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yeah so i thought i'd change things up a bit just for our last show and then share with you just some of my favorite clips uh over this past year of episodes there's been a lot going on a lot to talk about and so i tried to pick the ones that i found the most interesting and as we just heard from the intro that was a rendition of our intro song from episode 200 which technically was in 2019 but i listened to this version so often that it just wouldn't be right not to include it but it was composed and performed by one of our big fans warren taves out of canada aka jimmy the guitar player the name of the song is city of happy ones composed by franz hegedis from the album beautiful life and even though the normal intro is i think a little bit more upbeat i really found myself appreciating warren's more tempered version i kind of thought of it like the introverts version of the song so thank you warren so much and as dr hawk would say god bless the jimmy the guitar players of the world one of our first major announcements in 2020 was to welcome dr jen hawk to the beat your genes team so for almost 180 or so episodes dr lyle had analyzed and explained questions and concepts but he and i would often discuss that even though dr lyla tried to be as thorough as possible describing many many angles to a problem the sheer fact that we were both male meant that we were lacking a female perspective and the tiny nuances that come from that and so when dr hawk appeared it added a new dynamic and a whole different perspective to the show now nobody can explain things quite like dr lyle can but then again as i've gotten to hear dr hawk's interpretations of things uh nobody can explain them like dr hawk either well we had one announcement i talked to a uh ridiculously handsome uh young man from australia today it it there's like redundancy all over they all they're all [Laughter] just you know i'm gonna make sure i never move down there let's put it that way and uh he he he told me uh jen that he said you know i really like your plot podcast a lot but it's much better with doctor oh how about that oh that's lovely oh and coming from an attractive australian at that it makes it all the better that's great so uh anyway the announcement is that uh dr jen hawk has has graciously uh accepted that we we've invited nathan and i haven't invited her to be a permanent uh member of our team of course a full member of our team so thank you for joining us jen it's uh it's just it's just absolutely grand heaven it's it's wonderful it's really a lot of fun to be here and just to keep you guys in check so i i really enjoy it and it's been it's been a lot of fun in the small percentage of the 200 episodes that i've been here but uh yes we will have have much fun going forward and i'm really looking forward to it and without missing a beat dr hawk immediately demonstrated her understanding of evolutionary psychology in describing new year's resolutions you have health issues now we are now our first live show of the new year of 2020 and aside from bad 2020 jokes and hindsight's always 20 20. um it turns out i guess now now everyone's going to be starting uh their new year's resolutions so our first question is where do new year's resolutions come from why start something on january 1st or monday or you know whatever it is versus any other random day yeah i'll jump in here because i've gotten a lot of questions about this recently and talked to a lot of people who are making resolutions and wondering how to how to best make resolutions i think the reason that there's a there's a there's a collective move toward this is because it lowers the it essentially is a little bit anti-ego trapping in the sense that the expectations are a little bit lowered because everybody's transforming their lives today everybody's turning over a new leaf and nobody really expects anyone to make good on it um so that in addition to the fact that this is just the kind of culturally agreed upon first day of the new year fresh start um we're finally going to take some action on all of those those competitive goals that have been following us around and and uh that we've been acutely aware of for the last 365 days this is this is it this is when we do it so i i mean there's nothing magical about january 1st i don't think it has anything to do with the uh the astrology of the capricorn season or the phase of the moon or anything like that i think this is just a this is just a cultural moment um and it is it's very much like you can this is the one time a year where you can go in and announce to the office that you're you just signed up for a gym membership and and you're going to do things differently this year and people don't hold those expectations against you the way that they're going to the rest of the year because it's just a new year's resolution so you can have a high expectation for yourself but you kind of have this this comfort of knowing that you're in a position where you could outperform people's expectations and there's not much more motivating than that that's the the opposite of the ego trap when people are expecting more from you than you think you can deliver so this this at least it starts off with a nice little motivational boost that gets a lot of people going of course it doesn't really last very long for most resolutions because most people are making resolutions that are objective based not process based but that's a that's a whole other question well that's well maybe we can talk about another another show that's uh yeah i want to hear more about that yeah well i mean we yeah well actually you know what let's talk about that yeah let's talk about the process based goals versus objective based goals yeah i mean that's really the that is the that is the heart of of any goal setting and any motivational process but particularly if you're if you're trying to make a successful new year's goal is people fall into this trap of of linking their objective to all of the external esteem that they think that they're going to harvest when they accomplish that objective so they're going to lose 100 pounds and that's going to make them much more attractive as a mate and it's going to make