Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 245: Maximizing freedom, Are pets a supernormal family stimuli
an auto-generated transcript


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


oh my all right well how are we doing i think we're doing pretty well yeah yeah i'm not too existentially tortured by the end of 2020 i welcome it there you go good i feel uh i'm kind of yeah that this is sort of where the the uh temperature of the nation is is like yeah on with it on with it you got it yeah i've been watching i've been binge watching the crown which is fantastic by the way if people have not developed a crown addiction but the season four just just came out so of course i had to watch like all ten episodes in two days um and it's it's incredibly good because of course this is the princess die season right so it's like oh man talk about evolutionary psychology and you know what she thinks she's getting into versus what she gets and charles defective tortured personality and all of his distortion and everything else um but uh oh my god i'm having a doug moment i completely forgot what i was going to talk about 2000 i told you something about binge watching a tv show i couldn't i lost you after that yeah no maybe it'll come back to me this is i've been hanging out with doug too much i just get into my my departures and i forget the point of the story that's right oh oh oh it was getting on with it it was um getting on with it was very thatcher-esque because of course princess dai overlaps with with um the th the era of margaret thatcher in britain so she's very she's played by jillian anderson from the x-files and she's just this wonderful portrayal of this incredible you know the iron lady this is this amazing battle axe of an incredible politician and she's very much like just get on with it just suck it up get on with it yeah i uh yeah i might upset some people but uh i had a email exchange with uh alan goldhamer today and it was about covet and mathematics and and uh all this thing and i finally said you know what let's just have a hundred million people go ahead and get their vaccination if they want let's get on with it my god i've had enough of it anyway all good yeah 2020 is really just worn out everybody's patience on just about every front i think yeah you got it i think the only winners are the mean creators for this year so yeah that's good yeah no it's been a banner year for the memes and the meme creators the meme lords the meme lords among us have triumphed all right well in in the uh in the spirit of getting on with it let's just go straight to the questions yeah okay uh dear doctors i miss dr lyle's rants about the coronavirus i think of them as rants as they seem passionate and detailed so i thought i'd give a short rant of my own to try and provoke him i'm in my mid-40s and for almost my whole life i've been a strong advocate of much stricter controls of driving smoking and drinking i mean individually i'm not talking about doing all three at the same time literally my only disclaimer is that i understand controls may lead to behavior to go underground and so you'd have to allow for that otherwise i'd say bring on the controls of these dangerous activities roughly 1.5 million people worldwide on the roads die every year 7 million from smoking 3 million from drinking i believe the drinking one is arguably a big underestimate and the others might be too but let's be conservative in a discussion i always say to others to save this many lives and in the case of alcohol remove vast swaths of anti-social behavior i believe the acceptance of some downsides in our personal enjoyment of life are acceptable do you feel the same way i personally don't own a car don't smoke don't drink by the way others seem not to feel the same and often strongly say that deaths are an acceptable cost to the ongoing enjoyment of such activities relatively unsafe driving smoking drinking etc so the end of my rant is this how fantastic is it that everyone's cost-benefit analysis has suddenly shifted so far to now accept infringements on personal behavior just to prevent covet deaths i say welcome to the saving lives party i've been here enjoying it for many years and i welcome you perhaps now we're ready to save a few more million lives with some relatively minor additional infringements of personal liberty we could look at driving smoking drinking etc but then the replies ensue oh wait kovitt is special i've looked at the statistics and yes maybe it is but it seems to me by far the least dangerous of the four and yet we're doing much more about it weird what say you well i'm not quite sure what what the question winds up being uh jen do you do you see the question in there or what do you what do you say i'm about to rant on libertarian principle before i do well yes i i feel like this is this question is uh tailor-made for you and so i'll just go for a walk while you spend the next 47 minutes answering this but i think the kernel of the question is why are we why do we have uh why are we in such a uh fuss about covid when there are these other risks that are much more dangerous statistically speaking and and we're not um we're not making as much of a fuss about them that's how i read that oh interesting interesting i i didn't i might be i didn't quite get there but maybe that is what the person's saying so yeah i can sort of see that the what i'm what i'm at first seeing at first blush is hey isn't this a good thing that we are tapping down on personal freedoms for some you know the upside that comes from quote being safer the um yeah i think that's some sarcasm got it yeah that's my interpretation oh god don't don't get too intelligent with us people you know [Laughter] all right never understand masters oh man the uh yeah i'm not yeah i'm not sure i understand but i will say this that um that this you know jen i think talked about this last week and this is a and we discussed it just a little bit that this is a very interesting