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Episode 59: How different do we act when we're being watched
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all right good evening everybody it's an Ag along with dr. dot Doug while dr. Lisle how are you doing this evening good good about yourself not too bad it's getting warmer it's getting warmer so yeah I used to have this theory that when it gets warmer it's like human mating season so that's when like everybody starts going out and starting to find each other I don't know if that right but I always thought that was true I have no doubt that that was true when humans were living you know for people in the in northern Asia and northern Europe but I don't think it had anything to do with things around the equator so go ahead maybe I have two ancestry up in northern northern here I think you did all right all right well today we are going to be talking about a couple of different topics now I was reading the evolutionary psychology journal now you know it's it's something I really enjoy reading there's a there's a lot of deep articles in there some of which I understand some of which are just way over my head but but some of them I pick up here and there and there was one that really caught my eye now the question I titled the show how different do we act when we're being watched and so the question is do we act differently in private versus when someone's watching and I think that we can agree that the answer is yes but what the scientists were trying to figure out was how do people act when it's just a picture of eyes watching okay so that's what we're going to be talking about briefly and also we're going to be talking about another article that I read in the European Journal of Personality which is what's best for a first impression is it personality that people can observe before they come and talk to you or is it just the physical features they were trying to figure this out and you know it's a small study couple of you know maybe a couple hundred college students but the first one or the second one right personality or physical features because that's that's going to be a really interesting question when we're like I don't know parties business networking events what however however at conferences however we need the opposite sex so and then we are going to have a question from one of our listeners he might be calling in or would just read the question either one and then got a pretty pretty sad Darwin Award yeah pretty pretty interesting Darwin award that will read to everybody so dr. Lyle you ready for it I'm ready all right so the first one the research from the evolutionary psychology journal what this article found about eye images so when people are watching you it turns out that people do what's called pro-social behavior so you know as opposed to being anonymous or being being by yourself you don't really act the same so these researches they were trying to figure out is it just i image is like can you take a picture of eyes or painting and put it in the room and people will act just the same as they would if there were people like actual people watching and it turns out they that's true but they were trying to figure out is what if the eyes are closed what if the eyes have a direct gaze so like the eyes kind of like it's like the Mona Lisa right the Mona Lisa's looking at you all the time or if the eyes are looking away well they found that when the eyes are actually watching you that the direct gaze then people have a much bigger inclination to be pro-social compared to eyes that are averted and closed and then their control group was an image of flowers so really interesting to me because I thought well you know I can put a picture up in my Maya in my place of eyes watching me maybe I'll just keep it clean a little bit more often you know yes very good it's actually quite interesting it's showing that the it's actually showing than the neural circuits of the human so this is clearly an innate mechanism that we we are looking to try to be to essentially alter the inferences people make about what we would be like to trade with so this is a method for when we're being observed to make it look like we are more benefit our cost-benefit ratio that we bring to the table is actually better than it really is and you better do this because your competitors are all doing it since it's a species wide characteristic so the so that's actually what's happening here that's going to be what we call impression management so I think it's fascinating but all it takes painting in the room with some eyes on that painting and suddenly you're having the effect you know it's not it's not shocking that that's true but it's really quite interesting that it's true and I think they even did a to go even further and having eyes that can follow you you know particular painting style is uh it's just terrific that that's how they show that effect so yeah quite a quite a nifty little study and I had heard about something like this years ago but it sounds like this is an update on that and a little greater refinement so very cool do you think there's in plication 's for this in terms of motivational behaviors so for instance if I'm trying to follow my diet or exercise or you know be productive or whatever I'm trying to accomplish or if anybody's trying to accomplish that do you think it's helpful to have like that picture of eyes and they're in the really a really good question you know I was kind of rolling my eyes that you're at the idea of keeping your room clean herb ed I had I had didn't that did not occur to me so this is say leave it leave it to you Nate who's tortured was self-doubt is it it's absolutely right everything I I actually had not thought about adapting that in that way and so I mean somebody somebody that wants to get a dissertation done oughta had people do a weight loss program and have give them paintings to put in their room and they don't know why but they just want certain paintings in there and we can have you know water lilies by Monet can be somebody's to quote you know we're looking for that and then somebody else can have something where there's something with some eyes and so and then we find out whether or not there's effect I mean I think that's a fascinating