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Episode 260: Shaking the Jimmy Gene, Less productive after having a mate
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all right all right so you want to do we want to back up like a second and just kind of no no so um so tell me more about so speaking of the nha conference doctor yeah yeah you you did a talk there i did a talk there what'd you think yeah well unfortunately i missed your talk although it was great to see you after being separated by the forces of kovid for so long um so your your talk was right before i got in um but this was yeah it was my first um nha the you know national health association and so it was my first one and uh it was it was great to go it's kind of a you know doug and i are both kind of half one one foot in this um plant-based health world and one foot sort of in a more a more general evolutionary psychology or just psychology world and so it was interesting it was um you know very sort of devoted to cutting edge research and exactly what to eat and what not to eat and lifestyle issues for uh staying ahead of chronic disease and all the rest um and a very intense approach to all of those things so the kind of the thesis of my talk was um more nuanced than i think sometimes it can be interpreted as which is i was really just trying to talk about personality which we talk about here on the show all the time and the limits of personality when it comes to perfection in anything and particularly perfection on a healthy on a healthy diet of any any kind whatever sort of diet and lifestyle you were personally pursuing but i have just talked to so many people i have watched again and again and again that people striving for this sort of total compliant perfection on a whole food plant-based diet is a source of a lot of stress and and a lot of just agitation in their lives it's actually ironically undermining their health and happiness when the whole idea is that we we are trying to advise people to eat this way to improve their health and happiness but at some point that can really turn into this source of diminishing returns for people because it's it is incompatible with their personality to the extent that very few people are capable of being perfect all the time and when you hold yourself to that standard and and consider yourself a failure if you don't meet up to it you're really setting yourself up for a lot of feelings of failure and regret and guilt and just all the things that go along with that so i wanted to talk about that and and kind of you know just kind of have a message of you're okay if you're not perfect you're okay if you slip up it's really not the end of the world and all you have to do is correct your course get back on track and just kind of get on with it rather than catastrophize which is what so many people will do yeah i really like this uh course correction you showed a picture of a map uh i mean first really you showed that video of this waffle girl which was hilarious um yes waffle girl yeah then the tech malfunction in the middle of a statement about it and then it's like it's like people are hearing in the background i really want these waffles yeah yeah waffle girl if people listening have not seen the meme it's worth looking up it's this poor little girl who's probably four or five years old who is just crying about how she she can't stop dreaming about waffles and she doesn't understand why and she's just she's through her tears she's just begging for waffles but she's really more sort of confused about why she just can't stop thinking about them she wants to stop thinking about them and her mom says you know you just ate something else and i don't know why you can't stop thinking about waffles but you need to and she's just she's just beating this child is beating herself up for being obsessed with waffles and of course this is the story of most um adult humans who struggle with the pleasure trap it's really just kind of the same phenomenon so um yeah the echo of the little girl you can kind of continue throughout the presentation well it was a lot of fun there i i think we got to see all the usual suspects in the in the nha movement so one in particular that we like to poke fun of here on the show dr alan goldhamer so that was that was fun to uh to to see him in uh yeah for his element in all ways so yeah yeah no it's great it's great information and um you know it's it's i think a really wonderful resource for especially the people who do have that personality that kind of hyper conscientious you know we we call this the helper hyper health arena of people who are really looking to do an excellent excellent job with their diet and lifestyle and there's no better place and for mere mortals it's very good aspirational information i just don't want it to become this kind of bar for people to hold themselves to and then you know just become a reason to hate themselves that's not what we're in the business of trying to create we don't want people to be miserable so um we want people to experience as much joy and happiness as possible in their life and some of that comes from recognizing the the limitations of your personality or of your conscientiousness and um you know it's kind of just a different version of the the standard line that doug will give on this question which is you you want to do a b plus job you don't necessarily want to do an a plus job if you're not an a plus student you want to do a b plus job to do you know miss most of the terrible consequences of the modern standard american diet and maybe not optimize completely on all of the benefits that you would get from doing an excellent perfect job but to have pretty good results certainly relative to most people in the population and i i forgot who said this i thought it was chef aj but i don't want to miss quote her but i heard someone say something to the effect of you