that you know more more popular at work or whatever they're anticipating this big competitive payoff to accomplishing the goal so they have an objective based goal you know make a bunch of money or you know get a promotion or lose a bunch of weight or whatever it is and it's important to have these goals and it's important to be very specific about them that's part of the motivational magic is to is to have a very specific competitively relevant goal because you're not going to feel the motivation to accomplish anything unless it is unless it carries some sort of significant payoff with it in terms of what it's going to do for your your projected esteem situation in the future so it's not that having objective based goals are necessarily bad but the problem is that most people stop there um so they they write their little list and they make their little resolutions and so we can we can just do weight loss for an example because that's obviously the most common resolution that the people have um because it's the most competitively relevant problem for a lot of people probably most people so they they say oh i wanna i wanna lose 50 pounds this year um and this is great but then they get into you know week two and they haven't gone to the gym for a couple days in a row and they've gotten into some indulgent food and they feel like well whatever i guess i i missed the boat this year and i didn't do it because they didn't set up what the daily fundamentals were going to be on a regular basis to accomplish that goal um and the little fundamentals that are that are the process or what you really need to be attuning yourself to because that's going to give you it actually goes back to that article that we're talking about that article is saying that the sense of purpose and joy in life is very linked to progress not not not achievement per se it's progress toward achieving something really important um and so that's that's what we're wanting to orient ourselves to in the process of any kind of new year's resolution so instead of you know asking yourself whether you've accomplished the outcome of a goal you're looking at whether you did the basics that are eventually inevitably going to get you to where you want to be today um and this this initiates the whole self-esteem process which we've talked about a lot in other episodes and that that really is kind of a whole separate question but the the process of of developing pride and your ability to take action towards something that is competitively important for you really is the secret of feeling fulfilled and feeling like you're making meaningful progress toward a goal so that's that's essentially what kind of new year's resolution you want to have and how you should reframe your new year's resolutions if you want to not hit your first roadblock and turn the table over a couple months later the big news story of all of 2020 that ended up dominating the entire new cycle for the rest of the year the kovid 19 pandemic began this was the first episode where dr hawk and dr lyle commented on it but speaking of things going on in the world today yeah uh what do you guys think of coronavirus i'm just going to say it yeah man well i think of 20 you know i've been i've been getting you know emails 20 flights to hawaii or 100 flights to hawaii i got that email too yeah yeah yeah from alaska yep very stock market's not doing so great you know sure everybody's in a panic so to speak yeah everything's canceled surprisingly gone which i didn't think coronavirus affects you know bathroom habits but apparently toilet paper is really you know in vogue now yeah yeah yeah you want to take that yeah there's a there's a few things that i would say i think the biggest thing that you're seeing is um well there's probably a couple things but a big a big thing that you're seeing is just sheer fear of the unknown so uh because they call it corona bioverse instead of you know i don't know you know a bad flu white white white white swine flu you know what i'm saying if it was something that people were were used to then then they would feel like they could have they could essentially gauge it but because it's it's not as gageable because it's a new word and they don't know you know what what it all means and it's scary and so i think you're you're seeing essentially a species typical uh reaction that if the first at the first sound of a twig snapping your immediate reaction is the worst case scenario and this is uh this is a worse case scenario and it's also of course incredible fodder for media and so you know the media this quote is doing its job but in doing its job it it's uh we've probably never had something with so much publicity um you know where people can get 24 7. go ahead yeah yeah that's that's exactly the main thing that i was going to say this is the first post-social media outbreak like this so it's not just the 24-hour news cycle it's social media and now everyone's an expert right everybody everybody who is an expert on the election a month ago is now a coronavirus expert and has to post these manifestos on facebook about oh here's the here's the latest here's all the info here's what you need to know here's what you need to do to protect yourself so this kind of you know no pun intended but the contagion of social media that gets people really escalated and really scared and really like feeling they need to be the expert i think that's a big part of this story um and why it feels different yeah yeah yeah i've been i've been waking up in the morning and you know i have a little little uh app app blockers to you know restrict my my uh my usage but i'll all you know i've got a few minutes where i can check ch you know check it and every time i'm checking the news and i'm thinking dr lyle your words are ringing true in my head which is the media's job is to get the eyeballs on the screen yes the media's job is get the eyeballs on the screen i'm just like wow my eyeballs are on the screen watching and waiting and just looking at it yes my parents were both journalists and you know i grew up with the the mantra if it bleeds it leads like they they were they were total scanner listeners and ambulance chasers and if there was something exciting going on like we were