study and idea and so who knows we'll see what comes of it hmm interesting yeah yeah okay well very very interesting yeah I'd be it'd be curious hopefully if there's some students listening some psychology PhD students they can make them go and do this that would be really really cool after you do this I have to say that that that would be a remarkable study to do and one that has the possibility because conceptually it's fascinating it's not judging changing now now we're not just pro-social behavior which is what but but now we're going beyond to more important self regulation in general and and essentially that that are to break bad habits and so forth we are performing only in front of an internal audience and so if we essentially enhance that internal audience with some outside eyes you know a lot of a lot of people that struggle with their weight are eating cookies when nobody's looking but the reason salad in front of everybody at the lunch table so if we because the impression management issues so to essentially harness a bit of that there might be in effect there I'm not sure if there would be but there might be and I that would be well worth finding out yeah when I read this it reminded me when I was about 14 years old I was my parents love listening to this radio show host who was a psychologist or she was a marriage and family therapist on on a on a big radio station around here and she used to take calls for people and she had a phone call from a married man who was addicted to pornography and so he was asking her how the hell am I supposed to stop this I'm married I got kids and like I'm ruining my life because that's all I'm doing and she ended up telling him she was based on Freud and so she had a lot of thinking that listen to this show I realize now it wasn't correct but she stumbled on this issue she told him that she has to tape a picture of his of his family to his computer so that every time yahoo loads up the porn he's got to look at them while he's doing it and yeah and sure enough he called back like a few weeks later he's like oh my god I bet that's helped me so much now we kind of understand why very interesting very interesting will a good for her that's uh you know like like you said she didn't know why but she was smelling something there and and good enough good job close well alright students that ever do this do it call us call us to the show and we would love to hear from you go alright let's go on alright so our next next article is from the European Journal of Personality now I don't think it's an evolutionary psychology journal in fact when I looked at the personality traits they did have the big five in here sure but they also had a whole bunch of others like ambition you know so little little things like that but what they found what they did a small study use about 300 college students they quote they claim that the perceived personality traits plays no role in the romantic interest and here's what they did they took about 300 college teams that watch the videos of potential romantic partners of the opposite sexes and talking about themselves kind of like a YouTube value of themselves and then they rated these people personality traits and then their physical attractiveness and they reported the extent to which they rule romantically interested now what's interesting and this actually is really cool is all the girls they court they they talked amongst each other after they did this and they almost all agreed on the personality traits that they could tell from the people they were looking at so isn't that something that's exactly what you said and it turns out that they actually found that though that the physical attractiveness is the most important thing and actually personality traits played absolutely no role in the romantic interest when they first law I think he have been introduced somebody gets a medal for doing this study this this is a very very interesting study and this is a study that that interestingly enough or early way back in the day fifty years ago even though sixty years ago there was early Studies on interpersonal attraction others like you know I think Ellen brashaad and help I can't remember their names Walter wall stir its way back in the day they would do these studies and they would find like nothing okay they would find they'd come up with some variable like height is the biggest correlation coefficient etc and I was extremely interested in those studies as a young social psych student and I was frustrated because I felt like they were they were hiding their heads in the sand like it you know from from my standpoint it was obvious to me what I would be doing in there and when I'm looking at everybody's behavior it looks like everybody is following suit on on physical attractiveness dominating the show that would you know more ink more evidence for that would come later with with David buss and the rise of evolutionary psychology in this space but this study it's amazing that it's been 30 years since David buss had this thing by the teeth and now we finally we finally have a study that looks at this so cleanly and shows this ie complete effect for nothing other than than physical attractiveness and personality characteristics go entirely by the wayside that is fascinating and the obviously this obviously you could say well they don't know that much more about the people but if the people are talking you're actually picking up some information about their emotional expressiveness you're picking up a lot about their personality so the fact that they that the personality was not even an issue in computing the individuals mate value for either males or females is just astonishing to me I'm surprised that I'm surprised that it's that's actually a pretty good sized study a couple hundred people that's a pretty big statistical end so that would mean that if there are any personality characteristics making an impact they're making a hell of a small impact which explains my dating career yeah there you go that people nailed it so there you go well well done to find that Nate and I think that's uh obviously we're going to find that these factors become very important when it comes to an overall you know more complex analysis of the people in deciding on relationships and so on and