can you deviate as much as you can get away with one time yeah yeah i think one of the problems is that that of course is the correct answer right the the sort of you yeah the so many people ask this do i have to be perfect is it okay to cheat once in a while like you know what can i get away with um and the hard answer that's really difficult to communicate to the masses is that that is a completely individual process it's really really individual to everybody and you have to know yourself you have to know your personality you have to know your tendencies you you have to know if you give yourself one cheat meal a week is that gonna stay one cheat meal a week or is it gonna turn into you know you wake up face down and a gutter of vegan ice cream a month later and you don't really know what happened or what day it is um and that will happen to some people and and so you have to know your own limits you have to know what the consequences of um you know departing from your goals or what's what that is going to look like and what it's going to mean for you and people the unfortunate truth is that you don't know what those answers are until you go through this some number of times so if you haven't been through the process and you haven't made those mistakes and you haven't paid the costs of making those mistakes you actually don't know what the cost is and and you probably don't really fully quite understand what the cost is even the second or third or fifth time that you make the mistake it's this iterative process where you get to know exactly what you can get away with by not getting away with it for some amount of time this is what they call in 12-step relapses part of recovery it's a big it's the heart of how i look at managing the pleasure trap in any guys whether it's food or alcohol or anything else it's you don't know how costly departure from the goal line is until you do it enough times that you really understand okay i don't want to do that anymore that costs too much it's it's i was underestimating the cost um and i was underestimating the benefit of sticking to the plan and once you recalibrate according to that actual information that can only come from making missteps then organically naturally your your whole cost benefit analysis changes and your motivation changes and and you're going to stay on the straight and narrow more consistently and just more easily than if you try to if you had tried to force it at the beginning before you had made those mistakes so it's a little bit paradoxical in that way it's such a that's such a good point dr hawk because you know if people are motivated it feels like if people are motivated due to some disease process that will likely you know affect their life negatively enough so that they're motivated to change their diet and lifestyle if they change their diet and lifestyle sufficiently they'll get such good results that now this disease may go away all of a sudden now leading to their motivation to wane a little bit because now now it's not quite as pressing for them to continue doing so that happens all the time people kind of get stuck you know they they either regain some weight or they slip in their habits a little bit for all kinds of reasons because they've resolved their big health issue or because they've lost enough weight that they kind of don't they they don't have that intrinsic motivation anymore like they did when they started off they you're always running that cb and if if the journey from here to there of the last 10 pounds is is going to be a huge pain in the ass and take a lot of time and energy to pull off but you're you're not going to get that much additional status by doing it more than you've already gotten um you know very few people can get out of that motivational trap because the the nervous system says no we're not going to waste all that time and energy why would we the math doesn't check out here we'd rather rather invest in some other process that has a more guaranteed um more significant payoff because that's only going to get you a few more uh points in the status bucket and it's going to be a lot of trouble to get there so that's almost never inherently motivating mm-hmm and and also yeah that thank you that's such a great point um yeah i mean i look at uh you know a lot of the patients here at fasting escape and other patients i've worked with it's you know and this disease process has been going on for so long so they can kind of get in a version of this ego trap where it's not worth it anymore they're already too far gone and then they just it's just not not something they want to deal with anymore [Music] yeah yeah there's all that's one of the many forms it'll take there's um you know we saw it true north you might see this too where people kind of use it as a way to manage in a cyclical kind of way so it's sort of um you know they kind of let it rip the rest of the time and then you know a couple times a year they'll come back and and do this really kind of you know it's often rooted in this very harsh energy toward toward themselves this kind of punishment energy like oh i've been bad and so i need to atone for my sins and i need to go back into the process and make up for all the bad things i've done and that was the kind of thinking i was really trying to steer people away from in my nihi talk it was like that you're not you haven't committed a sin you haven't done anything bad there's nothing nothing about your your behavior around food says anything about your value as a human being or your your worth as a human um it just means that you're a victim of the pleasure trap as most people are to some degree or another and so all of this all of the narratives that people will take on um in this kind of attempt to you know kind of i don't know maybe get some points with their internal audience or get some points externally um in a form of status to sort of look at