely seriously look into a supervised water fast you know you're not going to fix this problem yourself in three days at home you're going to need to go a longer distance the average fasting length i believe was 10.6 days or something like that so that was the the typical length of time that we needed to achieve the results at the end of that you do not need high blood pressure medication because the blood pressure problem is gone and um and and then along with it are all this nasty side effects that come with high blood pressure medication and we should not have a problem uh with erectile dysfunction electron dysfunction is is you know a physiological problem and it's one that is uh generally correctable if if you are having sort of if it's sort of hit and miss and so you are you you still have some ability to get erections then it's almost certainly very correctable uh if it's completely gone uh it might not be you know there there may be so much uh anthrogenesis in that area that we just we may not be able to to reach in there and reverse that process but um but most definitely you do not need to be on these medications no matter what your doctor thinks uh what we need to do is as jen says correct the underlying problem and fasting is the most effective way to do it wonderful dr yeah yeah yeah high blood pressure is is one of those things i think of it um as it's similar to insomnia so when i have clients who say oh i have high blood pressure or i have insomnia it's i i don't i don't accept that that name for your condition until you have in the case of high blood pressure either fasted for some amount of time or you've been extremely compliant with a with a no salt or very low salt diet in a whole food plant-based diet for some amount of time just like i don't accept that you have insomnia unless you've you have created an environment of pretty exquisite sleep hygiene if you're still drinking a pot of coffee a day and telling me that you're an insomniac that's not that is not does not compute so yeah you have to you have to kind of address this at the at the root level before you start to medicate and certainly before you try to have a very difficult conversation with your spouse yes all good thank you very much dr hawk dr lau for the plug for people if you're interested they can go to fastingescape.com uh to learn more about this um but yeah that's i see this very very often like we you know we have continued to have that hundred percent success right here too um so it's uh and the doctors are always really interesting the doctors of the patients who come here because they really don't believe the patient's gonna actually not eat anything and they don't believe the patient's going to eat the diet either and they also don't believe that the patient's blood pressure is going to normalize and very often i've had patients who who tell me or call me or email me afterwards and they say the doctor was shocked and very often it's the first time in their entire career that the the doctors ever seen their patients blood pressure improve off the meds so it's really sure really fun to watch yeah it's the single most responsive thing i think in fasting i mean fasting no matter what goldhamer says it can't solve everything right but it it definitely it can solve this almost always yes yeah people are yeah yeah all good no no no no nothing further it's all good that's what they need to do that's the that's the solution all right what else we got all right our next question uh eating foods that make you feel horribly bad knowing they are harming you i find myself gluten sensitive with pain in my joints after eating it same with oils spending after time in pain and vomiting all night uh you know taking medications and nausea and still i feel like i'm punishing myself and wanting the foods that are bad for me why am i abusing myself in such a manner i don't get enough sleep often can that be the cause is it a deeper emotional issue i used to be sent to my grandparents when i was as young as one years old till 12 years old each summer away from my parents for three summer months to the black sea for the sun and sea waters i was a skinny kid and grandma and my aunt would always stuff me like a goose so i gained weight over the summer usually like 10 to 15 pounds and then i'd lose it all in the winter when i come back home to city life i hated to be away from my mom and being sent away but why do i do it now nobody is stuffing me but me can you help me understand the cycle p.s i'm overweight and feel uncomfortable and unhealthy 20 pounds over my normal weight thank you well jen uh this is an entertaining one it just depends on how we all how we feel right now we certainly have [Music] yeah yeah i mean this is uh there's there's a lot of backstory here and the backstory matters almost not at all to your outcome so this is a really common thing that people will look back in their past and do this pattern seeking to try to explain their current struggles and their current problems and because you're stuffing yourself with with foods maybe the same foods that you ate on vacation when you were being stuffed like a goose by your grandmother um it looks like this is a cycle that you're unable to get out of that began in childhood but really your childhood experience has nothing to do with this other than perhaps introducing you to certain types of foods but what's really going on is that you're dealing with fundamentally addictive substances this this is at the heart of the pleasure trap so you're not stuffing yourself you're you're indulging in foods that are harming you and making you feel like crap because those are unnatural