so forth but to but an animal is an animal and as an animal and this this human being was a nonverbal casual mating animal before it was anything else and so the the more sophisticated subtle circuits are in play but it is fascinating that they are dominated by the most ancient circuits first so good very good very interesting huh yeah well we there was two laying up that occurs to me you know i won't i won't get this quote right because i can't i can't remember it but it was Aristotle who said something of the kind he said a beautiful face is more important than any letter of reference and so he he also said sort of why is beauty important only a person without eyes could ask such a question and he said finally there are three wishes of every man to be rich or to be healthy to be rich by honest means and to be beautiful and so this is uh this study is now is now bringing this point home if we already didn't know it that that physical form you know dominates this space as as brutal enough unpleasant is that reality is it's a reality that you know it makes sense to confront it head-on and and understand it so that to make it less mysterious and not hide under the under the carpet mm-hmm now that makes a lot of sense and it it seems to be in line with a lot of what you've said before in our previous shows sure sure all right so I'm we actually we have a caller we have a caller that's calling any other question for dr. dial so caller is this Dan Dan welcome to the show yeah hi Dan how are you doing today you're on with Nate and dr. Lyle how you doing there oh good good can you guys hear me okay cuz I'm kind of getting a fireman cover my question while I'm reading an on speaker all right I want I want to say I love listening you guys show because I've been a huge fan of evolutionary psychology since I heard Jeffrey Miller on another podcast but you know one of the things that I've been hearing and and listening is dr. allow you talked a lot about the idea of nature versus nurture and in relation to like the five-factor man I may be getting this wrong correct me if I'm wrong where I'm saying this but with the five factor model that it's it's based off a nature and that's determining the character which essentially determines the behavior of an individual but I guess the thing I'm thinking about is that kind of with my journey of kind of you know looking at myself and same things that I want to improve upon in terms of my me my behavior I would say I think that I feel like I've seen things in my past that have made me behave in ways that maybe let's say from the idea of giving value to myself so you know that I I'm putting other people down in my head for example ultimately that's that's ways that I find value so that I can feel better about myself and I believe I tribute that to something like not you know being appreciated by those around me sometimes by my family and and maybe those around me I don't to say my friends but just you know school and things like that when I was younger and I tribute that type of behavior of doing that too or finding value in my intelligence rather than let's say finding value in Who I am naturally and what I already have so and I understand that there's a lot of overlap with you know like certain things of wanting resources and things like that like for example that sometimes people that are let's say have bad experiences when they're younger a lot of people say this in normal culture and you know pop psychology type stuff they say that it's when you someone is a bullied or whatever has troubles when they're younger they're really motivates succeed and I think that that idea essentially goes back into what you talked about with evolutionary psychology of wanting resources and some people are more aggressive about that and things like that but you know I guess I feel like there is some overlap with nurture no and and I guess if you can kind of speak to that because it's like sometimes I think about like why somebody shy you know things like that and I related to some what to some of the things I've experienced and some of the ways that maybe what I've experienced is maybe covered up or affected some of the attributes that are the traits that are the of my facts five factor model you know what I mean so right now these are really good this is really good questions and this is very very honest sort of introspection that you're doing and you're trying to connect some dots so let's let's just sort of take things back for a moment before we go forward so the first of all your life experience is going to be an interaction between your personality your natural personality and the environmental events that come your way so you could you could be born an extremely naturally happy soul with a lot of confidence and great emotional stability and extraversion etc and openness to experience and then you wind up getting thrown into a Russian gulag and tortured for the next thirty seven years now during that entire time you will be miserable so the environment is essentially dominating your life experience now when you are released nobody in their right mind would say that you would will not have been impacted by this however I will say that if we look at you five years after you released you are going to be remarkably similar to your identical twin brother who is never in that gulag okay so will you be somewhat different yeah you'll be somewhat different that you will not be dramatically different and if we had you take personality tests and we actually talk to you if we put you in circumstances that that we're going to call functionally equivalent circumstances so let me suddenly just sort of wind out here to try to explain a little bit about genetics and an environment and how they work so what-what I want you to think about is I want you to think about a a gene causes something to happen in the body so a gene causes the body to build the nose or the gene causes a body to build hair or teeth etc etc in a gene is going to cause for example your skin to look like the way that it does now then the environment is going to be acting on that and the result is going to going to be a essentially a combination between how the environmental factors impact those specific genes so if you go out in the Sun you're going to start darkening