in the car going after it because that's exactly what drive drove the news cycle even back in the dark ages of the 80s and now now it's an even more rapid ridiculous process so yes there's big money on the line to get your eyeballs on those stories and everybody's their own publisher with social media in early june there was some unrest during the black lives matter protests in various parts of the country lots of different perspectives were going on but our podcast being academic in nature meant that our curious listeners had some very interesting questions about everything going on and you can listen how dr lyle comments on the current events in a way that only dr lyle can dr hawk is not with us today she's taking a little bit of a bit of a break but dr lyle how are you doing this evening good all is well i i suppose it's all well in my world but the the world's got its uh uh got its turbulence tonight but things are looking fine yeah well the the turbulence we we uh we've had a few listeners uh send us some very excellent questions so dr lyle would you like to say something about what's going on today and uh in the world at present moment yes actually and folks uh nathan nathan shared some of these questions uh that i got a look at earlier today and i have to tell uh to tell you i'm i'm delighted uh with how intelligent and subtle and objective these questions are these are really really interesting questions uh very impressive graduate seminar level thinking uh which is what i was always hoping that that our little podcast might might be able to generate one day and it has so however this is a i i'd like to be speculating and thinking through these things uh with folks tonight however this is a time for us to be very sensitive about about a very you know a touchy situation uh for many people and so i think the the right thing to do is to examine some of the dynamics of the issues that are going on at a later time when uh emotions aren't necessarily or won't be nearly as high the follows a a general set of life strategies and clinical strategies that i use that many of you have heard before several times which is number one never make a big decision when a small decision will do we always we don't want to leap into things and make big decisions and so i don't want to uh have my comments look like i'm taking uh some kind of a position when in fact what i'm always attempting to do is just to remain as objective as possible and try to learn um i'm in no way a political figure in any in any vector uh at all what i am is i'm just very curious about human nature and so you know my sort of academical detachment that might come across might be offensive and i wouldn't want that to happen so the uh also if something is such a great idea to do something that that seems exciting or dangerous etc um it's always a great idea to wait for a while and do it later so if it seems like the guy is really hot really exciting and really cool you know and you don't you only just got to know him and he really feels like it'd be great idea to have sex with him i'll tell my clients if it's such a great idea it'll be a great idea three or four weeks from now too that idea won't go away and it won't it won't decay and the same thing is true about the the very complicated uh dynamics that are going on in in our country right now i'm seeing this now on tuesday evening on the 2nd of june and things are quite a bit different and seem much calmer than they were just 48 hours ago and i'm very grateful to see that that's happening uh the reasons for everything that's going on uh i believe are an interplay of many many different forces and those will be worth looking at to try to understand and shed light on from an ep perspective at a later time the it's going to turn out that that uh when when people when two people are in conflict two or more people are in conflict or it could be two large groups um if the conflict is very intense very serious business then it's going to turn out that the the gene survival mechanisms involved are are very sensitive about side taking so you'll see this in families or in relationships when when there's a lot on the line there it gets to be very edgy and if any individual tries to step in the middle to analyze the process without simply taking one side or another uh of a of a conflict it can be it can go bad very poorly so this is a something that that i want to refrain from doing by not getting in the middle of any analysis here at the moment this is undoubtedly a derivative of our tribal history so you're either with us or against us and under those under very high emotion high stakes situations um objectivity is not easy to find and so as a result uh i think that all of us that might be interested in whatever light that that our little podcast can shed on anything i think uh i think our ability to contribute anything to this discussion for anybody who's interested in listening our ability to do that is just as good or better later than it is now in episode 225 dr lyle and dr hawk comment on finding your own coalition specific to your personality and also to understand what depression actually is and how to get out of it if you start feeling that way dear doctors i'm a 30 year old junior doctor and longtime fan of the show i'm highly conscientious fairly introverted open agreeable and a bit unstable in my short life i have been a metalhead drummer a skateboarder have studied classical piano and physics and am now a doctor i have spent countless hours on each of these pursuits i have at times been very happy and lucky in love and at other times miserable and alone in my early twenties i suffered a terrible two-year-long depressive episode that i was only able to escape by completely overhauling my life with a major shift in values and a new single-minded focus on making intelligent decisions and working hard to slowly improve my happiness over many years i rein reoriented my life away from exploration joy and growth towards basically doing everything i can to make sure i don't get depressed again i decided to enter medicine in order to have a high paying high status dependable job even though it meant five six years of living on a very low income studying something that i actually find