problem for you know a free society in i i think that the founding fathers were were closer to thinking clearly in principles they didn't have as many million details to be thinking of because they couldn't envision everything but i think the i think the fundamental um the sort of the fundamental thoughts i think were possibly to some extent influenced by adam smith and his analysis of the uh the invisible hand and so the the notion of you let things go and the optimization of freedom in markets winds up optimizing the output of the society's economy and similarly the same thing would happen in principle in a utilitarian fashion about just basic human life satisfaction that the as jefferson would say the best the the government that governs best governs least uh the least infringement on human freedom and so the um so the the fact that smoking and drinking may cost uh some people it doesn't cost them quote doesn't cost lives it costs percentages of lives there's a big difference and so you know when they when they talk about oak cove it has cost 250 000 250 000 lives it has not it's cost 250 000 people a very very small percentage of their life it's a big difference and so the uh so when it comes to the infringement of human freedom uh on the part of a government a government that is actually sort of optimally organized not that there is not that there is uh you know the governments in general including the united states government are are not like the most brilliantly principled uh concept around around optimize they sort of are but they're really they're not they're pr it's pretty good this is about it this is as good as it has ever gotten the kind of the reasonable clarity of thought about essentially setting humans free from other humans by minimizing government interference but protecting individuals essentially against the state and so the um we're the u.s is about as principled as it gets with respect to that and so the notion of of an infringement on of the government on me for my own good for not drinking alcohol i mean that that became the the law of the land and it was obviously a noteworthy utter fiasco and the uh in prohibition obviously and so but the government continues to do things like this and and interfere in in uh normal human exchanges market activities etc uh making them illegal uh et cetera quote for your own good and and i'm you know obviously deeply opposed to this because my my sense of of life is one that the notion should be that we're going to optimize human life if that's what we're asking about and that's what we're arguing about we're going to optimize human life in principle by allowing human beings the maximum amount of freedom i.e the least possible infringement upon what it is that i want to do by you and you don't get to say that well what i like to do is infringe upon you so let me do it it's like no that's not that's not part of the equation one second while i let my cat out hold on my dogs are locked up in the bedroom and they're pawing at the door so it's like i'm just hoping that it doesn't get too dire right so yeah i'm trying to focus here and you know i get that uh racket so uh yeah i i'm thinking now i'm glad that jen said that maybe that this was sarcastic because i hope that it was the otherwise there's no end to the list of human infringements that some uh some totalitarian-esque individual would start thinking that is in my best interest to have everybody else having it infringed like oh i don't know how about horseback riding or spec writing's dangerous people get thrown from horses they die they get maimed they have their lives direct well we'll just eliminate horseback riding it's a thing that people can do what about playing hockey same thing what about playing basketball that's the same thing what about having sex oh well you can get vd hell you could get aids and die so let's just make that illegal you know we can go uh not to mention i don't know god playing fencing shooting guns you know going and playing golf because that could hurt your back or you could be out in the weather and get hit by lightning and die there is no end to it so when you start realizing okay this is absurd so where where does the where is there any legitimate place for government intervention well you know i.e why shouldn't i be able to drive 180 miles an hour whenever i want answer because now you're infringing on my safety and so this is this is the the where it crosses is where this happens and so kovid is an interesting moment you know for governments to think about about where where does my searching for my own freedom wind up interfering on you and where do we draw the line and it gets muddy okay so from my standpoint as a very principled libertarian my answer is i don't want the government in it i want somebody to be able to open their restaurant and have people go and that restaurant can run it any way they want and if you want to take your chances and wind up with covet as a result of going to a crowded restaurant that's your business okay and you might say oh no that's going to spread this this terrible thing and i would have to say okay let's look at it in the context of the overall cb of the society and what it is that we really think we all have the standard to gain or lose collectively at which point it makes sense to try to analyze just how lethal it is and what the costs are of this infection at which point you you drive yourself down to the analysis that i've been interested in which is that you've got to 300 000 americans have died of this infection or related conditions but they've probably only lost about a year of life on average uh 40 of the victims are in nursing homes or in adult care facilities so we know what that means we know that the average or the median age of death i believe is 78 for a coveted victim and it's 78 for a person in the society so as a result we recognize the sum total human cost is very similar to that of having you know i don't know how many how many