the skin a little bit dependent upon how how much Sun that you get and how how your genes are built in terms of melanin and the skin and so forth that the degree of that change is going to be what we call the reaction Rindge so if you feed kids different diets it will affect their height so if you starve a kid and make them extremely deficient in their diet they're not going to become as tall as the other otherwise would it become but we're also going to understand that through a normal course of events that are consistent with sort of natural inputs for the species that person is going to be essentially about as tall as they were going to be so Shaquille O'Neal more or less was going to be Shaquille Oh Neal he's wound up being 72 now had he had slightly different diet characteristics it might have been 7 1 and 3/4 or it might have been 7 2 and 1/4 there might be that much reaction range around height maybe more there might be an inch on either side of this but not too much we would have had to give him an extremely deficient diet and have him be really in trouble for him to be only say 611 to have made that big of an impact so this is the notion of reaction range so if you take a kid who is is in a normal environment is going to wind up with 140 IQ it's going to be a 99 plus percent I'll bring that kid it's going to be very difficult for it for us to put them in an environment where something very close to that isn't going to happen so we may put him in an environment where he winds up with you know we might wind up being 98th percentile pretty hard to put him in an environment where he would wind up at 95 okay so so what I'm saying is is that the human being is pretty much the human being physically and in terms of its mental characteristics and you can't shift it around too much with environmental inputs now you would expect that if you had extraordinary environmental inputs like we put you in a cage and treat you like a monkey for five years then we could expect that there would be some out some some changes that would take place that would be potentially significant and you know problematic but that is not most people's life experience so let's talk about life experiences but I'm going to say are going to come under the heading of normal so normal is going to be I got embarrassed in front of the whole school was in this eighth grade because you know I was supposed to do the talent show and then I got up there and just choked and I couldn't you know I was supposed to sing and I couldn't do it okay or I got you know I really wanted to be on the basketball team but I got picked last and cetera et cetera or you know I peed my pain in third grade and the whole school found out about it etc these are all normal outcomes of situations that will happen to a social animal that's living in close proximity and its behavior is being monitored cetera bullied is another one okay so these are all normal courses of events so we would not expect the the we would not expect substantial reactions away from what the genes are going to be building with respect to these individuals and we don't find them okay so the psychologists of course don't know this they don't understand how tightly constrained they would think for example the way some there are people that if you said well if you feed your kids really well they'll get to be tall you know your son would be six-foot but if you if you feed them junk food and McDonald's and everything else and that kind of crap they're only going to be like five eight so they might think that the reaction range was was four inches which turns out to be what we call a standard you know two standard deviations for God's sakes so it would take somebody from you know or you know I think that is I think the standard deviation for for a height in males is a couple of inches or so so in other words who would possibly take somebody from the sixteenth percentile to the 84th percentile depending upon diet well that's not true okay so the diet doesn't have anything close to that kind of an impact it has a very tiny impact it might take somebody from 75th percentile the 78th percentile might be three a seven inch so in the same way these personality characteristics have been shown to be quite robust with respect to than what we're going to call functionally equivalent environments it doesn't really matter with your with your height if you're eating Italian food or Chinese food or junk food or whole base you know Whole Foods plant-based pristine food from the time you're a little baby it doesn't make any difference by the time you're 20 your height is going to be essentially your height it's provided that there was sufficient calories for the basic machinery to operate so the concept of functionally equivalent environments is very very important and we're going to find out about how much variance these different variant environments the vast majority of environments are going to be within ranges where essentially the same it's essentially the environments or having impacts on the genetic code the genetic code is is not going to be modifying that person's personality hardly at all that's why we find in these long-term studies with monozygotic twins that are being raised by different people we find that their correlation coefficients are so high and they are about the same degree as high as whether or not those people are raised by the same people or they're raised by entirely different people so I believe someone could check me on this but I believe that for example with respect to intelligence the correlation coefficients of people that are raised in the same household by the same people the correlation coefficients on intelligence is 0.85 and the correlation coefficients if they're raised in different households by different people or 0.8 okay almost no difference now so what does this mean for us it means that it means that when it comes to you're essentially basic personality structure you are who you are and when it comes to things like shyness how motivated you are to succeed all this kind of stuff this is all going to be kind of in the cards the question is this does environment impact anything about you will impacts a great deal about you but it doesn't impact your personality so if you're in the Russian gulag you're you're