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Episode 271: Raising a child, Psychology of obese, Sleep, Disagreeable distance, Politics, Paranoia
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oh yeah i suppose this makes me feel like there's going to be some ranting today [Laughter] we're in a we're in a mood [Laughter] yeah i'm thinking how are things with you nathan uh they're they're good it's you know it's getting a little bit colder weather here we're actually in the middle of a rain storm here in southern california i got a little flash flood warning by the government and it said uh and i'm going to pull it up here just to read it because my little vaccine do you need a vaccine yeah i know well you know what's interesting is now you drive on the freeways and they have the billboard saying get your vaccine get your booster go to whatever the website is to do it yeah um every every state when i was on my road trip a couple of months ago you would see that almost almost every state including pretty red states it's like a thing yeah yeah i don't know who's controlling those because i know when i drove through arizona they had some really comical ones about speed like there was obviously there was some poet or comic like controlling those things they had some really funny ones so but not anymore but the flash floods makes me yeah yeah the flash flood warning i got was saying don't attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding and my first thought was don't tell me what to do government stop it i'll take my own risks but i've still been here at home stuck so there you go god that's this is the danger of uh institutional failure is that you just when people stop trusting their institutions things get a little nasty and you can actually find yourself at increased risk in something like a flash flood seattle got a push notification to all of our phones last week that the 911 system was down speaking of government assistance yeah so it was like oh yeah if you've got an emergency just uh go ahead and call this alternative number so hopefully people in need got the text and and you know remembered to act on it it was several hours that it was down for wow some sort of uh infrastructural issue so yeah yep is that the city that defunded the police then they got a whole bunch of crime then they realized they have to refund the police like refund the police yeah yeah the the empirics on that escape me somewhat because it's certainly a talking point but i'm not sure that they actually were meaningfully defunded but definitely there have been uh some shake-ups with staffing with mandates etc so they've lost some of their uh their boys in blue boys and girls in blue yeah [Music] well this is this this sounds all sounds like a little uh foreshadowing of what's to come but i can assure the listeners we're gonna actually get some questions first and then we're gonna let dr hawk and dr lyle uh you know speak about some current events so uh as soon as we're done with the questions we'll let everybody know for the ones who just who want to hear more they can turn it up all right what's up nathan all right our first question dear doctors how would you actually raise a child more specifically the first year all that whining and crying and getting barely any sleep for the first year is there anything parents can actually do or if there's nothing if someone has the finances to would you actually recommend hiring a nanny or somebody similar um i guess my first thought is to sleep yeah i mean i don't know anything about raising an infant so and i think that there's pretty large individual differences in infants and how they act so um but i think one of the the only underlying question that i'm hearing that that we can probably meaningfully answer is the idea of if you could afford help is it wise or good for the child's development to be raised by somebody else in their first year or is this a potential mistake because of bonding and the infant experience etc and i can res you rest assured it doesn't make a damn bit of difference who's raising that kid so you're uh you'll obviously if you're gonna be the parent even if you have a nanny or you have help you're gonna be plenty attached overwhelmingly invested so there's gonna be no lack of attachment on your part and and and uh basically cleaning up after them and having them wreck your sleep for a year or two uh isn't gonna help you love them more so so yeah so all this the point of all this is an underlying psychodynamic theory of a parent child particularly mother child attachment uh early in early childhood being this immensely important issue in and personality development or the relationship development is a 100 nonsense and um you know understandable nonsense it's understandable that people are thinking that that you know the early years of life or real real tender and impressionable and then if we bend them or push them or break little things then they permanently disable the organism that is not true and that's a that's a that was a a a hypothesis that was you know obviously considered for thousands of years you know throughout throughout history and has been found to be false and so we can dismiss it and for god's sake if you can afford it get as much help as you can afford that's my that's my official recommendation yeah yeah i mean it's completely up against all of the conventional wisdom out there from the the whole parenting industry and and the psychodynamic industries and where they intersect so i remember i mean i was very um you know not as a parent but as as somebody trying to make sense of the the issues and problems in my life it's very attractive to look at sort of narratives and explanations of things gone wrong in development because of caregiver errors right so it's um i i particularly got excited about gabor mate who lots of people who are listening might be familiar he's written several books when the body says no and in the realm of hungry ghosts he's uh sort of an addiction specialist who works with uh people on skid row in vancouver and he's got this this very trauma-centered um world view of you know all addiction stems from early trauma essentially and disconnection um and this is not an uncommon world view and so i i trying to make sense of my own struggles and my father's struggles and family struggles with with addiction um kind of came across this work and was totally riveted by this explanation that he gives in the book which is is basically you know if you don't sufficiently bond with a with a central caregiver early on in exactly the right way because you don't make the right kind of eye contact because maybe your caregiver is distracted or maybe they're uh you know high themselves or whatever it is that your little brain is not going to develop all of the right little connections that it's supposed to and so therefore you're going to struggle with addiction as you grow up and i was like oh my god this explains everything you know my this is it's all my dad's fault this is this is why this happened um and it's very attractive it's a really uh convenient way to to relocate all of your personal responsibility onto these things that supposedly happened in the past but this is just pattern finding so you know it would be it would be just as easy to say oh well i i have escapist tendencies because my parents were too attentive and smothered me you know it's like it's just whatever you were dealing with you you look to that as some source of explanation of why things are not as you would wish them to be as an adult and there's always some degree of of imperfection or something that you can find fault with and then there are uh psychodynamic practitioners very willing to sell you that idea so that's where all of this comes from and it's uh unfortunately as with most things completely at odds with reality so yes get your sleep yeah there you go of course you can get it back with 60 sessions right with uh with the psychodynamic therapist is that there you go there you go yeah all right all right nathan our next question dear doctors do obese people have differing psychologies i would assume that obese genes wouldn't survive to