children are born a year in the united states it's about it's got to be about 1 80th of 300 and something million so it's got to be maybe 5 million children a year and let's suppose we lost you know 5 000 out of 5 million a year to some disease process and if we did we multiply that by 80 years of life that would be four hundred thousand years of life so if we were losing five thousand children a year that would be notable and disturbing and there would be some action trying to figure out how to take care of it but it would not be a national catastrophe and we we are but that would be the same amount of life years lost as this so to my way of thinking this does not look like something where if you are infected you are losing a massive amount of life and therefore if you happen to infect someone else who then goes and visits their grandmother in a nursing home and costs her year of life this is to my to my way of thinking well how did why were you in contact with them well because they were out and about okay so if anyone wants to lock themselves down in a basement and you know get their orders in from amazon and then disinfect everything with a spray and protect their life like it's this precious thing against this ex you know very low risk process if you are not an elderly person that's fine with me i have no problem with that you're free to do that but i do not think that you have any any legitimate reasoning behind stopping me from taking my chances i don't try to stop people from taking their chances from using heroin that's their choice okay and uh could they in theory be high as a kite and then driving to me on the road sure okay that's a theoretical possibility if they run into me on the road and we we live and there's a bunch of damage and it turns out they were under the influence what happens well they lose their license that's reasonable okay because what they did was irresponsible but i don't consider it irresponsible for you to take your risks out in public in in a pandemic where the the cost to the average life of the in the society is exceedingly small okay if we multiply the sum total of years by the sum total of people that we have the cost so far has been extraordinarily small the societal response has been huge okay i understand that running the math on these parameters and seeing it the way from the perspective that i see it is exceedingly difficult for people to do uh there's a lot of problems in in life where the human mind doesn't do a good job of analyzing the math because it's just a little too weird for it to do there's a number of things like that uh yeah it's so it's so weird that we're predominantly relationship oriented social creatures who don't think mathematically about the world that is really weird you're right it is this is disgusting [Laughter] so the point is such is life it is the way it is and therefore as a result of that there are political realities that will fall out from that that are what they are etc etc but um so i'm not sure where you know where this person is winding up and maybe they're winding me up to to do this very thing to try to look at it and share my perspective on this um for myself being a relatively middle of the bell curve person when it comes to risk uh risk aversion not nothing fancy about me you don't you don't see don't see me any with the fancy stripes that jen has [Laughter] jen has jen has war stories that are way fancier than mine i'm pretty naturally conservative uh and therefore in general i'm i'm uh reasonably risk-averse with respect to all kinds of things uh but that when i when i look out at the landscape of businesses and people and what is it that they want to do i just can't possibly see a justification given what we now know about the lethality of this virus in other words what what the amount of life loss causes uh given an infection i look at that and i say no this should people should be able to take their own chances uh if it turned out that it was massively more dangerous so that the average amount of life lost was 10 times what it is then i would say okay you have a point okay that would be the equivalent of a drunk driver uh drunk drivers killing far more people than they do and therefore if you get caught drunk driving we throw away the key on you for 10 years that that that would be you know a reasonable cost benefit some kind of cost benefit analysis would need to be done and in fact legal theory actually has that concept in it about how to run those cost benefit analysis for society's best interest those kinds of cost-benefit analyses have been thrown out the window with respect to this and so what we have instead is a a fear-based little animal that can't do math uh essentially influencing a political process that has led to a remarkable amount of oppression i think it's temporary so i'm not that worried about it i think it's ridiculous but i understand that humans are humans and so that's going to happen and so at the end of the day i shrug my shoulders and we wait for 100 million people right ahead of me in line to get vaccinated and then i'll just sit there and watch all the little penguins in the water see if any of them get eaten and by that time i'll sit back and analyze whether or not i'll ever get that vaccine which is probably no and uh and and then we'll be back to normal and we'll be the new new normal will be look a lot like it was a year ago dr lyle thank you so much uh this one yeah yeah are you back from your walk yet oh i'm sorry yeah jeff are we still recording oh yeah jen so so what does your 13 degrees off dr lyle's take on this because i suspect there may be a few uh things you have to say about this i mean i don't i don't have anything to add to the sort of political theoretical uh libertarian rant so i mean to the extent that you know i identify largely as a political libertarian like i'm completely in step in step with everything that he's talking about in that in that sense i just don't quite think the question was really