quite boring unfortunately i have now been finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the people around me and i've been floundering in social situations both at work and outside work i don't have a relaxed easy going attitude and i can't fake it any longer i also have been single for two years and now have few remaining close friends i think this is partly because i have lived a pretty extreme life and have pushed myself very hard through some tough situations which makes it hard to relate to others but also because i'm fairly extreme in openness and conscientiousness department what advice do you have for improving my social situation i know dr lyle recommends fishing where the fish are but i'm struggling to find my fish well what do you feel like jen um yeah well yeah let's let's see so i would say the more this sounds like a very rarefied personality type so you've got an extreme personality type um which is just who you are so you've had this you know crazy history of all of these different experiences and uh it has cost you some some social connections and it's made it more difficult to find people to connect with and that's just what it is so we can't change who you are we can't change what drives you and um what kind of relationships you're seeking uh and so the the the fish where you fish are metaphor is sort of like um you just have to i hate to i hate to expand upon such a non-vegan metaphor but it's like you just have to it's it's a numbers game if you've got a very rare personality that just means that you have to expose yourself to that many more potential candidates for coalition than somebody with a more average personality or more an easier personality to find coalition members so this is going to apply to people with all kinds of distortion in their big five um justice the the more difficult it is for you to find similarly um built humans who are going to enjoy the same kind of things that you are and who are going to see in you a valuable insurance policy that that is represented by their friendship by by your friendship with them which is what friendship really is if you're you've got to be providing value to them just like they have to be providing value to you and uh you know useful to each other when things go poorly um in the future if they do and so in your case with with the sort of personality type that you have it's going to be tougher it's going to be tougher to find those people it does it they're out there just like you're out there but it is a it's a matter of exposing yourself to greater numbers of people who don't qualify for coalition and getting more discerning about you know moving quickly on from those people once you rule them out of coalition candidacy and just hoping that the hoping that the the lords of fate bestow you with people who do qualify for coalition and and then nurturing those connections when you when and if you do find them and they're rare you know i i have an unusual personality it's uh not i don't think it's as as distorted on the dimensions that you're talking about but it is distorted on several and it's it's been difficult for me to find people who qualify for coalition but i stumble across them once in a while but i'm also extroverted enough that i uh i talk to a lot of people and i vet a lot of people for potential friendship and coalition that ultimately don't make the cut and so you have to you have to just kind of embrace that process and hope that you get lucky would be the way that i would look at that with with friendship with romance and with anything else and then and then when jen good things happen then she dumps her friends and beat your jeans that's what happens says my number one coalition member all right now the uh i want to add a few things this is just just beautiful all right on the i would say this that uh this i i hear something interesting happening and that is that the the person had a had a major depressive process and they're a little intimidated about that because it's a little bit mysterious and they found that by getting productive and having some kind of moving forward that they got happy again so let's talk just very briefly and so we're under we understand clearly what happiness and depression are these are this is sort of a cleaver of a continuum of qual the qualitative feeling of emotional experience uh and of course those qualitative feelings are actually nothing other than analogs for the underlying probabilities of gene survival that are sitting under those experiences so obviously an orgasm under the right conditions with the right person should be about as good as it gets for human beings which it we would expect that it would be because that's how the genes are going to get reproduced and those would be the genes that you would want to be reproduced on the other hand being tortured or some other such thing when you're about to die that's about the worst thing so the feelings are met are an analog map of gene survival probabilities and so therefore depression is is it may be mysterious to this individual but it's actually not mysterious at all if we were to analyze it from this perspective we would realize that the depression was failure feedback and so knowing that depression is simply failure feedback and understanding that we don't have to work frenetically to avoid failure feedback we just have to understand the nature of that feedback and then map our way around that failure you know domain more effectively and so success leaves clues in those arenas and so we have to just be smart about that and it sounds to me like this person has not had any serious trouble in many years and we wouldn't expect them to ever have trouble again the um the what jen was talking about was you could you could think about life as a giant a giant smorgasbord uh people so in that schwarges board our your happiness is dependent upon are you going and getting you know really good food that you like repeatedly that's what it's going to be and so the uh there's going to be a certain amount of novelty that's that's uh necessary you're not going to want to just have brown rice and broccoli every day of your life even though it might be adequate at some times so you're going to want to have some novelty