suffering if you've got a mother who's a snarling pushy bitch this is unbelievably difficult to get along with then your childhood is full of moods of unhappiness and anxiety and stress now my friends in both learning theory and in psychodynamic theory will think that this is going to have something to do with your personality when you're 30 I will argue that it doesn't and the research evidence supports me and not them okay so what your mother is like how it is that she treats you doesn't appear to have any discernible impact on people's personalities now you might say well doesn't impact them at all well undoubtedly it does to some degree so for example when it comes to Mother's Day I think you're going to have a different reaction somebody who had a great mom and had a great time with her mom with your mom the I think when it comes to Christmastime and Thanksgiving this is going to impact you so you're going to you're going to not be so anxious to call home and think about we're all getting together for the holidays the it may it may result in you valuing a mate that is a little more stable and warm and loving and you may be a little less risk tolerant with respect to some personality characteristics and potential mates if they if any of them sort of remind you of your mother in essence if they you maybe you may become a little more sensitive to disagreeable characteristics than you otherwise might have been so in subtle ways that your environment is impacting you in the sense that and there's other things that you mentioned that are interesting so for example you talked about your own internal rehearsal processes when you see people and then you their potential competitors and then you think through where it is that you are at an advantage with respect to them etc and you feel critical of them this is a natural human characteristic now there are people that may not do this very much now I've never met one I've met people that do it so constantly they're annoying to talk to and so what this really is is that this is an issue about natural competitiveness and actually disagree ability so people that are very very agreeable will have that kind of process happening less people that are normal will how what happened fairly often with respect to anybody who is seen as a competitor within their ecological niche and people who are naturally disagreeable will happen happening all the time particularly with respect to almost anybody that is shining in any field at all a highly competitive disagreeable individual will find ways to clip down the tall poppies and assert themselves as above them so these are this is not anything so you may have been highly conscientious and very decent human being and therefore thinking that slightly shames yourself down that that these are this is part of your internal process but I assure you that this has been part of my internal process for decades okay and so this is a Joe's baby carrot butter but what's that you just made me feel a lot better about myself by the way ah very good very good so this is uh so this is a useful thing to know I suppose that if you're hyper conscientious and a really decent person that you might be feeling bad about having this essentially highly critical chip particularly and I think I would argue that we would likely see it in circumstances where anybody was potentially invading on some status that you wanted okay and so that that should be that's a that's an innate mechanism inside of humans essentially inside your own head what you're doing is potentially rehearsing the criticisms that you would that you would actually utilize in communicating with other people particularly for example attractive females about how it is that this guy's achievement that where he's getting some shine really isn't that worthy of admiration and in fact she should discount all all things about him that are apparently noteworthy and praiseworthy okay does that make some sense yeah absolutely I mean there's definitely some other aspects of that whole idea that I would love to talk more about but I think that's not necessary at this point sure so we're very good I can't remember some other things you said did we I'm trying to think if I if I explained this let me back up and just to bore everybody for a couple more minutes yeah sometimes when people hear me they I don't get my point across or I don't get it completely said the environment is very important in fact your environment is an unbelievably important feature of how enjoyable your life is going to be so what made you choose is an enormous ly important issue who your friends are what work you do where it is that you live okay etc it a family that you're born into and that you are interconnected with these things have I have quit art can be critically important features of how enjoyable or miserable your existences they do not however influence what we're going to call your personality so when parents I have parents that will will be quite concerned about the shaping of the personality of their offspring about whether or not their offspring are going to become good people about whether offspring are going to be smart whether they're going to be ambitious or lazy all these kinds of things and it turns out that they're they are truly wasting their time because those issues how ambitious how lazy whether or not they're going to be upstanding decent human beings and be honest and and etc honest straight rule-following high you know achieving and conscientious adults whether or not they're going to be really nice people and be pleasant other people and be empathic and nice to animals these things are determined at conception and will not be influenced by the process that of development provided once again the caveat that we do not have extraordinary environments okay and virtually no one in the United States lives in an extraordinary environment and so for all intents and purposes who it is that you are is yours it's yours alone and our job is to take whoever that person is and try to strategically move yourself into the very best set of circumstances to enjoy your existence to the maximum degree okay that sounds real I could sum it up really quickly would it basically be accurate to say your genetics determines how you react to certain environmental