how much i hate myself for doing this um it's not actually doing anybody any good and it there is no moral or value judgment on your behavior here you're just stuck in the trap and all you have to do is haul yourself back out yet again and it's just it's actually it's not that big a deal at all it's it's sort of it's sort of mundane and boring like oh yep here we go back on and you're likely to fall off again tomorrow and then you just get back on and so the whole metaphor that i used in the talk was this course correction if you're if you're a pilot who is flying from chicago to seattle and you notice at some point that the plane has drifted two degrees off course what most people do in that scenario with their diet is they say oh well screw it you know we're pointing the wrong direction um so let's just run out the tank and see where we land and we'll start again from saskatchewan or wherever we wind up you know and that's obviously you don't want your pilot doing that and that's not what a pilot is going to do they're going to say oh looks like we're slightly off course and we need to make this slight adjustment and get back on course and you have to do that hundreds of times throughout a trip and so that's what we're doing we're just kind of staying steady looking seeing where you're going seeing how far off course you are and adjusting as you go wonderful and and just not letting some anxieties get to you in the sense that to get you off course like the anxieties about your health or your dating life or anything else that might be feel like it's more pressing you think yeah well i think people i i think that's just part of life so i think part of you know when people we're we're kind of hard on the concept of emotional eating um in in a way that i think we're not always super clear about of course people do emotionally eat when they are uh facing a lot of life stress so if you're if you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty you've got relationship stress work stress you are going to go hunting around for the lowest hanging dopamine fruit that you can find and if that happens to be in your environment there happens to be really exciting stimulating high calorie dense food you're going to go after that you're just trying to make yourself feel better every single one of your ancestors would have done the same thing they just wouldn't have had access to the same kind of food that you have so it wouldn't have been as destructive when we're going after emotional eating we're really talking more about uh people imagining that they're self-soothing with pleasure trap food because it has some kind of childhood association it's the you know these cookies that my grandma made and therefore when i feel sad i want those cookies you you want those cookies because they represent this super normal high calorie density you know exciting uh little source of dopamine that it sits in your memory and and it's associated with some good feelings and so you're gonna go for it but there's nothing intrinsically um you know there's nothing particular about those cookies that's hitting any particular type of circuit related to any particular kind of trauma that you may have had dr hawk i'm so glad that you mentioned vegan ice cream once and then next one you said low hanging dopamine fruit because i think if you would have said it twice i would have to go get some after the show one of the lines that from my talk was vegan ice cream is not a crime oh here it is you just said it dang it i got some that's a tough crowd to try to sell on that line i could see daggers coming out of goldhamer's eyes but they did have some some black bean brownies i know our listeners just think that sounds absolutely delicious um but they were pretty good i think i missed those the the carrot cake donuts were really good um those were those were impressive uh and there were some other good yeah it was we were fed well for sure yeah i love the nha conference because it's one of the rare conferences where i where you can go and everything is pretty much safe and and i don't have to ask around does this have that in there just wonder be socially appropriate and just you know just eat the the decorations you know around the garnishes yeah yeah well it was also nice because it was a real conference it was my first i don't know about you but it was my first experience you know in a year and a half of the the the the old times and yeah yeah well not not even that i mean even if i hadn't known anybody this night it was great to see old friends and see you and see goldhamer and everybody else um dylan and reebs were there there were lots of lots of great folks there um but it was just the just the feeling of being in a crowded conference hall you know and and sort of uh shoulder to shoulder with people and um being in that conference setting it really it took me some time to adjust to it after living a covered life for a year and a half um just as i guess i've been living in a very blue area wherever i've been living and it's not been like that at all so i was sort of taken aback at first and you know people coming up to introduce themselves i'm like don't you want to stand back further i'm this is too close this feels too close but i got i adjusted to it very quickly and it was it was a little bit like being a time traveler mm-hmm yeah well speaking of these anxieties that people have um we have what do you say we get to maybe one a couple of questions sure let's see what we have yeah perfect okay so our first uh first question is from uh looks like another jimmy the guitar player so dr hawk i chose this question because uh just for you aren't they organized against me don't they have like an anti-hawk union at this point i feel like no actually i've offended the jimmies [Laughter] all right dear doctors i am a fairly successful artist in his late 20s my big five is highly distorted 98th