and but you're in order to get the novelty and get your coalition to to meet a lot of your different potentials for activating your moods of happiness there's going to be some trial and error and inevitable short-term failure that's the way it works the um so it's we look at this life this is a young person but life is really a process of it's a journey of self-discovery and that means that sounds highfalutin but it's not meant to be it's essentially you've got a personality or a genetic characteristics that your preferences fundamentally will never change their the job is to figure out it's basically like a pinball game that if we we know where the points are scored and how to do it then we can hit those circuits more often and more completely and have greater life satisfaction it's it's not fundamentally that hard very often when we're unhappy and we're frustrated the the answers are not that far from the surface they are in relationships that are causing us difficulty in this case the person's not very happy about their work they have done a tremendous job in putting themselves in a position where they can be financially flexible so go find components within that career that are exciting or if they're not you can always work that career part-time and if you desperately want to paint and be a van gogh then you can do it because you can work two days a week and spend the other five days a week as fan go if that's what you want to do so your nervous system leaves you clues just as success always leaves clues anywhere in the marketplace it also leaves clues inside you've had experiences of happiness there's a pattern to those find out where to spend your time and energy where it hits those circuits and scores those points we shouldn't have to live this life the slightest bit uh with other than short-term discomfort given the hand that this person has there's all kinds of people and all kinds of really interesting and exciting things to do a short while later in honor of an episode on the repeat exposure effect in women jimmy the guitar player also known as warren taves made another song for us [Music] well speaking of repeat exposure uh jen and i actually a couple couple months ago we're artists we had we had some time and uh i think you know we had we had some time to to spare um and we ended up writing a song to the tune of michael jackson's beat it but instead of beat it it's called repeat it and one of our most gifted and talented jimmy the guitar player listeners named warren tapes mixed and recorded a guitar version of the song so dr lyle dr hawk i've sent you a version i want you to hit play and so we can get your reaction to it okay all right i'm gonna listen to it right now do so okay i'll uh okay all right okay [Music] so soulful you wanna chase to me and do what you can no time to see a horse he's no much a man you [Music] those tricky genes they just can't see a good man they need a little time while he extends his hand you want him to commit better give him a chance [Music] [Music] right [Music] he has to show you that he's really prepared those issues don't come cheap be better [Music] to see how he shares repeating [Music] [Music] give enough time yeah [Music] [Laughter] that's very cool lauren's a genius not that it was is amazing yeah yeah so uh for our fans who are curious uh if you just heard the audio uh just visit the beat your gene or uh visit my youtube channel just nathan gershfield um and we'll put the video up there with the lyrics on there if you want to share it it's a pretty fun one so warren thank you so much it's just an incredible video this guy's a such a master guitar player yeah he's also got you know he's got the uh the the beard mustache looking rugged it's just a per he's got it all bringing the whole thing a few episodes later dr lyle answers a question about aliens i thought it was a very entertaining answer but also apparently it caused a bit of a stir since i received quite a few emails about it dear doctors i have a question regarding alien abductions i once read a book called communion which is an alien abductees accounts of being abducted over several years in this book he also detailed other people's experiences john e mack the former head of psychiatry at harvard where jen went to college did a decade-long study on 200 alien abductees and did not find any obvious pathologies present across the study's subjects if mental illness is not to account for the feeling of being abducted by aliens what are the doctors takes on this strange phenomenon how how classic some guy in the department of psychiatry is going to do some worthless study so he can get on a tabloid front page the uh this is you know he did a decade-long study of 200 people that that claim this like this is something interesting what a total waste of time the uh all we're obviously talking about here is some uh some probably some degree of extroversion obviously high openness uh probably not very high conscientiousness and probably not very smart so if we we took the average iq of the average abductee there's a good chance it's below the mean so uh because if your your stupid friends just might believe you and give you give you a little status for it so now i wouldn't expect any psychopathology out of this i just expect some rather run-of-the-mill nonsensical humans that believe in all kinds of crazy [ __ ] that's what i think yeah that's what that is i mean what what a i mean what a ridiculous thing for this guy to do i mean really how many people do you need to study before you figure out that these are just a bunch of low end not very smart whack jobs that that there's nothing wrong with them just do you know do 10 let's not spend a decade and do 200. what a what a fool all right or but really what it was was grandstanding because it was the the sexiest thing that this guy could sell at a conference that's what that's what drove that whenever you can't figure out something why somebody's doing something look for status and that that's what that research was all right all right all right i take it you don't believe me no or alien abductions nor do i believe that people thought that they were abducted right i mean that's that's really occam's occam's razor answer to this question is