hyper processed modern foods that you're not adapted to regulate or or be able to properly make use of so you you're you're being drawn to them um as a sort of a low level addictive process you're unable to get out of this cycle in the same way that i was unable to quit drinking alcohol when i was it was wrecking my life and i was not able to get a hold of it and i really wanted to quit and i would try to quit for a while and then lo and behold i'd get back into it again and i'm i'm sober now but that was a major major struggle because i was dealing with a substance that had hijacked the pleasure pathways in my brain and it was i it was not a fair fight and and food in the modern environment is exerting a very similar effect on your on your decision making and on your ability to modulate your behavior and your so-called willpower when you're confronted with it so this has nothing to do with old childhood wounds or anything that you're trying to recreate it's it's absolutely just a function of the kind of food that you you're being exposed to on a regular basis and there's no there's no easy answer there's there's a process that you have to go through where you you i use the phrase all the time that i got from 12-step programs which is that relapse is part of recovery so every time you you eat this crappy food and you feel really bad physically you are teaching your nervous system that it's not worth it to eat this food so every time you you so-called relapse on it it makes it less likely that you're going to go that far down the track next time and and indulge quite as much and harm yourself quite as much as you did the previous time but you're still doing it because it's an addictive process so all you can do is is you know watch that watch that improve over time as you as you become more and more aware of how much it really is harming you and how little pleasure it really does give you and try to control your environment as best as you can and keep this kind of thing that you can't stay out of out of your home and out of your direct path that you're going to encounter on a regular basis and since we're you know pre-thanksgiving and we're talking about the the fasting escape then you can go check yourself into jail at the fasting escape joint join our high blood pressure erectile dysfunction husband and you guys can uh go keep nathan company over thanksgiving yeah don't don't make a move on the guy though the guy has a really happy marriage [Laughter] yeah that's a good point good point excellent i i have i have good news and bad news about that answer the good news about that answer is i'm now officially redundant and the bad news about that answer is i'm now officially redundant nothing else needs to be said perfect great stuff yeah all right what else we got all right so the next question that you dr hawk and you dr lyle have on your screen we're going to skip that one because you just answered it you answered you did a two-for-one deal for us so okay so just scroll i just removed it so just scroll one more down and this question is when you're caught between the pleasure trap and the ego trap for food is one way out to somehow get to the point that you know you can eat whatever you want but you truly don't want to eat the high fat food or is the only way out to be sick and your life depends on it hmm let me think you can't quite parse that one right and hand that one over to you that's kind of a complicated word yeah i'm not quite sure so the the ego trap is the fear that you can't live up to expectations so the solution to that problem is to lower the expectations moder you know to some degree to the point where the person finally feels like they can meet the expectation so that is the um that is the general process there now the the what makes the ego trap pleasure trap dynamic problematic is that if we lower the bar so far all the way to let's just eat whatever i want then we are marching right into the pleasure trap so there there's a there's this sort of problem in in the in the world of healthy eating and everybody scratches their head about it and everybody's got an opinion and nobody knows anything okay so the the most people are like like you'll you'll hear some speakers say oh no you got to be perfect you got to be stay right on cl you know right on the line because it's an addictive monster and you have other people that are saying no that isn't true um you you need to you would do this thing step wise just like you would do anything now the truth of the matter is both positions um have merit but their their everybody is ignoring individual differences and so they're ignoring the personality factor so uh so therefore we have to enter that into the equation as well so the what it is that i do is that i listen to somebody who is in a motivational crisis in other words so that's what that's what a self-destructive thing is you are motivated to do something and as jenna was just describing what you're motivated to do is to activate the dopamine pathway if that were not true there wouldn't be a conflict so that's clearly what the conflict is and we understand what the hyperactivation the dopamine pathway is doing is it's telling you that you're doing the right thing so that that's what springs the pleasure trap once you become aware that that is actually a false signal okay so once you become aware of that you're hung over or your your gut is just filled with three banana cream pies and you feel like vomiting though you don't and you wake up the next morning feeling sick what happened well what happened was is that the hyper signaling of the dopamine pathway as a result of a super normal