about that i i sort of interpret the question and maybe um yes well but you know he's been asked to rant so yeah dangling a treat in front of the animal um but i i see it as a you know a version of the question that is like you know if why don't we have more more of these kind of trade-offs between personal freedom and and uh in public safety with things that are more dangerous than than covet not not necessarily advocating for them just sort of asking like why the disconnect between these these different costs in the in the different cbs that are being run and i of course my mind immediately with that question goes to the virtue signaling and the and the status acquisition that accompanies uh being in much more of a fuss about covid than being in a fuss about say seat belts or drunk driving or tobacco use or anything like that there's there's just so much more to be gained in the village for certain personality types um in in the conditions that we're looking at with social media and everything else to grandstand over why we need more more attention paid more more regulations more more fear-mongering in general just any any sort of energy that we can throw at the problem there's a different cost-benefit analysis for this problem at this time in history particularly for certain certain types of personalities than there is for those other risks that's that's sort of my take on it but i might just be completely yeah just on a lsd trip over here and reading a different question no no that makes perfect sense it's it's uh it's interesting that you say that i had thought about seat belts for a long time and of course i would say the notion that it's you know prohibited to not be wearing your seatbelt is ridiculous the uh however nobody's ever gonna get a ticket for it for one thing and by making it sort of the law of the land it that is actually an interesting piece of government education that is super useful the uh however as a libertarian i'm like hey let the let the insurance companies dictate this you know i.e if you're caught and your seat you know you got it damaged under your head but you didn't have your seat belt on too bad for you you know this says right here on our policy that that's not covered so yeah uh as as a libertarian i'm just uh you you can see the point of a lot of people's angst about trying to get other people to change their behavior for their own benefit or even for the village benefit the uh but i i sit you know at a position uh defending optimizing human freedom at a pretty pretty hard core you know i'm not as hardcore as some of the nuts because one step over for me jen is a nut one step one small step for a nut giant leap for nut kind there you go [Laughter] all right we're gonna get another label last time you talked about gonads dr lila i gotta i got someone send me a box of nuts that says edible donuts we're gonna get another one the only other thing that i would add in the in the libertarian discussion is that you know this is something i'm only very dimly aware of because i'm not a political theorist um as exciting as that would have been to wear extra tweed and elbow patches and to you know take up smoking a pipe early in my career and all of the all of the wonderful things that go along with being a political theorist but i am aware of of debates in the literature about um the applicability of libertarian principles and libertarian thinking to uh societies that are not fundamentally pretty homogeneous right so it's kind of this if you if you have a real diversity of values and of uh differential risk analyses and people's people basically paying different costs because they're coming from a very different cultural place very different religious place very different all all this this um genetic diversity yeah yeah yeah there's going to be it's all driven by genes so it's a different situation for the founders where there's great agreement on general values and sort of okay well we're all just going to kind of let the market decide these principles when you get into the current situation where we've got this incredible diversity of values and morals and and and differential perceptions of risk assessments right are deeply rooted in people that essentially person x is subjectively paying a way higher cost for your freedom than somebody who shares those values with you so it's right it's a debate within the literature i don't think there are any easy answers to it but it is a critique that sits out there wow that's so interesting to that's so fancy i never even would have thought of that that that's that's why we have the little all-star team it's beautiful jen thank you for even bringing that up yeah that's the sort of thing when i was talking about mask wearing yes you know what that that that's the reason i wear a mask is it's sort of it's it's not to surrender to the the most nervous denominator it's not i'm not you know i'm not being subjected to some kind of tyranny it's it's that i'm it's actually the same principle that we talked about on a show a couple of weeks ago where if you're if you've got a you're living in a house with somebody who's messy right like who's who rises to the occasion who who sort of adjusts their behavior right i forget what you called this you had a yeah you had a pithy i did name for it yeah right i forgot what it was but i sort of i i apply that in in the social in the public sphere right so if there are people who are are much more burdened by a particular policy and it doesn't cost me a huge amount of my personal freedom but that's again there's there's some sort of equation that would govern that right what am i actually paying for in terms of my personal freedom when wearing a mask for me it's not that great it's not it's not a huge burden you know if it were if i had to put on a full cdc ebola suit every time i went out to the grocery store that would be a higher cost to my personal liberty right if the risk of covid were the existing risk of covid that would