experiences yes very good excellent that's right okay thank you got it all right sir very good thank you very much for calling great questions my pleasure excellent yeah Dan thank you very much for the call really appreciate a great question you know as you were telling Dan that you also have these critical thoughts of everybody I was thinking I was just at them oh yeah I was just at the gym today and and I did go you know three four times a year and I go to the gym and I was and there was this like guy doing bench press you know so he's got like two of those like huge 45 plates on each side and he's like doing these giant impression of course there's a couple of cute girls watching him and I just think to myself yeah this guy's doing it all wrong so after he as he's he's got the wrong form you know he's arching his back whatever whatever I'm coming up with so of course as the girls stay there and he finishes I decide like I'm gonna show them how it's done so like after I like struggled to remove all three plates on each side of the bench press I put my little five-pound five-pound weights on there and I just shown you an ad I'm sorry you have to had well well yeah yeah I'm trying to show off so I was trying to bluff a little bit more but right yeah so I showed them how it was done didn't really see that I think it's just because you know there's a lot of people at the gym good story man very good as a very good question I'm glad I'm glad that listener asked that question because it's uh it's it's it's very useful for me to try to get that clear yeah all right what else we thank you very much well we've got you so tell us a little bit about what's been going on your life that you've been any conferences any any interesting introducing stories I did I went to a I went to an engine to conference that's a it's a food thing down in novice down in Los Angeles notice that I didn't look you up yeah so any rate I was will skip over that little detail and just go so well anyway I knew you I and II was I so I there's a lady there that had had known I hadn't known me I had met her before and she came up to me and asked me in her in her very intelligent concern about our new president and what this was going to mean for our future etc etc and was clearly worried and and respected my opinion for whatever reason because I know a lot about carbohydrates and protein and fat so that would make me an expert on on world political you know outcomes anyway so I started to explain something to her and and after I gave her about five minutes ten or ten minute download that all that I'll truncate that here she was really excited to hear this because she had never had this concept and never occurred to her and so I think I've talked about this before here but I want to I want to reiterate this for for people in our audience in case there this is a part of my thinking that they've never heard and that is that the world is getting massively better very very quickly and will continue on into the future indefinitely humans are are essentially have solved the of how to deal with with nature and people don't really know this and so they're still worried about the environment and they're worried about pollution they're worried about you know conflict between peoples etc etc there's going to be problems there's we're looking at the tail ends of the mess here folks what people are are quite unconscious of how different life is than it was a hundred years ago or 200 years ago and for that matter from 200 years ago all the way back to the dawn of written language and before in the last hundred and fifty years or about to about 200 years now since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in England what we have seen in places where we have a free enterprise free market system that has the natural incentives that come with trade and limited constitutional governments what you've seen is a 3% increase annually in humans ability to essentially manipulate molecules and put them together in combinations that improve human life that's what we're doing here is we are moving atoms and molecules around in ways to serve human interests and 200 years ago they would have had no idea what was going to come they the life that you live now is unimaginable from people living in 1825 and it's equally unimaginable for people who are living in 1917 so at 3% a year there's a little mathematical law called the law of 72 which is a little heuristic for figuring out how long it takes to double your money under give an interest rate so at three percent rate of return times 24 years equals 72 so it figure that it takes basically 25 years to double the human ability to turn resources into things that you want which means the price of everything gets cut in half which means that people have to use half as much labour to get what they got before so by 1850 the standard of living in England had doubled from where it was in 1825 by 1875 it had doubled again and by 1900 it doubled again and by 1925 it had doubled again and by 1950 it had doubled again and by 1975 it had doubled again and by the year 2000 it had doubled again in between the year 2000 and 2025 it will double again now from viewer in the middle of a 2015 and it's going to double again so what's going to happen is in the next hundred years from the year 2000 to the year 2100 there will be approximately a 16 to one impact on income in in places where that are that are touched by free markets so your children or your great-grandchildren will be 16 times wealthier than you are today and that being the case there isn't going to be any problem having the water clean or the forests or anything else the population density of the world will peak at about 9 billion in about 2050 and then will not rise thereafter so we essentially have all the people on the planet that we're going to have I was at the conference that somebody was lamenting how terrible was all going to be and we all had to become vegetarians in order to sustain the planet this is all totally ludicrous I don't point that out to my friends in the vegan movement just no point in trying to react ate them the point is is that this job is done human beings have figured out how to do this and we have solved the problems in principle so of course when you look out the world you