stimuli caused you to do something that was self-destructive the uh that in essence it's not your fault you were never designed to to deal with a stimuli of that nature that that's why the pleasure trap um you know basically traps the entire gamut of people from you know nobel prize winning physicists all the way to skid row bumps everything in between so it doesn't doesn't play favorites states presidents [Laughter] okay so in other words this is a this is a um it plays no favorites what it does is it's different types of artificial stimulation are going to attack different configured nervous systems differently so there's going to be people that will take one snort of cocaine and they're in serious trouble other people cocaine won't do anything to but alcohol or an opiate or something else will be far more problematic so the uh we can also see a another a a truly reasonable um excuse me an a natural problem of motivation is the ego trap so that is a natural problem that's that's a that's a social interpersonal and intra-personal problem with the internal social dynamics of the individual with an internal audience if there are expectations set up that you figure out that you probably can't meet but either other people or your internal audience believes that you should be able to do then we've set up a motivational crisis where the organism computes a cb and decides that they are better off not trying and they're better off just pretending like they don't they don't care okay so that that absolutely happens with with pleasure trap problems because pleasure trap problems can be very embarrassing they can make you overweight they can make you alcoholic they can make you addicted to cigarettes i had a friend of mine a really really nice guy was addicted to cigarettes you know i met him when he was probably you know he was about 50 and i was about 40. and uh really liked him very likable we had a mutual friend and we spent a fair amount of time together and he smoked and obviously i'm me and i'm uh just written a pleasure trap for god's sakes and he read it and his response was you know what i'm just going to you know i love smoking cigarettes and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna do it and i'm gonna eat otherwise helpfully and i'll probably get away with it and i'll just smoke as long as i can and that's that that's how i'm gonna live my life and it was an interesting attitude that i never challenged but it would come up from time to time it was clearly an ego trap process in other words he didn't want to admit that he might not be able to stop and try really really hard and then fail okay so he had that as an aspect of his personality um he i don't know what you would call it there was a proud uh streak of the personality that did not want to you know certain personalities are going to be more susceptible to the ego trap than others and this particular guy was highly susceptible to the ego trap and so uh he he had this attitude and and this would come up you know over the years and then about sometime last year or so he got super sick and he was in a lot of pain and it turned out he you know had a massive lung cancer and he went in to see alan and then he he told he you know he said alan you know hey i'm gonna i'm gonna quit and alan you know alan's decent enough guy in the clutch and so but to me allen said yeah just in time it's like just in time yeah he he died two months later in excruciating pain so the um the ego trap can be you know can be a devastating problem that sits alongside a pleasure trap the pleasure trap with respect to smoking is not that hard to beat you just have to be willing to fail at it you got to be willing to take it on you know multiple times about eight times on average about two weeks of a pretty intense unpleasantness but the average person if they go up to bat eight times and they take that thing on they'll beat it okay so it's not like it would have been that hard to beat so what did he do he left at least 10 probably 15 years of life on the table he spent the last six months of his life in excruciating pain uh and then when the chips were down he was willing to do it well then it was too late so i'm wandering all over the place with respect to this question but the but the the but the answer to the question is you know just has enough complex puzzles that the the standard lines that we're going to get from anybody about a prescription about how to solve it are or are lacking the nuance that we are going to shed here that we are trying to explain here so number one you have to know your own susceptibilities number two you have to then realize that your job is to make improvements from where you are now and to work diligently to make those improvements not to be seeking perfection but to absolutely uh be determined to make improvements it's good if you actually have sort of some sort of written record to look back on that process of improvements so that you you are accountable to a record and you can also see the fact that you have succeeded as you have a written record over time as you do that what's going to happen and one of the most important aspects of this problem is to be paying attention to the nature of your self-esteem mechanism so the self-esteem mechanism is a mechanism that resides as an interaction between the internal audience and you're a steam meter so when you do diligent work if you do an improvement over what it is that you were doing before in the pleasure trap and you do it consistently your internal audience will give you a bit of a thumbs up if you do an excellent job the thumbs up is more firm in other words it is it is a sense