that would be too much for me and i would feel burdened by that so i think these are very dynamic you know they're they're going to change with all the circumstances but it's just worth throwing out there yeah all good a small a small [ __ ] in the armor of libertarianism yeah very small very small like i remember i remember reading when i was getting into libertarian thinking is um there's a couple of studies i think i it was either milton friedman's book thomas saul's book or or another book some of that nature and they they mentioned about seat belts and also bicycle helmets and that there were studies done that after the laws came out that they found that the crashes the car crashes people were dying at a greater frequency because they felt more protected they suspected that people felt more protected and so therefore they thought they could drive faster or whatnot that was the uh the argument there um yeah yeah yeah of course yeah this is sort of this in the op-ed of reason magazine right my god exactly yeah yeah i i understand i think that these are rumors that we hear rather than yeah rather than fact but but still but the point is the point is still there and uh and that's these are these are the trade-offs that that i would like to see considered rather than just scared animals yeah uh influencing political policy which isn't even considering it so anyway that's where i'm at all right our next question all right on we go let's do something else don't we have some jealousy problem in a relationship to talk about or something uh let's see maybe we should i don't know i can't just whatever we got nate okay our next one is uh this will this is this is dr hawk dr lyle because you guys own pets this this may be get interesting okay all right dear doctors be your genes listeners are sophisticated enough to recognize that porn and video games represent supernormal stimuli that can be problematic because they ultimately get in the way of achieving meaningful goals but if we're really honest with ourselves wouldn't we also admit that dogs and cats are really just another form of this counterproductive supernormal stimuli meaning that they tickle the reward pathways meant to incentivize family formation but could possibly inhibit us from doing the work to form meaningful bonds and offspring with potential mates well jen you can you can have fun with it but i got i got plenty to say but roll i i mean i suppose yes speaking as the the 40-something crazy dog lady who never had children um i i think it's uh yeah it's a whole separate conversation about whether video games and porn constitute super normal stimuli to the point that they're they're getting in the way of achieving meaningful goals i think we'd have to kind of interrogate that whole proposition but but maybe i can leave that for you to do because i don't think that's going to be happening at the level that this questioner might be worried that that's happening um i yeah i think definitely having pets uh fulfills the parental circuit in a very significant way it's um but this is such a this is such an individual game i mean i i don't think you have this wholesale situation where our you know the national fertility rate is declining because too many people have pets in their home and they're they're putting off having children because they're they've they've misapplied like it's it's the pleasure trap of raising dogs instead of kids i think that's very unlikely to be a meaningful problem in the demographics of national welfare anybody else's but that doesn't mean that it doesn't it doesn't satisfy that parental chip it absolutely does i mean i i do i do think probably if i didn't have dogs there would be a lot of a lot of things that i would feel or missing in my life that i would i would be looking for more actively in a relationship you know the dogs are company they they are this kind of proxy for children um dogs particularly are sort of um perpetual toddlers you know cats cats are much more you're living with peers you're living with adults everybody's sort of with your boss you're your boss but dogs are very childlike they're they're just you know constantly even even though my dogs are seniors now they they behave in a very childlike way and so there is um to some degree with cats too but it's it's absolutely i i feel very maternally toward them and i can tell that those those circuits have been to some degree hijacked in any kind of earlier in life yearning for for a child which you know sort of can't just bubbled up occasionally in my history um i haven't felt that in a very long time because i've had these dogs for over a decade now or or one or both of them so i yeah i it definitely can supplement and and perhaps even replace um those impulses to some degree but not at any level that we would need to be concerned about and it's a it's a personality specific thing i am particularly susceptible to to that so-called trap because of my immense love for dogs which is genetic you know my there were enough dogs in my ancestral history that that you know made enough hunts more productive that i i am very drawn to dogs in ways that other humans are not so um but i this has been a this has been a complicit willing um arrangement that i have made with them where i i have sort of traded potential potential uh reproduction of children for this this time with the dogs there's not i wasn't tricked you know i wasn't um i didn't wake up one day and be like oh my god i never thought about having children because i was so distracted i thought i had children with these dogs i think i think women who really want to have children regardless of whether they have pets or not that that drive is not going to evaporate on them um because of their their maternal instinct toward their animals i i know plenty of women who um have lots of animals and and who are you know still yearning to have children have children want more children i think that is something that is individual to females specifically