percentile openness 75th percentile conscientiousness 98th extraversion 15 uh agreeableness and 98th percentile neuroticism which has gotten yeah which has gotten me into all sorts of trouble but luckily i have a high enough iq that has kept me on the right track your podcast and website have helped in almost every arena but i can't shake my jimmy jeans i find myself falling in love but losing interest just as quickly this has caused many unhappy romantic relationships sometimes even when i desperately want them to work my question is how can a jimmy who would love to pair bond beat his genes is there a 10-page date rule for men what is the right environment if i can't change my personality oh man maybe uh wait until your testosterone drops in your seventies is that the reason you eat vegan ice cream right just so you can die right right exactly get on a standard american diet you know sabotage your health and so then yeah you'll be you'll be uninterested in romance by you know 45. um i don't yeah i mean you're cornered in a lot of directions wise and uh jimmy the guitar player-wise i mean you're you're a young guy in your 20s who is self-described as fairly successful i mean you you were supposed to be advertising and waiting around for the absolute highest quality mate you can possibly get and you you believe especially with that level of openness the openness alone um plus the extroversion would make whatever kind of inherent parabon tendency you had and other personality factors it would make really like serious com pair bond commitment difficult for anybody in that situation just because there's this incredible fear of missing out there's this incredible um interest in new frontiers of all types and so um that's you're just really really really in a tough position so i mean you've listened to the podcast enough i'm sure that there's nothing really i can say about how you can you can't force yourself to settle you can't force yourself to be resigned to this kind of thing um you you were just in a situation where you were on this side of the equation of the casual mating pair bond continuum where you just need instead of the magic 10 you probably need something more than that you you really need your socks knocked off and you know you will get to a point where there is somebody in principle who you could see as real parabon material i think a lot of that comes with uh just the experience of realizing that no potential pair bond is a thousand percent perfect they're always going to be trade-offs one direction or another i talked to a lot of young guys in your situation who are struggling with the reality of trade-offs like oh well this one's really intelligent but she's not as sexually exciting as the last one and this one is great with my elderly parents um but you know she doesn't want to have kids et cetera et cetera there are always these these trade-offs these situations you're just going to run into it and kind of like what i was talking about before with relapses part of recovery i think part of the wisdom that comes with age and experience is reckoning with those trade-offs and and realizing that you you can hold out for absolute perfection for as long as you want you're unlikely to find it but you can get to a point where you've calibrated and you've calibrated and you've calibrated where you can recognize a major outlier when you find one and that's unlikely to happen for anybody by by their late 20s um it doesn't necessarily happen for everybody at all i think it happens for a lot of people but it comes with time and it comes with calibration and for you it might take longer than most uh just because you need more data this is this is i think we've talked in the podcast about the the princess equation have we talked about this a reminder is attributed it's attributed to so many people i don't know who to give give credit to it um i don't i don't know where it originally came from and of course because it's attributed to so many people it takes many forms but the general idea is that um in principle there is a correct equation for for determining for finding your princess if you're if you've got a village full of women and you're trying to find your princess or if you were a prince however this story works and whatever shape it takes um you you essentially there's some algorithm by which you go through that population you you date as much as you can until you're 30 or some of the some of the equations are 35 and you assign each of those mates a value and this is kind of where the whole thing falls apart because you know unlike doug i don't put numbers on people this isn't just a beauty number this is a general mate value number um and so you know you've dated a hundred women by the time you're 30 years old and they all are somewhere between one and a hundred in terms of what kind of princess they would be for you and so the the one who is the highest number by the time you get to that arbitrary cut off whether it's 30 or 35 or whatever it is or some number of women that you've you've been with um say it's 85 you've you've never gotten higher than 85 on your mate value spectrum that's where you kind of set the marker and so then the next the next princess you meet who is 85 or higher that's the one you marry just because that's sort of at that point mathematically you've you've gathered enough points of data that that you you've recognized that the next one who's that high or higher is the outlier and you're not likely to run into somebody higher than that in a reasonable amount of time so that's kind of the that's the the very fascinating yeah kind of pointy-headed nerdy way of looking at this but that's the general idea that that's what everybody is doing in the dating arena whether they they go about it in that sort of virgo sort of way or not they are they're they're playing the field they're getting a sense of who's out there and they're