that's what they have in common is that they were all actually abducted like let's just consider the obvious hypothesis like let's just take them at their word yeah sure right and despite you know the amazing thing is about that is that like all of the radar work that we do and and the motivation for the aliens obviously what the aliens wanted to do was they wanted to come and not talk to any of our heads of government heads of military heads of science or anything else no they wanted to talk to 200 morons that's with who they wanted to talk to and otherwise leave no sign yeah yeah so anybody that it would say it is an idiot and anybody that believes it is an idiot and anybody that studies it is an idiot the whole thing is total fiasco dr lyle what do you think about the movie independence day that one was pretty [Laughter] in that much of a rant about something feeling that disagreeable oh so your mystic chip your mystic chip is uh you know well yeah i think i think it's coming down to openness it's gonna listen and and status opportunity not only you know the the author of the study in the paper and his own status mongering but also yeah the you know doug's touching on it the sort of low-hanging fruit of of social status available to the local yokel who gets to go to the bar and tell a story about being abducted so oh god yeah yeah i would do it myself it's the tall tales you know like control for people like who's who is most likely to tell a tall tale in general yeah it's got all of those characteristics that you're talking about with a with a dose of again the sort of the extraversion to go weave weave a tail in a social setting about it to gain a bunch of status so yeah but he's he's the head of psychiatry so he's not thinking about the world this way um and uh yeah i i also just you know since i've been tarnished by my association yeah yeah right i want to want to state for the record that i don't you know was not part of that department and i don't know the guy and don't completely have no knowledge of any research or any work that he's done and have nothing to do with my harvard experience there you go there you go you're all you're clean and in what felt like a social media and news grand finale for 2020 the us presidential election between president trump and former vice president joe biden happened and we got some commentary from dr hawk and dr lyle and we are anxiously awaiting the certified results so dr lyle dr hawk take it away what uh what say you about this uh this is interesting well this is uh this is this is why you have a phd in political science from harvard for just times just like this so let's let's let's hear what jen has to say as you look at this whole thing jen just give us a little feel of your survey of it yeah well yeah doug and i had a good conversation with us this morning for people who are on our membership site on the living wisdom library we actually talked about this on our membership our weekly membership chat um and so uh people may have already kind of heard the points that we'll go over today but i think the main thing that comes out of this whole experience and anyone who's been listening to the podcast for any amount of time knows that they can come to the conclusion on their own that it's uh it's very likely that doug and i voted for different candidates even though we share we share a lot of politics in common because evolutionary psychology kind of it it really drags you into a more libertarian position because it it really communicates very effectively through behavioral genetics and just through individual difference the fact that humans are individuals humans have individual preferences they are wired up in very individual ways we obviously have many many things in common but the pursuit of happiness that is so central to our entire premise of democracy is actually a very individual process so as you come to terms with that through ep i think it's really inevitable that it starts to seep into your politics as well because you reach this point where you realize it's actually very tyrannical to impose your idea of the pursuit of your happiness on anyone else in the population at all let alone the other half of the population that doesn't agree with you so i think we have we have that kind of premise in common even though we we sort of drift over to the other sides of the bell curve in terms of our share not share dimensions and the other things that would uh determine what party we're most affiliated with um and you know i i think the the main thing we're obviously nothing is nothing is completely official yet uh although it's it's looking pretty official um i don't i don't know how much of a chance that you know vegas doesn't think there's much of a chance of this turning around so at that at that point i start to think that okay we're actually this is really happening um but what we were talking about this morning on the q a is that it's it's this is really uh amazing confirmation of how robust american democratic institutions really are and when i say democratic i say that with a a small d you know small dem small d democratic small l liberal like this this is the machine that the founders designed to be incredibly resilient to even really ridiculous unforeseen challenges and really toxic personalities in our leaders so say what you will about trump but the guy is the guy is not the most presidential of characters to occupy that position um and we like to think that that position is reserved for somebody who is much more presidential in character even though that would be a little bit of a historical mistake to assume that everybody who's been in the white house has had that kind of gravitas they have not um but no one has been under as much surveillance and scrutiny with that sort of bombastic buffoonish sort of personality as trump so for us to get through that with the pressure of all of the media attention all of the all the social media around it um and now to be in the midst of this very messy contested situation with uh you know a sitting president crying foul like these are these are challenges that lesser democracies would not be able to weather and and we're doing really just fine the process is working just as it should um i