of internal dignity that comes with knowing that you have done an excellent job but if as long as you work towards it in in a way where you're improving that is what it is that you need to do you do not need to seek perfection it is rare for a pleasure trap problem to be so devastating that we have to be perfect there are there are conditions on the continuum of addictive process where that's true alcohol cocaine methamphetamine heroin those things you have to be perfect cigarettes come into to come into range there uh food is it is almost never necessary that that's true so food your job is to make improvements solid improvements and then make some more and then make some more that's how it is that we're going to get there and we're going to get there by watching for an internal guide that's actually talking to us if we're paying close attention which is the internal audience's signal to the esteem meter i.e the feeling of self-esteem of moral rightness the uh you don't need to be perfect you need to be good and you need to be good quite consistently and uh and that's that's how we can beat uh the pleasure trap obviously there are individual differences there are people that that may react to uh junk food in the way that somebody else reacts to alcohol uh not gonna be common though that wouldn't be typical for the species so most of us are simply as what jen has called it we're in a low-grade addiction along with an ego trap that is basically sent to us by by an outside observation of the problem that says hey this shouldn't be that tough and yet it's actually tougher than people think as a result it sets up an ego trap and then between the two of those things that you go trapping the pleasure trap set a trap that can be remarkably difficult to get out of so that that's how we do it we do it with with an intentional improvement over where it is that you are and then some record keeping that's involved and then watching for the self-esteem mechanism improving its signaling and then getting understanding that a feeling of that you are better that you are doing a better job and a feeling of pride in that that is not happening by accident and that's a critical guidance system for you to grasp because that makes it far more worth it to be diligent okay when we seek goals of attempting to improve our diets it's almost always as a result of weight loss motivation which is almost always as a result of improving our attractiveness which is always a result of a an imagination of how great life is going to be once we get to that goal and get the esteem from people that we seek esteem from and instead what we want to do is we want to understand that the guidance system that's critical is going to be the internal audience's signaling of self-esteem along the process if we can get focused on that and learn and understand it we're much less likely to let it go and that's the solution to that problem dr lyle thank you i i'm reminded of the talk that you gave at chef aegis conference last year where i remember you said that that that feeling you can't get anywhere else other than earning it yes and that that uh that we should be chat you that we want to be chasing that feeling for the rest of our life and that yes we can only get it through diligent effort and it's it's incredible dr lyle thank you good that's so right on target nathan that's exactly what we're talking about all right just and see if i can just jump in really quickly please um there's there's something kind of implied in so much of what you're talking about that is not um that we don't often make fully explicit but it's sort of i sort of touched on it a little earlier when i was talking about relapse being part of recovery as well which is that part part of the ego trap or one of the facets of the ego trap that people get into is that they're just gonna get this one day that they just they need to listen to some more podcasts and watch some more videos and they just can't get it together and they're just one of these days they're going to figure it out and they you know they know everything and and you know i've had some success but then i slipped back and then i just i just can't seem to get it together and it's like you need to realize that from almost everybody who is trying to solve this problem this is a this is a lifelong back and forth dance between feeling that dignity and feeling the disgust when you slip up and then going back into the dignity it's it's a roller coaster you're you're not going to one day have it just kind of fall into place and then be on the path of ever accruing self-esteem for the rest of your life because you've got it figured out and you're doing the right thing it's it's almost certain that you're going to have moments where you slip up where you you you you get indulgent you have you get derailed for one reason or another there's things are going to happen and so that that contributes to people's high expectations for themselves and their and their level of self-loathing for not being able to figure it out and and solve the problem because it's it's really not an overnight thing it looks like it is for a lot of people who are successful in the plant-based world um but for almost everybody who is trying to tackle this this low-grade addictive process it's it's because it's not something that is an all-or-nothing do-or-die proposition like alcohol is for me it's something you have to manage over the rest of your lifetime and for almost all of us that's that's going to be a five steps forward two or three steps back five steps forward kind of process it's an ongoing uh journey that you just get to kind of deal with and