they're learning as they go about what they value the most and what what kinds of trade-offs they can live with and what kinds they can't and then at some point ideally we would hope before you're 70. you run into somebody who's sort of like whoa you know i haven't found one like this before or i only found one like this before and i was young and 22 and stupid and i let her go and i shouldn't have um and so here's another one and i didn't think i'd get another chance so i'm going to lock her down that's just kind of how it works and so you just stay open to that and there's really nothing more in the meantime that you can do to force your nervous system into accepting an outcome that you you're not on board with and to to people that might uh to who may ask um if jimmy goes about and just you know fully expresses his jimmy jeans will that um hamper his chances uh for for a pair bond or is it kind of like whenever it comes out like they'll they'll he'll immediately change uh his his ways essentially hamper his chances in what way just that he would scare off serious pair bonders uh yeah oh that's a that's a good point i didn't think of it like that what i was thinking about was yeah will they was it will they will uh enough well well too many casual encounters uh prevent jimmy from enjoying a pair bond encounter a repair bond life essentially oh well uh possibly but there's there's really no way that we can stop that process from happening so we we have to kind of start with the assumption that that process is happening rather than telling poor jimmy to you know become a monk and lock himself away from romantic attention because that's not a reasonable way to tackle this in principle would jimmy have been better off in a context with less availability and you know more competition and just sort of a whole different context maybe would he have been happier in the stone age where there were only four girls in the village maybe but with openness that high an extroversion that high he would have been setting sail for the next village anyway he this this would have been the guy who would have been absolutely you know finding out what was over the next hill all the time um so i think no matter what approach you take if you want to be you know you want to honor the personality that you have you are you you you're you're you're checking out the goods here definitely you were playing the field in a very serious way and and so yeah there is some danger i mean i think we've talked about this before where you know a lot of people in the online dating environment with the swipey apps in particular it's this infinite supply and so you never come to terms with the trade-offs because you just keep pursuing perfection you keep pursuing perfection and it's like well it's always being dangled in front of you too yeah yeah well that's the i think i think men have more of a uh a more innate difficulty recognizing how significantly they're being bluffed early on um and and sort of the the degree of deception that um women can display personality wise i think women are more i think they're sensitized to it beauty-wise um like oh let's see how she looks you know the morning after um but in my experience men are not as sensitized to it personality wise so so women are just as capable of being deceptive and bluffing their agreeableness their conscientiousness their extroversion any personality quality that looks really attractive at the beginning for some amount of time um and so this this perpetuates the cycle of oh the one i've got here is ah she's 89 perfect but the one that i'm talking to and on this app seems like awesome you know she doesn't have all these flaws that this other one has and she she doesn't you know harass me about leaving my socks on the floor or not doing the dishes um that was like a total dug-ism [Laughter] but she's she's not nagging me about the things that my current current broad nags me about and so hey i'm gonna i'm gonna move over to this seemingly more glittery option over here um and you're really you know you're very likely to be um paying a real cost for the early deception that happens in any relationship not that she's doing it maliciously or even consciously just because people are always trying to over signal and over display their main value early in a relationship um and i think women are more attuned to that because they're seeking to rule out um they're just so attune they're just that's their whole mission is they're looking for reasons to rule you out so if there's any inconsistency in your facade they're going to pick up on it quicker whereas males are a little more optimistic in that regard in my experience so um but yeah the this whole i mean it's a terrible terrible cycle where you just always think you can improve upon what you have and maybe you can even improve upon it for some amount of time but then that crashes and burns and and so you just repeat the cycle again and again and again um where really any meaningful pair bond is going to have trade-offs that sort of start to feel intolerable in an environment of infinite supply and you're in a position to qualify for a lot of girls and it's just it's it's a really really really hard uh process to get around so yeah i would say just give it time and let life happen and hope for the best as all of us do well you've given me pause to think perhaps we have to go to you know a buddhist temple and uh and and live out the remainder of our days oh or maybe not even buddhist temple maybe the uh the yurt yurt uh community that you were talking about a couple shows ago yeah totally go let's go hang out in our yurts and you know connect them with hamster tunnels when we want to socialize and the rest of the time sit in deep meditation reflecting on the uh the cruelty of reality and the human condition okay well you want uh i want to do one more question what do you think sure let's see