you know people uh on all sides of this and on on both sides of the aisle including doug and i both have faith in the courts to do what the courts need to do to the extent that they are summoned to resolve this and um i'm not particularly worried about the outcome either way i i am an institutionalist first and foremost so while i have specific personal political preferences that i would like to see echoed in my president who is in that position is much less important than the the upholding and survival of the institutions that preserve the process and that seems to be very healthy um and healthier than i would have thought so that's all good news from where i sit with my political scientist hat on totally i i couldn't agree more this is uh i i said earlier that i liken this to a uh like if you heard that there was a new steven spielberg movie out and everybody told you it was a great one you would be riveted because you know the quality of spielberg and you know that if this is a great spielberg movie this is going to be phenomenal and this is a this is that equivalent in other words that the spielberg is the founding fathers and that those are the that is the collective human genius that gave birth to a phenomenal country uh what makes the country phenomenal isn't you know the rocky mountains and the beaches of florida it's the it's the legal system is what makes it great and at the heart of that legal system it is how do you defend the transmission you know and the and the the selection of power and how do you limit it and so that that took just almost unbelievable ingenuity as far as i'm concerned and negotiation to to come up with the design that we have and um and so this is now a moment a spielberg-like moment where it's going to get challenged hard uh uh trump is not somebody that backs off from anything so he he will you can he is he is he is utterly shameless he you cannot cow him by embarrassment into anything so if he thinks he's been cheated or if he thinks that there's a way to use any system into his advantage he will i don't believe he'll do anything to cross the line i don't think that that's in his dna i think what's in his dna is to use every possible advantage that he can and uh and so now we as jen would say you're not going to get challenges like this very often but the whole point of the system is to be able to withstand whatever it is that can be thrown at it and now we're going to get the kitchen sink and so to me it's a spielberg movie we get to sit back and watch the next two months watch this unfold and i have no idea you know what i can guess what i think is going to happen but that's meaningless in other words what what i get to do is sit back and watch uh the american system work under pressure and that's a that's a spectacular thing to observe and i'm looking forward to it as as jen says no matter what happens i'm looking forward to watching the process work we're getting to see uh a historical moment you know it's kind of like watching the the last four minutes of a great super bowl it's like okay now now we're gonna get to find out what happens uh and let's you know the referees are the best we've got in the league we've got instant replay uh we're gonna do everything we can and we're gonna find out what happens and somebody wins and somebody loses and um the and then and then i think everybody lives with it you know maybe not happily but they do i think then that's that's how i think this goes down yeah i mean i i don't how many people i think a big big piece of the current debate at least you know the internet debate is you've got a lot of people who were not old enough to remember the 2000 election didn't that's amazing isn't that amazing i know i used to my opening question when i used to teach poli sci um just to kind of get a sense of the room as an ice breaker was what's your first political memory and in the time that i was teaching i sort of watched it go from you know fall of the berlin wall up to you know it started to creep north until people started to remember like you know clinton's election and then and then pretty soon it was 9 11 you know they're just getting younger and younger all the time i guess 1968 democratic convention is not out there anymore oh that's funny so you you you and i were similar ages when we had our first for me it was the berlin wall so that was at the moment or or maybe the iran contra hearings on tv that was a big deal too you know sort of sitting and watching uh ollie north sit there and answer questions so those were my formative moments but um but yeah i mean i think you're most of these whatever we're into now generation z or whatever it is they didn't they didn't have that experience and i don't think there are a lot of people even democrats who are sitting around gnashing their teeth thinking that gore should have been president and that this was all illegitimate and you know the the both both terms of w's presidency were a sham and never should have happened and it was all he was just installed by the court that lasted for a couple of years there were definitely people on the left who did feel that way and probably would still if you if you press them they would that's the narrative that they would come up with certainly w's first term um but uh i i don't think anybody really thinks of him as an illegitimate president uh and you know they might not like him and they might not agree with things but that was i mean talk about uh hotly contested crazy you know down to the wire supreme court decision i mean that those were those were crazy times that this seems much more civil and measured compared to that um so for people who just don't have that perspective it's it's like yeah we we've actually been here before yeah fairly recently and we got the ridges fine and it was the you know the look like things were going to go to the other guy that time and this is how it works it just pivots back and forth i mean we were talking in the q a today how a lot of republicans are upset that some of their nominees on the court are not playing out like they were supposed to you know these guys are supposed to be very much in the party's pocket according to the perceptions of a lot of people who vote for their president based