reproduce in historic times before agriculture in terms of extreme obesity so do you think that has any impact upon psychology today also are there any groups of people that have differing psychology from the average human population for reasons similar to the question or just at all um this uh this questionnaire is trying really hard and they're they're trying to use some ideas that they've heard here and they're trying to uh they're trying to make sense of some things and but that's uh so we we can we can applaud the effort uh like a you know a bright student in a class trying to ask a question that's that's a little bit a little bit past them so the uh the there weren't any obese people in stone age environments and there weren't any obese people or extreme obese people uh the genes for obesity are simply genes that are that are more thrifty in terms of conserving energy um and so those people would have been in stone age environments um even somebody with with that today is extremely obese all you're looking at is you're looking at a uh a completely functional human genotype that in the stone age environment would have been moderately thick okay so um and would have had a uh survival and reproductive advantage absolutely a very significant advantage yeah yeah so the question is sort of framed backwards right right so that they're they're just so they're just kind of confused about what they're seeing in the modern environment so yeah so there's no so they're kind of upside down there so the uh secondly when it comes to are there they're kind of also reaching to try to figure out are there groups of people somehow that are different than other groups of people um well it depends on how you group them then there's an infinite variety of ways to group people right down at the level of a single gene variation but that that silliness so uh but there are meaningful differences in in uh how people are sort of personality wise and physically depending upon where on on the globe uh they the the parents met in other words two people from central france uh that that uh ancestors came from central france and we looked at their genes and we can see that they've been in central france for thousands of years those people look different uh and are gonna act somewhat differently on average than people that are from scotland so even just a few hundred miles away uh in evolution can make can make non-trivial differences in behavioral characteristics and physical characteristics and so uh so certainly when we get out to the level of continence we see very significant differences uh in people so a uh a continental uh view of or even subcontinents northern asians versus southern asians uh africans eastern africans versus western africans the um uh certainly uh different you know northern european southern europeans these these can be sliced up if you would like to into different groups of essentially groups of people and if you tested them on various uh characteristics both physically and in personality you would find group averages and the further away those people are likely to be in terms of evolutionary time uh the more the more different they are likely to be or added in of course the adaptive landscape so uh eastern africans for example evolved in very different circumstances than irish and as a result i would expect that if we looked at 100 eastern africans and 100 irish and we took mean differences we're going to see all kinds of significant differences uh on the the bell curves of each population as plotted against the big five or other other measures so in that way um this is a this was uh beautifully documented and argued by nicholas wed um who did his his most famous essay was where he brought the house down on the uh gain of function research of kova 19. all right atomic bulletin the atomic bulletin uh former new york new york times you know long long time uh journalist and researcher author really well well-known and respected yeah but yeah wrote this hell of a book yeah hell of a book called uh a troublesome inheritance and so for those that are interested in this type of question uh we would direct you there nicholas wade is a is a superb read just a fine scholar and you'll get a feel for these sort of group differences around the earth wonderful yeah it's it's amazing that the same guy who wrote about these ideas of the genes race human history all these things uh now did the the the research on the political side of things so for listeners who are always upset about the paul you know the stuff that you guys share just realize it's coming from the same sources the same brains that are fine it's not our fault it's nicholas it's not our fault he's convincing yeah the 10 000 year explosion covers some of the same territory as well um from a slightly more cynical point of view so um but it's uh for people who are really interested you can you can deep dive into that too what was that again dr hawk it's a book called the 10 000 year explosion um about recent evolution and divergence yeah by uh gregory cochran and his co-author whose name is currently escaping me okay cool all good thank you all right what else we got nathan all right dear doctors i have a question about sleep is it genetics how much sleep someone needs do some people just naturally need more sleep even when diet and exercise and stress level and everything is in the right place do introverts need more sleep and rest because their nervous system works differently i don't know anything about introverts versus extroverts but certainly and certainly the condition of the organism makes a difference so if you're sick uh if you're injured uh you know etc if you've been stressed all those things would would make a difference in terms of your sleep needs but all things being equal genes have an enormous impact on the individual differences so yeah uh that that is going to be the main variable in individual differences in the amount of need for sleep without a doubt and and you know sleep uh differences beyond like the quantity of sleep but also your sleep preferences early birds versus night owls um you know all this kind of stuff i would not i don't know but i wouldn't expect there to be um a really consistent difference between introverts needing more sleep than extroverts i can see the intuition for that introverts get their battery drained being out there with people and need to recharge but um i think that's yeah and i i think that's just a little egocentric bias from the questioner who's probably an introvert who restores their energy through sleep but i don't i don't think you would see that widespread across the population so i've certainly known lots of uh insomniac introverts myself yeah i i would completely i completely agree i i i'd be surprised to find any effect there mm-hmm dr london just to be actually i actually say i actually would be i would not believe it if i saw it yeah they're just very separate yeah just separate basically yeah dr lyle i remember a long time ago i had heard you make a comment in a lecture at true north which is uh that there was some belief that that ex introverts may have something in their immune system that makes them less likely to want to interact with people uh maybe i'm misquoting that but because that's correct okay no that's correct in other words that that is that is a that's a very significant hypothesis that has non-trivial support that uh so introverts may essentially be reacting to uh some some surveillance mechanism of the immune system that knows that that they are better off not challenging that immune system so that is a yeah that's a that's all uh that's by way of jeffrey miller and that is a it's interesting but doesn't mean that that's still not ultimately genetic in origin okay so uh just as the the robustness of a person's musculature is going to be genetic largely so could be the robustness of an immune system so um yeah so i i don't you know what that's getting a little deep and complicated and too much uncertainty for us to really be speaking about because i don't want anybody thinking that anybody really knows anything with any certainty uh but there but that is a legitimate hypothesis and