see a lot of poverty you also see you still have nation states where there's disagreements and in very serious potential problems you've got some neuroses in the capitals of the world like in North Korea and in an Iran that are trouble and they're nuclear bombs could drop and it would be astonishing if human beings got through a nuclear age for you know 150 years and didn't have a nuke drop somewhere I'd be really surprised if that if we managed to pull that off we probably will I mean we'll probably have something happen and it's going to be a great tragedy and you know 3 million people are going to die in the whole world is going to gasp and everybody's going to realize wait a second we can't have this I don't believe you'll ever see this with the superpowers they're too smart too sophisticated at this point nobody's interested in that that's not where any of the troubles are so what we look at is the following that the problems today are interesting problems and they're important problems and so it's perfectly legitimate for people to be working on those problems and make them a little better but in the long run there's no way all these problems don't get solved so you can you can imagine the consternation of people you know in New York City like what are we going to do about all the horse manure that's on the street in 1900 and you can imagine all kinds of you know hand-wringing and and tearing of hair and trying to figure out what we're going to do because we are knee-deep in horse crap ok as the population rises they would have no idea how easy and how smooth and how brilliantly human beings would solve this problem in hundred years in the same way the problems that humanity faces will be solved and solved very easily and brilliantly in the next hundred years so your job isn't to be sweating about some dark dismal future with problems your job is to figure out how you're going to optimize your personal happiness in the now and let the world and its future take care of itself because it's taking care of itself brilliantly you could not stop the innovation that is taking place right now the information is located and hundreds of millions of heads backed up on hard drives all over the world all that's going to happen now is that human beings are going to continue to innovate things are going to continue to get better cheaper faster cleaner that will not stop ok if anybody wants to read a book that's the definitive argument on this topic it's called the rational optimist by Matt Ridley who is a tremendous mind and and if you need a good solid dose of data to cheer you up about your future that's it actually you know and a couple weeks ago I just was reading an article on this new bacteria that they scientists discovered could actually eat plastic and so I remember when I was like getting into the health movement I was I was reading articles and constantly thinking like oh my god people are you know the plants not going to survive because of all the trash and plastic here we go right now I realized they'll figure it out of course you together stop another lake one thing they will not figure it out that everybody thinks that medicine is going to figure out they think that medicine is going to figure out all these little problems with respect to health they want we're hitting up against the genetic constraints of humans humans are going to live about 85 years plus or minus 10 that that's what it is and we're essentially getting to the constraints now so don't smoke cigarettes eat a decent diet to get some decent exercise and enjoy your life because they're not going to give you any more of it fantastic all right this is great you know and I think you have a few minute audio of this if anybody wants to hear it again you can listen to podcast or you have a little audio of this on your website as Team Dynamics da right and it's like what did you out about the world is going to hell or something like that right so that's right I did that I forgot about that thank you got it all right um yeah well let's let's do our Darwin Awards okay your garden call it call it a day all right Larry our our runner-up here this was this was a man who he was under arrest and he I the defendant his name is Daniel I don't want to give his last name because it's just too embarrassing but he was he was fled from the police and after he was pulled over for erratic driving and he had been drinking alcohol and what he did was he took his underwear he ripped his underwear off while the officer was pulling him over and he ate his underwear and his thinking was that hopefully the cloth would absorb the alcohol before he took a breathalyzer test yeah so he ripped off his underwear they fake they handcuffed him and while using the back a patrol car he ate two fabric unfortunately he still registered point zero eight percent the blood-alcohol limit left but that wasn't enough to convict him of driving into the flames so I guess it worked a little bit all right all right all right so look yeah let's do it hiring that drum roll yes all right so this is a lawyer in Toronto name's Gary yeah he loved tell his buddies that the windows in his corner office were bulletproof and unbreakable so one day he decided to prove his theory by running into one at full pace in front of his clients of course the shocked clients watched as he crashed through the unbreakable windows and flew right out the 24 floor window oh my god unbelievable Wow I want to put the laugh track on because it's a little sad ya know that that's amazing that you're looking at some very interesting characteristics there personality-wise and you're looking at some some sort of disagreeable dominance open to experience your is some interesting and unusual combination there led to that fascinating bizarre McCobb you know that's a that's about as bad as it gets wow what a story all right that's just a little tip that's a little tip to our listeners not to do things like that yeah I would be willing to bet there was a good-looking woman in one of his clients that were up yeah yeah and he just had to had two grand piano a little too much Wow not be hardened you didn't no you did not out all right well alright there we go that thanks dr. Lao we'll talk to you next week
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