on that idea and and really judicial independence is a thing and we want it to be a thing we want those those justices to get in that position and and you know follow follow precedent follow their conscience follow the follow something that is outside of party affiliation that's why they're there that's why these are lifetime appointments so we have these just beautiful i mean this is what checks and balances are all about and nobody has been able to copy us as as well as we came up with it this is just an incredible system all cool all grand we sit back and watch the movie popcorn [Laughter] yeah and also i also spoke about uh this morning i talked about how um that the the feelings that people have and so the feelings that people have are are uh vastly more intense than than is warranted by the actual outcomes the that isn't unless you were oh i don't know maybe you were some executive in a in a an industry that was looked like it was going to grow largely under trump and now it's going to have its wings clipped or if you're an industry uh that was hoping like crazy that biden would win because you know that that industry that you're poised to make a lot of money very few of us have a significant direct relationship or correlation with our outcomes and any political process the um and so i mean the the beauty of it is that that uh at this point the the united states government uh the united states uh certainly federal government actually any uh any uh level of government has surprisingly the variances in how the government can work are almost irrelevant to the individual citizen um the uh that that is it isn't entirely true if you're a developer wanting to build on the coast of oregon and you built you know had a thousand acres up there and you wanted to put a golf course in and now the coastal commission you know is saying no you can't do it even though we told you 10 years ago you could do it you know you've got a political mess on your hands and and your life you know maybe is very significantly influenced by that but but the vast majority of people do not have their lives actually influenced by politics the uh and that's because the the decision-making powers of the government and the variances and outcomes of how government the government makes decisions are in relatively narrow ranges largely as a result of a very complex set of checks and balances that it keeps the the decision making as as jen likes to call it little c conservative in other words not conservative politically but conservative in the fact that it doesn't change quickly the um however your feelings don't follow that and so it can be a little bit confusing um to i think of i i don't know why i have the scene seared in my memory but some some college football team lost a big game like a national game and i and they cut to the cheerleaders and they were crying and and i and i remember it was very uh it was very like you could tell it was a big thing and of course it does feel like a big thing but the reason why it feels like such a big thing is because you feel like you're a member of a village that just went to tribal war you know if you're one of those cheerleaders you're about to be one of the spoils of war [Laughter] when the truth is of course i mean that is exactly what's going on so the in the same way that if you're the member of the losing posse or winning posse in a national election you are it's hearkening back to stone age processes where that this was a huge issue in your life of leadership shift in a village of 40 or 50 adults and your little coalition if things will go badly between your big guy and the other challenging big guy then that's not so good for you and that that will have actually a potential significant uh change in in your outcomes on on some issues that are very important to you whereas and you also feel very hyped up and agitated to try to convince everybody that your position is right and the other position is wrong and the reason why you are energized there is because you believe that what it is that they think has significant meaning for outcomes for you that are important now hopefully everybody can run the math there's 150 million voters whether you convince seven people you go out there and yell and scream and go seven for seven and flip seven votes it's not going to have any impact at all but in the stone age village if you flip seven votes it would have enormous impact and so as a result you have within you a feeling of imperative and angst about about whether or not you can convince your friends and relatives and you know your stray uncle louie out there who is thinking wrongly and needs to vote for x instead of y that feels important to you and you can feel incensed and frustrated and angry and everything else under the sun and desperate in other words you can have a lot of very intense feelings only because these intense feelings are echoing to stone age processes that were very important as opposed to the current situation where the outcomes are for all intents and purposes irrelevant um i can't i cannot honestly tell you having lived through however many presidents i've lived through as a conscious human my my first consciousness about the presidency would have been with jimmy carter so i would have been about 16 at that time at that point you're old enough to chew gum and walk and be drafted and all kinds of stuff so i can i but when i think about my life experience and what was happening on any kind of day-to-day or month-to-month or year-to-year basis i cannot honestly tell you that my life has been in any way measurably influenced by any of the half a dozen presidents uh that have that have come since jimmy carter since i was awake the um and i think honestly as i think you used a word gen monitored if you were to monitor your own internal experience and get a graph on it of the last 30 years of your life and try to chart whether or not when president x was in charge you were five percent happier than president why was the charge i think it would be absurd there's no way that's true your your future and your life is overwhelmingly dependent upon the esteemed dynamics of your existing situation not washington politics you
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