evolutionary theory and it it uh and there's evidence suggesting that it may well have you know it's it doesn't have to be the big story in introversion but it it may be a significant part of the story well i don't know if he came up with this theory before or after he uh hooked up with his current wife but when i first heard the question it actually made me think of her work which is about disgust primarily and discussed being higher among women and higher during um particularly susceptible points in the menstrual cycle especially the luteal phase when you're more susceptible to infection um and and just you know higher levels of aversion and disgust among women in general and she also has written about um uh illness and when when we are sick we become introverts we become much more introverted obviously everyone's had this experience you want to crawl into a hole and be left alone you don't want to be going out and socializing and you certainly don't want to be around people that you don't know and she she's written quite a bit i think did quite a bit of her doctoral work in that area so i don't know if they they intersected on that sort of uh coincidentally or if he picked that up from hers i'm sure he picked that up from her that sounds sounds directly derivative yeah she actually wrote an essay fairly recently that was very good about this issue about how personality can change quite profoundly in response to chronic illness and uh introversion being one of those kind of shifts that people can undergo and and just to to keep keep people clear in our consistency the personality didn't change the the circumstances changed and therefore the person's behavioral pattern changes i.e what the outside would call personality but we would call a change in your circumstances so but it can change in a consistent way if your environment changes consistently right so if you if you are stricken by a chronic illness that is lifelong then the shift in your that that intersection between your your innate personality and the environment is consistent as well so your whole personality as it is expressed moves to a new equilibrium so right yeah exactly unless you get lucky and you water fast and you get better and then you get to bounce back right i mean that is that is precisely right yeah and i've seen that in people that have suffered from you know chronic fatigue for example and have not been able to get better those personalities are effectively changed because circumstances have changed basically permanently for the worse yeah all right what else we got nathan all right we uh dear doctors this question is about disagreeable distance i have been working on that with my family members who are very difficult unpleasant and disrespectful towards me while it does help considerably with the day-to-day dynamics i often still feel guilty about pulling away and think that i need to explain myself to everyone even though i haven't i'm very high conscientious and agreeable on the big five and in the 90s for both i do believe i am doing the right thing in limiting contact and resources for my happiness and well-being but i don't feel better why won't my inner critic give me esteem for separating myself from the disagreeables the problem is is that you're in conflict over the resource management of the the hit that your reputation takes with your tribe from withdrawing from them and so you're you're used to you've got anxiety about being having your your resource points of resource in the tribe basically contracting and you losing esteem with them and therefore putting yourself in a more vulnerable position so uh the fact that we have an alternative analysis of their value um and that it that it encouraged you to actually make this move all this means is that you've got cognitive dissonance over whether it's worth it and the um so i would say that there are there are a number of things that could possibly shift your cognitive dissonance the one of those for example one of them is just more time with with the process so that's that's one thing second of all um you you might you might benefit from a an independent third-party analysis of the cb as as they as someone essentially helps walk you through what your vulnerabilities are relative to a reduced tribe particularly that tribe which doesn't sound like a particularly useful tribe and what it is that you may need to do to move your mind into a position of power with respect to those new vulnerabilities that are coming from getting the disagreeable distance so this is uh uh uh i would say that that's you know somebody needs to papa you might use a third party that could be very thoughtful in helping walk you through sort of your what your adaptive unconscious is concerned about and get you more to a position of power about those things so uh the therapists like this are a dime a dozen on every corner they can do this kind of really simple work but you better just find the only one that can do it you talk to jen hawk [Laughter] [Music] well you and and even if you don't uh even if we don't have a session i don't know if this questioner is in um either of my weekly groups but this is a very kind of common situation in the the two weekly groups that i do uh and so i can give you a reality check but so can the other people in the group so and i've seen that happen with this exact issue because there there is great selection bias in my groups especially my women's group for high c um high agreeable people in the sucker triad essentially and and so a lot of people who have um cut ties with disagreeables whether they're family members or or friends or whoever they are and they have this residual kind of conflict and guilt about it it's a super common issue um so yeah come on over to the uh the virtual village and we'll we'll check you yeah perfect yeah just perfect great all right nathan now what about all right uh dear doctors i know you try to avoid talking politics i don't know what they're talking about no sure yeah they're not listening to us or discussing very briefly but maybe you can give us an evolutionary perspective on today's hot topic uh this was this question was been a couple weeks ago a few weeks ago but this hot topic about an anti-abortion law in texas question is is why is there such heated fight over a woman's decision to have or not have a child most actions to enforce anti-abortion laws are taken by male politicians what is it to them if someone's offspring appears on the planet earth against their mother's wish many claim the religious reason but it seems to be only on the surface as it looks like many politicians don't give a damn to christian values if they do not serve their purpose what is their true motivation what is the evolutionary perspective on all of these fights uh well i'll speak on this and then jen can find you know the holes in my thinking but the um first of all any individual politician's thinking is likely to be not very well analyzable because politicians by nature are actors and they're attempting to build the largest possible coalitions for their own personal interests so it's difficult to know what they really think about anything okay so now the question is however the people that vote for them are not doing that same thing people that vote for them are voting for their positions that they truly believe in so we can skip over what the individual politicians are up to and the fact that it's male politicians voting for this the vast majority of politicians are male so that's not a relevant issue here okay when it comes to pro-choice pro-life this is basically evenly divided and it isn't it isn't it is not the case that statistically um that there's a statistical difference in the gender breakdowns of these things just as many high percentage of women are are are pro-life as our men okay in other words that so there that there is not a gender bias in this decision so the um so now the question becomes from this questioner's perspective somebody else might have a 180 degree different perspective and ask the same question the um but the question is why is it you know why do people have this desire to to say hey you know a woman can't do do this and we