it's like that's not that's good and bad news and and we have lots of different tools for helping manage that fasting escape is one of them um but i think people need to need to check their expectations a little bit for how good they need to be in order to be successful like you need to recalibrate what it means to be successful and improvement over time even if that includes a lot of slipping and a lot of retreading old territory is still improvement dr hawk thank you so much and and you're so right because nothing else that we do in the world works that way like when dr lyle you were getting really good at free throws it's not like you put your foot down stomped on the floor and said i'm today i'm gonna make a decision and make all the free throws you had to practice at it practice at it and no amount of watching basketball helped you do that right totally jen that was fat fabulous dignity and disgust they're literally it's literally a protein system and it's flipping back and forth and it's the pleasure trap is dragging us into uh self-destructive and therefore self-discussed you know processes and the the other side of that is self-discipline going beating your genes going against that and and earning the dignity of the this you know par part of the process self-esteem signal fantastic i drafted jordan except she's a lot prettier and i don't like basketball yeah well so what just get used to it close enough yeah yes we're very lucky to have you on dr hawk oh my gosh it's great great stuff beautiful all right all right what else we got nathan well we got two questions both are the pleasure trap but slightly different different nuances so so if they get redundant dr lyle i i hope you hope uh um okay uh dear doctors the best definition of the pleasure trap that i could derive from your book is the state of addictively pursuing low-cost highly available often hyper-stimulating pleasures at the expense of health and happiness however you state in the summary of chapter 4 the miracle and madness of modern medicine that quote modern medicine which can help us lessen our pain but fail to help the body heal itself can also be a pleasure trap this leads me to think that my definition might be too narrow or at best it is the only one definition of a term that has many would you be willing to provide a succinct complete definition of the term or spell out the different ways that you use the term in the book um yes uh let me i i it we could we could pull it succinct uh let jen jen can use those kind of fancy words all right it what a what a pleasure trap is is it's a it's a um it's a motivational dilemma where the individual is confronting stimuli that were not part of its natural history as a result the stimuli can either be hyper activating a pleasure pathway or they can be hyper or they could be shutting down a pain pathway either way they appear to be causing improvements when in fact they are fooling the system and a destructive process is actually taking place so that's what a pleasure trap is pleasure trap is an artificial stimuli activating a circuit causing an inference that we are experiencing biological success when in fact we are not so that's we'll take that i i think that's pretty complete does that sound pretty complete jen okay of course got it no worries yeah you got to use doordash later after the request there's no doordash in maui fortunately for all involved no no i think it was the post office lady but it's like she doesn't normally knock so that was strange um yeah that sounds that sounds perfectly right i think if people can kind of get into the weeds with the semantics a little bit um when you know we're talking about the most of the time when we're referring specifically to the pleasure trap we're talking about the the the culinary pleasure trap and you know the the ways people get into it and sometimes expanding that to mean uh other addictive processes but that that reference to the to modern medicine is getting to sort of the the broader concept and the the ways in which we can wander into everything that glitters in the modern world that does not ultimately serve our interests in the best possible way yeah that's the it's the fooling of the system okay that's really what the pleasure trap is it's it's fooling a nervous system that was designed for a whole host of natural stimuli and to evaluate those stimuli accurately with respect to survival and reproductive outcomes okay and so if you if you fool if you if you uh create stimuli that the system is not designed for then you can wind up with mistakes that's how that works and and melee concurs by the way yep all right so our final question dear doctors i'm curious as to why and how we got it so wrong for so long with regards to genetics versus environment we blame genetics for chronic diseases like diabetes high cholesterol and cancer and we blame environment for our personalities intelligence behaviors and life choices when it's when in reality it's the complete opposite who we are individually is genetic and what diseases we get are driven mostly by environment like food and lifestyle once we found out that the earth was round and revolves around the sun most people caught on how long do you think it will take for society to quote catch on to the truth about genes and environment um great fabulous question and i love it and i i have actually pondered the same thing and i i haven't quite thought it through until just now which is why i love to do q a because people then ask me questions and i have to answer them and i i look through the file and i a lot of times come up with it and so jen see what you think about this it's quite possible that one of the reasons why this mistake is being made from both these opposite directions is for status so think about this that if we can be blame a disease process on nature on on individual nature then number one the the doctor doesn't have a status problem and number two the person is not self-destructed through self-indulgence so that's all very convenient okay on the other side of it when it comes to how smart you are in your personality whatever deficit you have let's blame them on our parents and our upbringing yeah yeah nothing innate to you nothing innate to me my genes are fine okay so and also my kid has unlimited potential don't tell don't don't tell me it's limited so we can sell the possible emerging inter beauty of our of our average child to the village saying how great you know they're going to be and we hold out hope and we continue to invest in that process uh et cetera so i i could see possibly status related issues being uh complicit in this strange looking dichotomy does that ring any truth jen or what do you think about that oh absolutely absolutely i mean yeah once we found out the earth was round and revolves around the sun most people caught on but not people who had you know skin in the game not the catholic church not people who had a financial interest in the opposite opposite outcomes so we see exactly the same thing now where it's maybe it's it's hard to say with the chicken and egg problem when it begins with status and when it becomes incentivized by institutional structures and rights careers and financial pathways and all of the different things that we we could point to on both sides of this equation in the medical industrial complex and in the the blank slate world particularly in education and parenting and the new age movement and everything else that talks about you know you have unlimited potential and if only you weren't this bruised little banana that was irrevocably damaged by your parents you would be you'd be you know this great triumphant character so yeah i think it's this it's a mix between um people dealing with very very strong and very salient financial incentives political incentives status incentives um and and just the fact that this is all really entrenched culturally and institutionally at this point i mean we certainly we we talk about this all the time we talk about you know how has science turned its back on this incredibly robust evidence that we have from behavioral genetics um particularly on the blank sl on the blank slat slate side of the equation it's it's a it's a travesty it's a miscarriage of of scientific justice and in psychology as well as all throughout the social sciences and so we are obsessed with this question and spend a lot of time asking ourselves this very thing um and and when you're confused look to the status that's one of our main rules about trying to understand human behavior so yeah this person is is tapping into exactly one of the things that we talk about quite extensively in the book and is of great interest to both of us we also talk about this a lot in the um on our website in the membership section with the the history of modern psychology there's a whole module for members uh where we really get into how where we went wrong um and and why blank slate thinking triumphed over over behavioral genetics and um reason essentially so if people are interested they can watch that too i think there's four hours of digging very deep into that question yes but the this is a beautiful question and it's gen jen is uh i i it's actually amazing for me the how how uh what what enlightenment i've got from from my friendship with jen has been all around i i don't think in terms of institutions i never have it's always been belly to belly me three feet four feet away from the client and the two of us are walking through their brain trying to figure out like i don't care about anything else in the world all i care about is improving their existence but jen as a political scientist comes from a world view of of institutions and systems and it's it's always stunning for me to listen to you reason things out because um at the heart of it what we have here is uh certainly in academia and then widening out of academia the the culture is intellectually corrupt and it's uh completely and so it's a that is to me you know i have been rolling my eyes and disgust over it and and slapping people quietly in therapy not physically sort of the old you know the old deal the aftershave thing slapping the guy on each side and he says thanks i needed that like that that's been stop it that's why you do phone calls that's right so in other words that's sort of what i've been doing is as a therapist and counselor and then jen comes along and says whoa you're you don't even understand how deep and wide this corruption is it's chilling and uh and you know i was aware of it but i didn't i didn't actually understand something that she puts her finger on so beautifully so many places and and stuff that we have talked about and done and we're writing and that is incentives that they're that systems start to be set up um and then then there is it's it's kind of uh you know this is how the world works that once his system is set up uh it's an incentivized in certain way it can run down a bad path forever just look at look at the world economies and how incompetent they are at solving the basic economic problems of humans like all over the world there are people that live in places where there's a lot of talent and a lot of brains but they can't get themselves organized with a dam because the existing systems are corrupt so in our country of course