uh doug can speak more to the male brain on this but i think if if you've got the the the instinct the the the the sort of your biological clock is ticking for children it it ticks all day long whether you've got puppies or not yeah um i would say this from a just the the theoretical underpinnings of what the question is and that is that supernormal stimuli are by no means necessarily negative uh they can be extremely positive and so for example well i don't know it's christmas time so the more mormon tabernacle choir for goodness sakes okay that that's a that's a super normal stimuli the uh that you would never have seen that in the stone age and so you get to find out through for example music or for example the movies you get to find out you get to push the limits of what the human emotional system is is capable of experiencing by getting an extraordinary stimulus in a in a cheesecake that would never happen so you're never going to get a story told by a campfire in a single voice that is equivalent to titanic the movie it's never going to happen you're not going to have the music you're not going to have the beautiful people playing it out you know very carefully acted you know five seconds by five seconds caught on camera by an outstanding director with all you're just never going to get anything even close to it so you're not going to get that experience you can't hit all the neural circuits in the organism so beautifully for two hours you can't do it you can have a really fine experience you can have a great storyteller paint a picture with words and with their voice and with their gestures that could be magnificent and it would be a great experience and maybe similarly moving but you could never have a titanic you couldn't do it and so there's nothing in the world wrong with that experience it just it allows us to find the limits of you know what a human nervous system is capable of experiencing how exquisitely so the um so that that would go with a great many things including pets so pets have been essentially selectively bred by human beings to create extraordinary cost-benefit analyses emotionally for for the owners that's what they are so undoubtedly as jen says they started out more utilitarian and useful and now they've morphed all their way to just being so damn cute and unbelievably uh exaggerated feedback systems of communication of love that it's like tremendously satisfying for people to experience that that in no way is uh a problematic for the disruption of humans calculating what's in their best best interest where we are essentially not trying to just settle for the payoffs of the genetic code for how we're designed to follow our feelings towards intense uh ecologically valid uh sensory experiences that then result in what the optimization of children of the optimization of producing children that's where that design goes we are absolutely trying to beat that design so we're trying to subvert uh the the goals of that design to try to taper down we want just as exciting a romance and sex but we don't want all the implications that come with it very few people do very few people very few women want to have 16 children the um and very few men would want to support them they might want to have sex with a woman enough times to create 16 children but they probably only want two so the uh in the same way that we want to hear music listen to stories we want to and pornography is an interesting example of can you get a stimuli that when it's super normal is it disruptive to the person's uh you know is it disrupting their ability to actually make a cost-benefit analysis on their time and energy utilization that winds up being a worse deal and the answer to that is of course that's possible so that's possible with food drugs pornography gambling there's a there's a list of things out there social media okay there's a list of feedback systems and stimuli that can be that can essentially trap the organism into making what is probably lousy uh judgments is it always lousy is always problematic no it's not okay nobody is going to ever make a convincing argument to me that the snickers bars that i have eaten in this lifetime were a counterproductive pleasure trap that i'm going to pay some dire price somewhere in my old age where i'm going to regret that i ate him now alan might say so but he's wrong so the um so the uh what we're after is we're actually in some ways we want to welcome supernormal stimuli into our lives where that stimuli represents an improvement over what the natural stimuli would be that we're actually designed by nature to be sensitive to okay so i'm designed to feel admiration and like the sound of a really good voice but you don't why not have the best voice and why not have it perfectly reproduced on a compact disc or in my ipad ipod or whatever to to to have it great why not have it reproduced by a phenomenal speaker system when it was done in a studio why not and the answer is there's no reason at all why not so the um so the that's sort of the big wide theoretical answer to this question is careful supernormal stimuli are not in principle a problem at all specific supernormal stimuli represent a substantial threat to your ability to maintain an optimal calculus for how it is that you should be spending your time and energy if you're going to try to optimize your life experience so we need to look out for those things while we take advantage of the other things and try to put together the best life path possible that's what we that's what we're trying to do even even in the case of something like pornography i can imagine yeah yeah yeah i know so i want to hear what you have to say [Laughter] there are definitely cases and i've i've talked to people who sort of are forfeiting potential real-life romantic engagements because of a so-called addiction to pornography or because of the sort of idealization of a certain type of of mate that they can find in pornography that they can't find in the real