find this really interesting problem and that is that people have individual differences in their perspective about what's fair so there are people um i can remember i actually remember having a little lightning bolt in my life when i was about you know 19 or 20. now that would have been would have been about 21-22 uh because it was when alan goldhamer was in grad school and he called me up and i don't got so this is amazing because of the million hours of conversations that we had this is a moment in a conversation that i remember to this day so yeah this question now brings it up so we're talking we're going back four decades and my brain is like a a uh a memory device it's like a like i've got an audio tape recording as alan said well it is ridiculous life does begin at conception deck it's like whoa wow okay so and he you know he had been studying the biology and you know he was deep in grad school and he's looking at the whole thing what pregnancy is and alan is if anything utterly unemotional human okay so it's not like he came was brought up with any big political agenda on any side of anything or religious for that matter he was just looking at it as a dispassionate you know young doctor looking at the scientific evidence saying hey begins a conception for god's sake what the hell is he going to call it okay and so that did not make him in any way uh what he call it pro-life but that was his position and quite frankly that that people can defend that position all day long the uh and so now the question is well what point does this thing start to have inalienable rights okay it's like well you tell me so you start to realize that this whole damn thing winds up being a muddy continuum and so now you can see how and it was useful for me to have that conversation i don't remember if i was hot under the collarbone i don't think i was i think i was more kind of surprised like i never even considered it from that perspective and um and so you live long enough and you're going to run into people who are very bright very sincere and absolutely believe that aborting a fetus is killing a child and there is no way for them to see it any differently on the other hand uh in a remarkable turn of personal psychology senator orrin hatch out of utah looked at this question as the united states senator and having to weigh in on judicial decisions and everything else and there was a a very a very amazing quote of a personal statement he made that he said you know i've looked at all the evidence and i have examined my conscience from every possible angle and i cannot look at a fertilized egg and say that that is a human and i cannot support blocking a woman's you know right to choose or whatever this is a deeply religious man who looks at it upside down inside out examines his own conscious and comes to the conclusion that i would come to okay and fought his way there through deep examination of the evidence as best he could now someone you know two percent different genetically for more and hatch you know it's very similar can't make that leap and doesn't and winds up in the on the other side of this so what i'm telling you is the great question of quote how the hell can they think wait the way they're thinking but when you are thinking that way it's because you don't have enough life experience and you haven't talked to enough variety of people that differ in their opinions to you you haven't talked to enough of them you may have talked to argued with 15 ones that didn't impress you but you didn't actually discuss dispassionately or calmly with 15 people that you respect the hell out of that think differently than you do and when you do then you'll understand why this is one of the great debates of our age because people well-meaning people that are highly capable forget that that ninety percent of the unwashed masses who can't string three sentences together that aren't contradictory forget about all those people i'm talking about people that that should have the decisions of a culture in their hands those people legitimately can differ in their opinions and that what's what makes this very difficult that's how so that's how i see it so i i respect that this is an extremely difficult problem uh myself personally without it without any question i pro-choice but i recognize that a reason for that isn't because i'm smarter and i've thought it through more deeply than somebody uh equally bright on the other side of this question it's because they and myself through either personal experiences or differences in genetics literally have our brains grind their way to a different opinion and you know that's why you have a supreme court and you have judicial challenges and you have new evidence that can come in over the ages and you you know a society does the very best they can when they are deeply conflicted and that's what i had to say about it jen what do you think about this no i mean i think that's a very comprehensive overview the the only thing i can think to kind of chime in with is that that that coming to that well-considered um you know conclusion uh that process can include uh various distortions of various types including strong powerful religious convictions so you know that that that is going to play into the the analysis of a lot of people it's not necessarily i mean obviously we know that there are a lot of people who have the these knee-jerk sweeping reactions to to these sorts of political questions and um we're not talking about those people we are talking about these people who have who have strongly considered it and and weighed the pros and cons and so there there are some who are you know under under the influence of their religious conviction and their strong religious beliefs so that that that is when life begins and they believe that for different reasons than alan goldhamer believes that right and and then there are others who and i have seen plenty of these in my political years working in legislatures and with committees and and running campaigns that it's it's very which way is the wind blowing in this district you know which it's very their personal beliefs may not at all reflect their political beliefs that they are really coalition building in their district and they are pandering and they are flip-flopping and everything else and so there's a huge huge piece of that in this as well so part of what makes it frustrating to watch as a spectator of the politics is that there there is a lot of just general hypocrisy to the whole question and people pick up on that like you you are you're watching people talk out of both sides of their mouth and and you can't quite catch them doing it and it's very frustrating so that's in there too yeah you bet all right all right thank you got anything else yeah uh we got one more question and then we get to hear sure here hear you guys [Laughter] dear doctors i'd like to hear your thoughts on people having paranoia in the internet you hear all kinds of reasons for why people have paranoia paranoid thoughts is it mainly genetics and personality can you treat paranoia and if so how some of us develop it situationally beautiful segway for what's coming yeah oh yeah that's exactly right i mean just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you the um yeah uh uh what it what how do we begin this uh our deepest apologies in respect to pam popper uh this is uh very very very uh germane to where we're going the uh it is i would say first of all paranoia that's a that's a sweeping word that encompasses a wide range of mental processes so the uh i think that we would have to define it and we'd have to define it as a repetitive pattern of arriving at inferences feelings and then probably related behavior associated with uh a an irrational uh suspicion that other people are out to do one harm okay so that that characteristic could be true of someone for example coming down off of a meth you know meth high or someone that just smoked some really particularly potent weed can get paranoid in other words we can alter the brain chemistry and get people paranoid we can also have patterns of behavior that are suspicious looking coincidences that fall together and make it look like there's something nefarious aimed at you but i don't think that's what we generally are talking about when we're talking about paranoid we're talking about someone who is not under the influence that has a sort of a steady bizarre uh inferences of of being you know of essentially being a target um that that is going to be genetic so uh obviously it could happen you could have i.e drug damage brain damage car accident you could have things that could jar a system and damage the brand's ability to to make uh reasonable inferences but the main reason why it is that you're going to see quote what we're going to broadly call paranoid experience inside of people paranoid personality disorder paranoid schizophrenia whatever you want to call paranoid this paranoid that it's all the same thing all of it is due to gene variation and so uh that is the reason and the uh so it's a it's a naturally varying characteristic as you would expect that in a stone age environment and a group living you should have a certain amount of neural circuits in there that are monitoring situations looking for evidence that others could be plotting against you and so yeah overestimating the worst case scenario just like that's a that's a very adaptive skill that a lot of people with just generally high conscientiousness have um and then you you add in a little instability yeah you get some you get some what we might call paranoia yeah yeah yeah so it's not maladaptive per se it's it's helpful um but uh it all depends on the context right and if you get a little too wide and a little too open and not very smart you wind up with some really stupid [ __ ] and and then and you can get some really destructive behavior in response to to those uh anxieties like aliens maybe dr lyle yeah all kinds of stuff i mean i i have of course treated many people uh and the question is is there any treatment and the answer is no there's no really treatment uh as robert plummen would say there's no disease so there's no cure um the the best you can do is to to try to provide a little bit of coalition support for the person so they feel generally a little bit less anxious in life and and hopefully you know that that's enough to make them a little bit more comfortable so that's that's that's that yeah don't believe me don't bring out the stellazine you know dr genius psychiatrist and think that you're gonna help this because you will not all right all right wonderful doctor doctor what else do you guys have on your mind yeah do we have do we have a little bit more time or what do we think yeah i think yeah yeah we should run a little bit you know just here we sit you know here we sit at a in a uh kind of an interesting position that we have on board in our little eyes esteemed dynamics beat your genes world um a uh a phd harvard political scientist in them this is like uh that famous phrase from patton um from the movie patton like when when they when they put him on the sidelines to take away his command and then the whole world is at war and he says the whole world's at war and i'm not in it the whole world is in a political unbelievable shitstorm unlike anything since world war ii and we have a resident political scientist and so what the heck what do you what are you thinking feeling sensing anticipating just tell us a few things about what's on the mind of jen hawk these days i'm getting all set up for like this high quality rant and really just like my brain is broken it's like this week has just broken me i just feel like it's i there's i mean i've spent so much of my interest in politics and and political science was motivated by um the study of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and how they consolidated power and and how they managed internal enemies and how they how they created i mean one of the very first papers i wrote once i decided to major in political science was about the the value of a perpetual crisis in an authoritarian regime and like how that was like this really essential thing you've got to have a perpetual crisis so you can continue to generate internal enemies so you can continue to legitimize your your um your tyranny essentially and so this is like this was poli sci 101 and i was always very interested in these themes and um pursued them up through i mean i originally went to graduate school to study um post-soviet institutions across the the soviet space including in cuba and not not so much china i was never a china china specialist but um very interested in soviet institutions especially in soviet history um and propaganda and censorship and and all of these things that i just am sitting here watching this unfold in the west in a way that makes me feel that you know maybe we maybe we never did win the cold war maybe maybe it's all been a very long game i um i'm just baffled and broken and disheartened and i just cannot believe what we are watching and as doug keeps reminding me every time i start to [ __ ] about this he's like you keep forgetting we're at war this is war like there this is not a rational process you you keep i i keep beating my head against the wall like why aren't people seeing it why aren't people uh you know like uh looking at the high concepts here the high the high principles of western civilization and fighting for them um but it's war it's absolutely war and we we talked about this a little bit um on our q a the the living wisdom library q a last week where people have been asking us about this predominant theory that a lot of very smart people have embraced this mass psychosis theory um that you have mass populations of humans um under some kind of hypnotic spell as a as a feature of i don't know the destruction of their culture and meaning and and uh these certain certain things that have been put into place in various points in history including in nazi germany and uh and of course now and we we discussed kind of you know why we didn't think that was exactly what was going on that this is more the aggregation of individual interests and people acting very much on an individual level out of immediate self-interest but some of that self-interest is going along with the crowd and um and going along with the crowd in a way that forces people to um embrace a new world view that is coherent to them um and and a cohesive narrative of what is happening and what is right and uh that is just that that narrative and that world view is one that seems to be inevitably hurtling us toward a sort of bio-authoritarianism i don't i don't see how we stop it at this point and i just find it very dismaying so that's where i'm at i'm i'm depressed af how are you doing yeah well i i'm less depressed that's these are individual differences between us um yeah so people just fyi is something that jen sent me today uh twitter is now going to be banishing people who who uh quote science that shows that people that are vaccinated can pass the virus now let's let's get very clear about this there is no scientific question at all about this of course people that are vaccinated can pass the virus they pass it just as well as people that are unvaccinated however this is absolutely uh deeply and evenly motivated by twitter and twitter is of course part of a of mass uh the massive western capital uh that goes along with microsoft and and apple and facebook amazon and google okay and pfizer and so by the way it occurred to me that pfizer rhymes with kaiser no god sure does well there have been many many many fascism jokes out there the fascist regime yeah so this is um so this is this is no joke uh this is this is we are not we're not hallucinating and we're not making something up and we're not blowing something up bigger uh than it is and we're not making a mountain out of a molehill the the foundation of what we understand to be freedom is under vicious and ruthless assault by major uh west you know western capital and these these individuals uh have gotten so wealthy that they've literally figured out a new way of taking over the world so that the cost of warfare has been has been dropped by you know 99 so now all the the warfare it's a brilliant scheme uh that you don't have to actually shoot people to death and then put them you know throw them in the river and destroy their tanks that's old-fashioned you know quaint and stupid all you have to do is take over the existing government machinery uh quote quasi-legally and you take over the press you buy it and then you you basically have your company called twitter uh ban anybody that says what is obviously true so the public literally can be confused and actually miseducated about what the truth is and um etc and then you did then by by that you justify the extraordinary process that you're seeing now worldwide where you know you're going to have to be vaccinated in germany and in austria and if you you aren't vaccinated they're going to fine you 4 000 euros a month uh in austria and you you know you're not going to be able to work essentially what you're doing is you're looking at theft okay so you're looking at uh you're looking at regimes stealing people's life savings and their livelihoods uh you're you're watching something that is a different version of devastating a society with carpet bombing uh in its individual level yeah in other words they're able to pick out who they want to kill uh effectively and so this is uh it's also jen sent me you sent me an extraordinary uh essay uh that that really explains some things that i hadn't quite conceptualized in my own head uh which is the notion that it's the first time ever that you you sort of that the the cabal doesn't have national boundaries or alliances it's a different it's a different looking animal um you know it was the chinese and the americans put together the coronavirus that's that's who did it they they're they're supposed to be enemies but they work together on it for god's sakes and um and so the uh you're you're finding that the reach of all these things is bizarrely uh international and you're you're watching the leadership of countries do completely and utterly irrational things that are leading to pressure and financial penalties for those who don't go along with the regime this is amazing and uh he called it a self-inflicted genocide especially self-inflicted yeah yeah and amazingly enough through this close math psychosis which is not what it is so we analyzed this on the living wisdom library it is it is what it is but we shouldn't call it by that name or use that framework but it is it is a mob mentality sort of you know it's a it's a there it goes by many many names moral panic you know there are these sort of moments in history where you do watch groups of people behave in this quote-unquote very irrational way and so you have social scientists come in and say oh well they're under some sort of sociological hypnosis and so let me let me articulate some vision of how that works join the winner no matter what their morality is join join the winner and and find a way to make it make sense for you you know like you you have to change your values you have to you actually have to subjectively reorient yourself to reality so you can continue to be ontologically coherent like you you really do have to um to readjust into and to essentially go with the flow so that looks like oh people have lost their minds they've you know changed so much they've they've abandoned long-held principles um but these are people acting under you know strict individual rationality to um to improve their prospects their their survival and reproduction prospects just like we would anticipate so right um yeah all of this kind of hand waving and very fancy sociological languages is a incorrect somewhat misguided way of talking about that that phenomenon it's interesting it's uh this is this is where we get to fly our flag that evolutionary psychology has a unique precision in understanding this uh for whatever good it might do uh at least at least we understand that uh i remember my friend dr rick seidel you know 20 years ago uh called me up and said when we were talking about the differences between um um cognitive therapy and what it is that we do he said cognitive therapy assumes that people are quote irrational and he says the truth is they're totally rational yeah they're always people are always right they're always rational that all they all they do is they they misunderstand you know features of reality they they misunderstand parameters perhaps but they're not irrational so the people you're only as rational as the information you're plugging into your computer to tell you what to do so if your information is distorted and skewed and haywire then you're gonna have a your your calculator is gonna come to a haywire result yeah yeah what we're seeing worldwide is we're seeing this bizarre concept that um that essentially uh they're they're the the end games the thing is that that led so many of my friends to be confused and disbelieving uh and sort of not certainly me too i mean i was there god knows in july so i didn't start you are such a you were such a sweet little normie for such a long time i was like i was like damn it doug wake up yeah yeah well it uh yeah you know i i needed to see the blatant disregard for for all facts coming out of the cdc and subsequent our united states government and that didn't happen until you know august and september so the uh then we see all the lot all the dots on the line and and we realized that we're not seeing a picture where you know the head of australia says this is ridiculous what the hell are we doing with vaccine vaccine mandates that don't make any sense at all and then we're going to see the same thing in canada but then we don't see it in germany and we're like okay well this is obviously politically motivated in germany nope we see wholesale disregard for the truth okay for uh for anybody that's interested it's interesting that the empire of japan does not share the same opinion okay so japan is going their own way they have no vax mandates they actually explicitly tell people that there is no there's to be no discrimination of any kind for people who are not vaccinated okay so there's no vax passes to go into a restaurant there is why do you think that these people are irresponsible in terms of public health of course not they have read the evidence the opposite yeah they have read the other even russia even russia has uh you know various tolerances in place and and you have a i know there's at least a year of um you get a year waiver from any vaccine mandate if you have natural immunity if you can improve natural immunity so they're they're i mean the us can't even go that far we can't even get we can't even get like a six-month respite you know if you have a positive test if you if you have an actual case of covid that gives you no exemption from any vaccine mandate which is insane so even russia can manage that so this is so understand that russia doesn't have quite the same skin in the game as the united states because the united states government is a target of the international cabal who wants to take over the machinery of the united states government in order to be in control of the world order russia is not going to cede control of the world order to that cabal so as a result they are in fact an independent agent uh that has has possibly some utility for shoving their citizens around a little bit as long as everybody is doing that they might as well join a little bit but they are actually not as absurd as the united states of america yeah mexico i mean there are countries you know powerful countries scattered around the world that are um i mean those three those are that's a really interesting combo japan russia mexico naturally super diverse economically super diverse you know that these are there's no one thing you know comparative political scientists would be like what do they have in common what's keeping them out of the you know what i would maybe not see an argument for that equivalently across all of them um but uh but yeah that is telling you that there is something more institutional and uh you know economic at work yes yeah yeah this is deep economics and basically uh what we are concerned about and live in in varying degrees of anxiety about is that you you are watching the fact that a few people got wealthy enough that they could literally control world process that's that's a very scary thing and uh we don't know where it's going and we we are aware that it's happening and we're aware that the united states is the great prize okay so yeah whatever it is that you're trying to steal in the world you know there is one set of jewels that is the fanciest jewels that there are uh the most important uh the most important political system to get control of and therefore you have control over the world is the united states and uh it is the hardest to take because we have the most sophisticated system of checks and balances of thank goodness uh as a result of some deep thinking on on the part of the forefathers so the um so we we remain with greater freedoms than these other places that have already uh that have already taken over by force their populations um the these people in these other countries have not capitulated willingly they are being forced to the point of a gun uh to do the bidding of this cabal so this is uh this is the state of the world that we're in right now and it would be remiss on a podcast to be talking about human happiness decision making evolutionary biology for god's sakes and life uh to not be uh noting that there is a large elephant in freedom's living room and uh we're keeping our eye on it and when we when we know anything or have anything particularly useful to comment on that we can think of you'll be hearing from us but we we've been doing a lot of deep thinking and right now all we want to make sure that our people know uh from the standpoint of us being transparent and as educationally useful as we can figure out how to be is that there are big problems in front of us there are also big wise strong courageous people that are defending freedom in this country and uh we we salute those people we support them robert malone peter mcculloch there's uh many other alex berenson uh there are there are a great many people that that have done great work have done probably the greatest work of their lives and uh so we we hope and i i i have i wouldn't say confidence but i certainly have a lot of hope that there will be a lot of freedom left uh at the end of this how much i don't know and i don't know what it's gonna take uh to defend it but that that's where we are poor gen is uh studied too much totalitarian regimes and is still less optimistic i just you just you watch you just watch how easily you know democracies how fragile they can be yes and uh you know the united states is is seems impervious and seems uh well consolidated and it certainly is relative to the rest but it's not you know it's not that old it's only a couple generations old um and uh it's uh it's not immune to these processes and this is as that as that essay that i sent you kind of points out this is a a very distinct it's a stateless form of totalitarianism um where it's really the elites versus everybody else and the elites are cross-national and that's that has really um never happened before in human history it's sort of like when we talk about yeah totalitarianism uh destruction of democracy or or just war in general it's it's always oriented around the discussion of state versus state um and and a kind of nationalism that is not present here um and so it's really it's it's difficult to wrap your head around it it's a whole different language it's a whole whole sets of assumptions that have to be let go and whole whole new sets of assumptions that have to be absorbed and it's just a it's a lot to to process and to come to terms with and for from my perspective a pretty demoralizing one just because of yeah my particular uh historical interest and what i'm familiar with so yeah yeah it's this is uh we're in the super bowl of freedom uh they they already beat all the weak teams they beat australia they beat canada they beat new zealand they beat they uh they've beaten france they're going to beat the uk easily uh and and the vote that i think the vote went down today they they have beaten germany and they have beaten austria okay so this is the super bowl of human freedom forever they beat canada easily so the the the truth is is that the the one team that has a chance against global totalitarianism is the united states and it's the strongest team it has the you know it has the most and the best players and so we we absolutely have a chance but it is daunting and it's a strange thing to be talking six days decades into this lifetime and never having considered this possibility that the the extraordinary freedom that the forefathers carved out and made possible in the united states and spread throughout the world that literally is in the balance right now okay so it is literally on trial for its life and so you know we we will see it's not like we're gonna die uh if freedom dies in the way that we know it we we will survive and we will adapt and we will make the best of our lives but the extraordinary thing that has been the freedom of the united states of america that concept of self-governance by by allowing to be governed by the consent of the governed that degree of freedom and the extraordinary prosperity and potential of human happiness the the optimal set of circumstances under which happiness is to be created inside of human beings that is a maximally free society of which we are the approximate approximation of what is possible it has now found there has been a an extraordinarily uh serpentine process by which that has a threat has emerged uh i didn't see it coming the vast majority of people in the world haven't seen it coming this thing has quietly emerged under under the revolution in technology in the last 25 years and so it is upon us and it is dangerous as hell and it is evil to the core and that is such that the technological revolution is such an important component because this would not have been possible you you can't like as you're as you're describing it's not as if you know people are being uh actively you know knocks in the middle of the night and disappeared in the middle of the night or or thrown into gulags because that's not necessary it's not necessary to actually act with force against anybody because you can you can make a an individual home a gulag you can you can isolate and manage your population in ways um with with data surveillance and also with the possibility of remote work that everybody has and all of these things that were not in place even 10 years ago um and so this this kind of uh you know perfect perfect crime the perfect perpetual crisis for anybody who would want to execute these kinds of political and economic takeovers of the us or elsewhere have really been facilitated by our dependence on technology and and our attachment to it and i mean i've ranted about this before but you could never have gotten away with uh you know long-term uh quarantine lockdown policies in a population that couldn't stay home that in order to make a living and so you you uh have run into the situation where it's it's just possible in new ways for people to be productive from home um and increasingly so as the metaverse comes online and uh and that makes um the entire population just just prepared vulnerable to all of this so it's it's our own human energy yeah but and and we're and we're more susceptible like not only are we giving away the data through all of our use of technology that makes us easier to manipulate and control but we're also consuming all of this data that is very tailored to us specifically and you know the the state media of the us and elsewhere um i if people haven't listened already um i don't think it's in danger of being taken down off of spotify but probably it's going to be taken down everywhere else but um dr peter mccullough is on with joe rogan this week um and it's a three-hour long conversation where they they go over um he mccullough a couple of times says this is like grand rounds on joe rogan he is so he has such um familiarity with the literature and he just cites paper after paper and he calls out the the actual propaganda techniques of cnn and others who just repeated talking points that were outright lies um to to manipulate and to create narratives that um that essentially from mccullough's perspective suppressed early treatment in favor of of pushing people to get the vaccines um among many many other things and so like all of this is like part and parcel with what we're talking about the the sort of the specifics of what they're talking about on that on that um podcast are the the machine in action essentially um and how this crisis has been harvested and leveraged for greater population control and will continue to be so yeah and it's not they aren't making it up as they go along this was exquisitely planned and this is this is not happening by accident okay and so this is uh this when you understand how carefully this was planned and how ruthlessly and viciously it's planned uh you realize oh wait a second you know this isn't a disagreement and this isn't a little bit of pharmacological profiteering this is war okay and they are they're coming after everybody's money they're gonna drain everybody's uh bank accounts uh they're when i say that there are ways to do that where you don't even understand that has happened they they can they can uh they can also move which they are moving very as swiftly as possible towards a a non-cash economy uh in an all-out digital economy so that they can control every possibility of you transacting with anybody else in the world that it must they must be able to know about it and they can have ai surveillance and so as a result uh if you if they disagree with you and they don't like you and they don't like what you say they can shut you down make it impossible for anybody to pay you and impoverish you and into submission and into poverty okay this year even if they just don't like you a little bit they give you you know all of your your loans suddenly have a way higher interest rate all of your like it's just it becomes harder and harder to get by it's not as if you've been completely de-platformed and disappeared you know you're able to participate um but you're it's it's very much like the chinese social credit system where you you are um you're burdened with these extra costs of doing business and you can't do business everywhere right yeah and this is and we see demand for this we see i mean just look on twitter any given day and you see the the the sort of outrage and the um the demand for more draconian mandates and and you know the evil unvaccinated who were bringing society down and and there's this sort of um this this this this othering process that is going on that is key to this whole process and this whole um just the whole the whole scheme yep yep this is that is that too is by design it's unbelievable it's it's it's so big you you it's like you you wake up you know you you walk on the beach and you turn your back and you turn around and there's an 80-foot tidal wave coming at you it's like holy s you'd have no idea that thing was coming it's a tsunami coming from an earthquake that happened out in the middle of the pacific and nobody told you about it and there it is and you're staring at it and that that's that's what this is the equivalent of and so you know we all we all we can do is we can you know you do what you can for yourself but mainly uh we are observing carefully uh and trying to understand and with people that we talk to that are in very difficult circumstances that i talk to you know weekly i'm talking to several people that are up against it in some very very important way either here or around the world okay yeah me too lots of people have everybody major major conflicts tremendous and so this is uh this is the uh the biggest monster in the living room of our time you have other personal issues individual issues with relationships health issues financial issues that are et cetera problems with your kid in school that they say is adhd there's a thousand and one problems but we got another you know we got a big big monster sitting in each of our living rooms and we're watching carefully and hoping uh hoping for the best so more to follow when it makes sense wow yeah we basically we we snuck a little hawk blocked into the beach this week that's that's basically what just happened can't help it yeah yeah well we didn't record one this week anyway so we we're just bundled in yeah everybody that's on hawkblock probably listens here so this is all fair i think so yeah yeah all right folks yeah maybe we'll have a bitcoin special too cryptocurrency yeah uh crypto is overrated we can we can have a we can have a whole discussion about that but i'm i'm very dubious i'm very dubious about uh that being the the doctor you're just about to receive probably a bunch of emails once i release this because of saying that there are quite a number of people i'm sure a bunch of people watching podcasts who are very into the bitcoin no i was i was i was very into it for a while as well but i my sort of larger view of the forces at work here make me um skeptical of its ability to avoid those pressures the same pressures that we're talking about the the sort of global elite takeover um you know has uh has lovers that attach to cryptocurrency as well so i don't i don't see it as being a completely independent way to avoid this whole problem yeah maybe we'll have to hear more about that another time doctors thank you so so much love it um can't wait for the next current event episodes so yeah all right oh it's always good to have a little solidarity at least [Laughter] all right all right folks as the sky darkens above us yeah uh yeah one last thing uh that that i also said on the previous and the living with some library talk that we did which is that robert malone said something that was important that caught my eye you know about maybe a month ago and he said you know this is this is dark times and we're in trouble he says but one of the things is is that you're going to meet new people and you're going to find new kindred spirits and you will and they this is a period of life that you know this crisis will forge some connections in your life that would not have otherwise been forged and so you know we don't want that but it's going to happen and and that there's truth in that and so uh i even even remotely you know people uh even me learning about robert malone and a peter mccullugh is is inspiring uh and it fills me with gratitude and admiration uh for for people that are that are stepping up and and doing their best and um and there's gonna be people that that i'm going to meet along the way of this journey we're we're not nowhere near the end of this thing and so we're going to observe a lot we're going to end it and it is super it's been super useful for me to have a gen hawk you know to talk things over with and to listen and to to educate me on so many angles of this the it helps to to have people that that you can respect and that you can learn from and try to piece these things together as we try to get a map of our new reality so that we can make the best moves for ourselves and our families it reminds me of uh 20 years ago this moment has stuck with me for th for this long i was watching the election returns of the 2000 election which at the time i you know were this was just traumatizing to watch this like toss-up where people who don't remember you know all the networks called the election for gore and then they were like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute like new [ __ ] has come to light and so the night was left as a as a question mark with bush vigor and so i was frantically flipping around i was alone in my office i was working at a non-profit i was frantically flipping around for channels for anybody that was still on talking about it after like brokaw went to sleep and everybody else signed off and so i found myself wherever tucker carlson was at that time i think he was he at cnn he wasn't on fox yet yeah and i've never seen him before this was my introduction with the red bow he had his little bow tie and and and i remember clear his day he he he he said well you know you never know what's gonna happen it's always darkest just before the dawn and then there was this beat and he said of course it's also always darkest just before it goes completely black [Laughter] you
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