there's corruption there's inherent corruption in in any governmental process but the amount of it is minuscule and the system works extremely well relative to how badly it can work uh and how badly we do see it but uh uh but in on the intellectual side of things now in the 20th century particularly late 20th century and 21st century it is you know there are components of this that are rotten to the core and this this questioner has identified this and jen and i do we just you know i i i walk around lamenting and questioning and irritated and then jen explains that's how we that's how we do it is i mean it's in it's enraging though you know it's i i mean when people sort of start to open their eyes and you know they're so called red pilled on this kind of stuff you start to see the hypocrisy with the you know the the mixed incentive structures that are rewarding blank slate thinking over here but reverting to genetic determinism over here and it's like well which one is it you know like you gotta you choose your pathway you don't get to have both of these things at the same time and so it becomes i i think you know it's it's people are asking questions like this and i hear this from clients because it's there's you're watching um the dissonance of hypocritical thinking that is being buffered by strong institutional interests yeah and to one question um that uh to a component of the question sort of how long can it last that's a great question and we don't know and we we have one of our beautiful optimists robert plummen saying it's all coming down in ten years because yeah because the first one polygenomic readout you know you're like okay well this this is this is how it is he's yeah he's probably right in the sense that probably at the at the end by the end of my life it will probably be so necessary for for systems to be competitive to have to acknowledge genetic individual differences in humans that it will become it will become as commonplace in the discussion as sort of evolution is in common discussion now okay you couldn't even breathe the word evolution in 1970 that meant you were an atheist and you were a bad person and you didn't like people and you were just a disagreeable sob that that's where you were in 1970 okay today you can use that word sort of casually and get away with it and like in mixed company you know like it's it's actually gotten that that sort of has become more accepted as the concepts of the genetic code and nature and nature shows and planet earth and everything else under the sun has sort of seeped more into the popular culture as far as that goes now that hasn't walked its way over into the enlightenment that that we see uh when it comes to human human beings but it's it's going there and so uh i i you know things are human things are definitely going to change but they're going to change slowly and painfully and it's going to be um you know one funeral at a time one funeral at a time that's exactly what it is well and i think we're where the flip side of that is that there's there's gonna be this interesting intellectual schism where you know there there are increasingly people who understand how it really is and and have you know have have had their eyes open to the truth and then you all and at the same time you have ever more powerful structural i'm sounding very conspiratorial right actually just this is true like you know put your tin foil hat on and buckle up because this is in in academia in particular you have a lot of people who are just now reaching you know the very beginning of a multi-decade career who are very invested in blank slate thinking in the social sciences so i think the social sciences are going into a real dark age for the remainder of my lifetime more or less um even though there are these pockets of extraordinary insight and people doing really incredible work who are largely marginalized from those those mainstream conversations and so i i think the end result is the the undermining and the the delegitimization of academia as as we go through these next decades where the value of my phd in a social science from an ivy league university gets corroded by the fact that these institutions will continue to defend to the death these these mystical untruths of blank slate thinking um so that's a really it's a weird place to sit where we have more and higher quality information about how what human nature is really about and how humans really work than we ever have we we tacitly uh use it in the form of data analytics which if you know personality wasn't incredibly stable and behavior couldn't be incredibly well predicted from it then data analytics would be useless so we sort of have this this strange use of of these facts that is emerging in that whole venue of life but we can't acknowledge it from a behavioral genetic standpoint or or from you know anything that looks more solidly evidence-based so yeah it's a weird it's a weird place it's a weird place to sit yeah i'm glad i'm not in academia yeah aren't we beautiful yeah amazing well dr hockey will always be a pre-2020 harvard grad to me so yeah that's right it's i think seriously i'm not even joking like it matters like when oh you're a harvard phd what year did you get your degree was it was it was it pre or post the uh the the blank slate you know the uh the the shutdown the coming of the shutdown yeah yeah i mean it's um the well yeah that's a whole other rant never mind i was gonna start talking about vonnegut but we can we can do that next week people should read harrison bergeron if they haven't already we'll just leave it there you
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