what we got okay dear doctors i'm a young male adult in his twenties and i truly enjoy studying working out training and just overall being productive i know it's because i'm trying to gain mate value and climb social structures but i truly do enjoy it i just generally can't understand how people can party or work their entire lives away at a fast food joint just to play video games when they get off work and slowly go more and more into sleep debt as the years pass them by but i also realize that in the end i'm no different and my path in life will still see me at the grave nonetheless but that's just how i see life and productivity now i recently acquired a girlfriend and i found that i'm more attracted to bouts of like a company okay proceed yeah i've acquired a girlfriend and i've found that i'm more attracted to bouts of watching youtube videos for a few hours at night before i go to bed or just generally being less productive i've had problems here and there but most of the time i avoid the temptation altogether and it works well but the energy to stop relaxing and start working once i'm there is more than i'm willing to muster it seems it may be that this is just how i feel right now in life and in a month or two i'll be more productive again but do you think it's possible that now that i have a mate my brain doesn't believe i have as serious as a need to climb structures and gain skills if so that is seriously depressing looking forward to your thoughts oh man uh yeah i i don't just think it's possible i think that's absolutely what's going on i mean this is the whole the whole reason that you're doing all of these things is to get what you have um and so it is seriously depressing i mean going back to our uh our the earlier question um you're likely to feel your motivations start to dial up when you start to see some flaws in this human that you haven't seen yet and so even if you're not necessarily interested in leaving the relationship or finding another relationship you want to be ready in case that opportunity were to present itself out of the blue and so you want your internal audience to be observing that you're improving your mate value all the time so if if she no longer qualifies for you at the level that she qualifies now which is likely in any any medium or long-term relationship there's sort of you know there's going to be that that early bluff is going to wear off a little bit and you're going to come face to face with some things that maybe you don't you don't love as much as you thought you did um or conversely if she does if you if you realize that you really have gotten somebody who's incredible you can't believe that you're with her then you're still gonna feel motivated to improve yourself to continue to impress her and to keep her so if she starts showing defective defection signals that's interesting it's if she could show defective or defection signals either way what's the option that's going to motivate you exactly [Laughter] some sort of corporate merger um so yeah um i think you just have to sit back and watch your nervous system here it's very very likely that whatever you're experiencing now is just this complacency that is coming with the calibration to this new situation um and you kind of don't know what sort of deal it is and how you feel about it and so the whole system says let's just kind of hold off and not invest any more time and energy in any kind of process until we know where we stand and what we're actually in the business of of doing and what sort of display we need to the world to get us to where we want to be so you kind of don't know what that is yet because you've this was a recent acquisition so i would just enjoy the break um and uh if if possible and just let yourself have that experience and it's very just personality wise it sounds like you're quite a go-getter and you have a lot of innate initiative um and a lot of drive and that's not going to disappear it's not just going to abandon you because you got what you want the the nature of that sort of initiative and drive is that it's never quite satisfied it's got this real restlessness to it so um i suspect that that will come back with a vengeance pretty soon wow dr hawk thank you so much uh really appreciate these uh these answers and the the discussion it's um you bring a a a way of analyzing these questions that uh that a lot of our listeners really appreciate uh including the jimmy's so don't don't get too down on yourself [Laughter] i have a soft spot for the jimmies i just can be a little hearts it's it's just you know tough love i'm trying to help them help me help you all right well dr hawk thank you so so much for coming on this evening and uh we will look forward to uh our next show with you and dr lyle uh coming up in in the this this next couple weeks and uh for our listeners uh again if you want to check out there's a couple of ways you can get in touch with dr lyle or dr hawk one of them is esteemeddynamics.com you can go to the website they're also joining the living wisdom library you can become a member there and also get dibs on their for on their new book coming out soon and uh we've got the dr hawks you've got your hawk blocked which is the patreon uh it's at patreon website and then um you got the virtual village is that right yeah that's part of the patreon system so yeah if you if you join for 15 bucks a month you get access to the weekly live stream um which where we talk about all kinds of things there's no telling what we cover every week sometimes it's quite scandalous too too hot for youtube but not necessarily too hot for gab which is where people can find you as well exactly yes that's why i'm retreating to the dark dark corners of the internet well may the force be with you and we will we will look forward to chatting with both you and dr lyle coming up soon you
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