world so that that is a real thing that exists with that kind of supernormal stimuli but i don't think that exists with pets i think i think there's a difference yeah in in having pets to sort of uh fill a space in your life that is unsatisfied by a real like a you know an actual child or a real life example um and and having it get in the way with going through the process of the you know the romantic process and the sexual process and everything else that would lead you to following the mandates of your reproductive goals i i cannot i mean i suppose it's possible in the world for for a female to meet her dream guy and say oh you know you're just you're just five percent more trouble than my dog and so i'm cool with just staying home with fluffy okay so yeah go good luck via condos like i just don't i don't think that that's often going to happen not to say that it couldn't but it's not going to happen in the same way that it would with these other these other supernormal stimuli yeah i think the as you would say these other things all of these supernormal stimuli would potentially would potentially carry a little bit of risk with it some of them would carry enormous risk some of them carry moderate risks and some of them carry probably almost none and so that that's how that's how we should look at this yeah all right well we started with analyzing risk and we're ending with analyzing risk i think there you go that's a perfect way to end 2020 dr dr hawk dr lyle keep keep going keep put dr hawk in front of dr lyle one more time all right so uh dr hawk um dr lyle [Laughter] it's only alphabetical i don't get what the big deal is right it's just i understand it's not a big deal at all no you're first doctor lyle's second that's how it is not a problem the grass is green the sky is blue and dr hodge is first that's it oh man all right guys well it's been a wonderful year with the two of you and let's we'll re rewind and reload as we begin 2021 and uh i'm i'm reminded dr hock by the way um and this is not patriotizing i i i got so much feedback from your uh statement on the the new year's resolutions about the process-oriented uh you know process-oriented thinking uh surrounding goals that that uh i'm i i i re listen to it every once in a while too um and so you know january 1st is right around the corner and i guess that's when everyone's gonna uh be allowed to start over again or start you know their resolutions anew and um and uh so we're looking forward for 2021 dr hawk and dr lyle yeah hold on a second and also jen is going to have a little mini seminar for a few days in january that people should know about that exactly it's gonna i'm not all sure what she's gonna do but this is a a rare place where these principals are i'm sure gonna be running through this i.e process over outcome self-esteem over grabbing for something desperately and so this is a a good time of year for people to to uh that if you're if you're wanting to sort of get your head very straight about how it is that we're going to pursue some goals in this case i think it's associated with health weight etc but it could be anything uh this might be something interesting for people to look into yeah dr hawk can you tell us a little bit more about this please yeah yeah sure i'm actually doing two things in january so one of them is um called the virtual village which is uh an outgrowth of the um sort of group coaching that i've been doing in december so people can sign up for that and that's that's sort of anything goes in that conversation so this month we've been talking about motivation and goal setting um in advance of january uh for sure uh but we talk about other things just kind of what people are going through it's sort of like a 12-step meeting meets group therapy meets a meditation session kind of kind of experience so if you're interested in that you can sign up on on my website junhawk.com um and then also uh later in january right around the time that everybody's new year's resolutions start to fail them i'm i'm doing what i i think doug is talking about which doug has actually been recruited to be part of um which is just a it's a four-day webinar series uh that is mostly around setting health goals and you know sort of dealing with the pleasure trap and and but it yeah it can it can apply to any sort of goal setting process it's just about what constitutes a smart goal how do we how do we align our intentions with our stone age circuitry um and how do we look out for the most common pitfalls so there's a day where i will be talking with doug about some things and then um also there's a day talking about just some of the some of the specific dietary things involved with the pleasure trap with dr michael greger so that will be later in january i think it's uh the 26th through the 29th and people can sign up for that on my website as well cool and that's that's jen hawk double h o w k dot com so h o w k dot com yep telling you it should have been h a w should have been i thought my dad my father always did that you know he was the big radio guy and he always whenever he put his name in print he just did it with an a so yeah oh well it could be these cool logos you know it's my contrarian great grandfather who didn't want a conventional spelling i don't know where those genes came from certainly wouldn't know anything about them [Laughter] he had a super super typical uh name when he immigrated and so he actually just made it up it was a place name um and uh but he he didn't want it uh didn't want it to be too conventional couldn't have that no brother oh man all right everybody great talking to thank you thank you so much uh for this wonderful year lots and lots of lots of things we learned and uh with especially with all the things little changes going on in the world uh with this coronavirus stuff and you know yeah just interesting 2020 that's for sure so let the 2020 jokes begin next uh next year
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist