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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-07-11
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okay all right okay I know we're live and there are a lot of people watching but we're still kind of in testing mode so bear with us for a minute you there Doug and how can you hear me I can hear you can you hear me yes okay awesome can you see me yep all all is well there okay let's see here we've got something going on over here there's conversation going on in the chat we have a lot of people already logged in so I don't know if you if you can see all of that so the tech technology is a little tricky because I I am the host and so I had to promote uh Dr Lyle to co-panelist that uh he can't see everything that I can see so um I will just make sure that this is all set up so it looks like we have yeah we have 24 people already and um joining every second but we'll officially start in one minute so cool yeah I can't I can't believe this you're a genius yeah a zoom zoom genius yeah so it looks like a lot of a lot of people have figured it out so that's good so um we'll we'll try this way and see how it works and if people hate it or we have other glitches we'll try something else so uh Doug can you see the chat at all or can only I see that I could just see little people that say something at the bottom of the screen a little bit Yeah that's the chat yeah like people just saying hi hi from San Diego yeah okay so yeah you guys I think there is a q a feature where you can you can ask questions that way or you can just put them in the chat here and because we can both see it you can put them there we also have a fair a number of questions that have been I mean we just have a ton of questions that have been submitted in various formats so we can just pick a few of those as well yes all right let's see so I got 30 people now um so yeah it's 2 30 so we're gonna just get started if if we want to make it official and be on time did does anybody have like a real burning question in the chat that they want to start with or should we just go with what we have what we have already this is your moment all right let's see we had a whole big variety a bunch of Personality questions a bunch of pleasure trap questions so we will try to kind of keep a balance of those things yeah we don't want to focus too much on one another so this this one was uh this one was interesting so this is a personality question about stability um so there were actually two on this so we can kind of lump them together so someone said can people be stable in some areas of life but not in others does this change as we age since we have less Vitality Etc I've faced big challenges such as the loss of parents job divorce Financial Etc um and and handle them I'm sort of abridging this and handled them well um but I may wander in the weeds with a healthy lifestyle um is healthy only is healthy only area that makes one lower on a stability bell curve so sort of just like does stability apply differently to different Realms of life um and then somebody else was asking with stability what's the evolutionary advantage of higher than average neuroticism slash instability like what's the what's the evolutionary purpose of it so let me just kind of talk about that particular facet of the big five if we want to and and touch on those kinds of ideas because it's been reflected in some other questions too so do you want to jump in there and yeah I I uh and then I'm gonna just jump in and make some comments to try to reduce confusion more broadly and then you can address anything you know places where you see that I'm not answering the question the um the the way to think about this very accurately is to be thinking about personality characteristics not along the big five or big five plus IQ I want you to think about it Gene by Gene uh or a good way to think of it would be sort of the characteristic of a given neural circuit binaural circuit so um so a person might have uh so so however this works and it's it's not known how it works at a microbiological level but probably this a huge quantities thousands of genes are contributing to for example what you and I would call stability so but what what does that mean that means neural circuits all over the brain in different domains there could be romantic domains there could be mother child domains Behavior there could be uh disagreement over trade uh issues there could be for example anxiety about threats in the landscape from either Predators or weather in other words there's all kinds of different neural circuits inside the human and the neurotransmitters that run them are a very complex soup of probably over 300 neurotransmitters and these are all being given to you in in your uh at the moment of conception so for example you may have 58th percentile on relative to your general population in your area which is essentially also going to be different your percentile is going to be different there relative to your general percentile with respect to all of humanity because people's in different places have different kinds of threats and opportunities it's going to cause some people to be more or less impulsive depending upon what continent or what section of a continent these genes have all done so the the notion that um uh what I believe to be true is that effectively your personality is fixed but that isn't that is only very grossly summarized in something say for example on a percentile score on stability so maybe uh maybe your emotional stability Score says it's 75th percentile but that may not be true with how it is that you react when lightning strikes lightning strikes you you might be at the 30th percentile you may jump twice as much as the average person because that particular neural circuit on you happens to be more sensitive for some unknown reason okay so the uh so what I'm trying to explain here it's also a little bit like trying to uh we were to just take one domain like intelligence what intelligence is is intelligence is literally the reduction of ambiguity so no intelligence means you know nothing so there's no guidance of any Behavior you're an animal in a swamp that has no way to find out a cue as to whether you should go to the left right upside or down so you're basically a brainless animal like a like a what do you call those things that sting you in the water that look like a jellyfish okay jellyfish basically has no brain uh has an incredibly small brain because it's just drifting with the current and it either runs into food or mates or it doesn't but God knows I'm slightly lost Jen oh intelligence okay so intelligence uh is about the the information processing ability can the organism reduce ambiguity from a stimulus array well we we say well on the big five plus IQ we just give you an IQ score uh no I don't know maybe the person's 135 IQ so they're very bright well that that is useful to know generally because because there's a lot of genes that somehow went into building the size and complexity of different neural circuits and so that person has an exceptionally high level of ability generally however they may be terrible at certain kinds of information problem solving so for example they may be Asperger's and they can't read facial cues uh that's intelligence it may not show up on an intelligence test but that's not relevant it is absolutely intelligence uh it is the the reduction of ambiguity of trying to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling and a person with those characteristics has a reduction of intelligence in that arena is it scored on a test no but it's absolutely there it's also intelligence to be able to shoot a basketball in other words sort of have the coordination to actually know how how far you know I'm pushing this fall with x amount of muscular contraction that too is intelligence okay it's just not intelligence that shows up on an IQ test so um so the the stability is going to look very differently dependent upon just on a genetic basis based on which domain Of Human Action that we're actually looking at so that's one source of variation in other words so two people that have exactly the same score on stability on on a big five test can be quite different in terms of their personalities because if we were to look at 50 different domains where stability is relevant to to us analyzing people we're going to find that those two people are probably quite a bit different across those 50 domains okay there's going to be some correlation coefficients or they wouldn't have the same score but they're quite a bit different two people that score 135 on an IQ tests they have very different abilities okay so so one of them may be extraordinarily verbal the other one may be extraordinary mathematical the third one may be extraordinary special relations uh Etc another one may be very good at Social judgment another one may be very poor so uh hopefully I'm trying to explain that we use words and Concepts to try to synthesize down a very complex a very complex system called the nervous system and so we use things like the big five five Factor model plus IQ so we use these shorthands but if we're going to actually understand what the truth is we're actually talking about individual variation in genetics down at the level of neurotransmitter uh production that is second Dairy to Gene variation and and is and those those neurotransmitter differences are going to be uh play out differently across thousands of different neural circuits in the brain to which are susceptible to those neurotransmitters so it's like ah for God's sakes okay that's the truth that's how it really is and that's before we add anything like experience and learning that's going to alter the responsiveness of that individual in a given situation that they have experience in and received a profitable or dangerous so I.E learning so before we even look at learning if there wasn't even such thing as learning and we had two people that scored exactly the same on IQ on openness on conscientiousness on introversion extroversion or stability or disagreeable we would find that two people with identical percentile profiles and and in in a species that had no such thing as memory so their behavior could not be modified by memory those two individuals would be dramatically different individuals you would not mistake them and you would be able to pick up regularities in their individual differences in personality by interacting with them would they be more alike than two random members of the population yes but would they be substantially different from each other absolutely they would be very substantially different from each other so that's hopefully going to you know people can we record this I think this was a pretty good answer so uh so holy so if people watch this clip uh hopefully they're gonna get a better understanding of what what it means to quote you know what your personality profile is your personality profile is inherently extraordinarily complex with abilities to chart differences in domains essentially a psychology of situations but has not yet been accomplished in the world of psychology I can imagine 50 or 100 years from now or a pace of modern psychology's scientific advances maybe like 700 years from now but it should be possible that within 50 years they could literally have broken down quote personality uh differences across different types of domains and that's what I think you you sometimes allude to this Jen when you talk about some of the additional sophistication that they're using with things like conscientiousness being orderliness versus versus uh brightness yeah yes yeah so yeah so you can see that this would in principle probably be subdivided as far and wide as there are neural circuits in humans that are built by Evolution ultimately down to the individual where you've got a you know a genetic type for that individual so that you're describing very specifically so the whole point of the big five is to sort of create these big buckets that were sort of artificially siloing people into where yeah you're going to have a lot of differences even though you're the same exact percentile as somebody else it's going to express itself very differently but overall it's still a very good place to start to be get to know thyself um and I but I I uh I well I don't I don't want to interrupt them so I'm good carry away on the point so I mean this comes up a lot just this general question of people uh taking a big five test any big five tests that they find online and either not resonating with it because they don't see themselves as the percentage score that the test gives back to them because it's measuring a different facet of conscientiousness or a different facet of emotional instability or whatever it is um but also sort of expecting that they are going to behave in a certain situation according to their big five number and that they don't and and so they're sort of confused about that people just get very attached to their big five typology and I think this whole this way of understanding it is it's really just a very broad brush idea of who you are and and where you're starting from relative to most of the population I mean if you're scoring is 95th percentile for neuroticism it probably does mean that you're a little jumpier and a little more reactive and a little more skittish than most people that you meet and so that's a that's a valuable thing to know about yourself but the specifics of how that's going to play out in your life and and how it might be 99th percentile in some areas and more like you know 80th and others um that is all very much individual to you so it's um but it's still it's it's very useful to to have the sense of where you're starting from so you can kind of have a sense of how you're systematically distorted and how you go about your life and if you're if you're up there in the 90s on a big five test that you take online um or down in the in the lower 25 on anything that's telling you that there's something a little unusual about your general approach to the world and so it's a worthwhile thing to know um instability it's funny because I think it's there are definitely some advantages to it just sort of General instability just getting back to the the essence of that question I mean I think of instability as a measure of how how noisy your um your CV is at any given moment on like what the best thing to do is you're essentially taking in more data than you should be and assigning more value than you should be to a lot of different things you're you're a very sensitive instrument um and that makes your life a little more chaotic and it makes it really difficult to know what you're going to do for both yourself and for the people around you but you can see how that would be useful in a village context you're like the very sensitive little detector of disturbance in the force whatever that may be so if there's any trouble you're reacting to it before other people are um and your lack of predictability of your behavior also makes you more there's more attention on you because there's less we don't know what you're going to do so that's going to attract more attention more investment in your process so I'm always telling women who are all upset that they're on stable I'm like that's the sexy chip that's what makes you interesting that's that's the hot crazy Matrix the crazy tricks are all unstable because it's like what's she gonna do next like how is she gonna react to that that's the it's very it's inherently interesting and I mean it holds the interest of other people in the in the village so those are a couple of potential evolutionary sources of it that is fascinating Jen I never thought about that but it it makes complete sense yeah yep that's uh pretty sure that's what's going on there some of my history yes it explains a lot of a lot of things to a lot of people uh all right we can we can move on we have other personality questions but we can come back to them but we're sort of getting all kinds of things coming in from various formats so um Gina asks in the Q a she says women can develop feelings for someone over time as they get to know you but men know when they meet you whether they're interested or not how does this change with zoom dating with with the no real contact is there any sort of is there any sort of difference there um so she's asking about the what we call the repeat exposure effect so I think most people who are hanging out in this in this chat are familiar with just our general conversation about this but the the idea that women can build attraction with repeat exposure and that men generally don't operate in the same way so is there any reason to expect that that would be different over video I think I think uh not not so much on the female side I think females can definitely develop repeat exposure feelings via video and social distancing dating um and I would imagine that it works you know pretty similarly for men and they're not getting the full the full analysis of the potential mate value and you're not sniffing each other's pheromones and you're not getting the full experience that I think the general uh qualification process is operating very similarly I don't know what do you think totally agree yeah yeah if when they'll uh you'll find out when they ask you to stand up and then turn around a few times okay where's my toxic masculinity alarm again and then you find out whether you're the early or late for your next Zoom date yeah I I have been actually I've had several clients who are you know in the online dating process and all of the dating apps have moved toward video in a post-covered world so they've all integrated video it looks like they they all pretty much had it ready to go and now they've all rolled it out um and so people are doing this and I uh whether it's within the app itself where you're just going to FaceTime them or or whatever I am encouraging women in particular get the guy on video as soon as possible because that's the best way that he's going to rule himself out so we actually give kind of different advice to men and women as to how they should strategize in early dating um women you want to get him talking as much as possible before you meet him because he's gonna reveal all of the things that are going to disqualify him um I uh my my favorite is the guy who pronounced library library you know we're gonna go to the library um and I was just like oh the inward cringy in this it's like no I'm sorry you just you're disqualified so you never know quite what it's going to be it's like the the off-color jokes or the just the the awkwardness I mean it's always going to be a little awkward on video the first time you're talking to somebody but there's a there's a Next Level awkwardness that you know is going to translate into an in-person meeting so the female's incentive is give him every opportunity to [ __ ] up basically like let him stumble and mess up and make mistakes but the male's incentive is to meet as quickly as possible so you don't get disqualified before you have a chance to build real repeat exposure in person um and uh I I don't know maybe uh depending on how slick you are in video that might not apply quite as much but um they are a little bit uh contrary in positions yeah yeah all good yeah let's see what else we got good times out there okay so let's see I had there was a question over here um there's some there's all kinds of Converse I'm just trying to again what's what's most valuable there was a there was a question about books um like what would be the three basic books to read on evolutionary psychology I think the sort of fundamental text to build the foundation I can't find it now but it was something something like that um yeah we might have different different ideas about if you can only choose three I mean the selfish Gene I think we would probably both agree is fundamental on the list um I love the mating mind I love the mating mind to sort of by Jeffrey Miller to to Really ground people um in all of the things that we the the sort of sexual selection side of things it's it's vast influence on human nature yeah um but for the third I don't I don't know there could be a lot of different different books that could take you in the right direction which one would you recommend next I would say um I would I would actually I don't mean this to be elitist because I would go between these two books um depends on how smart you are and what your goals are if you are merely uh if you are merely blight or very bright then I would uh and depending upon you wanting to get a real grounding I would recommend David buss's textbook evolutionary psychology of a new science of the mind yeah uh extremely methodical comprehensive it's it's written for the college freshman okay so and of course I I've said this many times that when I read it uh I was already you know 15 years into evolutionary psychology and I I learned a great deal for one thing and second of all I also at the end of it I I I was bemused because essentially I thought well now any college freshman who actually gets an A in this class studies the material reads it fits it back gets it right on the multiple choice exams literally knows more than 99 of the professors of psychology in the United States okay that's that is how comprehensive and outstanding and obviously revolutionary the book is uh however it's not exciting and it's not passionate and it's not brilliant it's just it's very busying okay at this very busy and that's it bus is a he's really sorry he's one of these guys that at the end of his life he would have built you know as a contractor he would have built 17 000 houses and in 47 different tracks of land he's an organizational monster and he's methodical and outstanding okay he's prolific uh not flashy the uh brilliant is Pinker yeah and the um the blank slate yeah that would be my third but it's but it's hard to read it's hard sledding like even if you've got like good chops and good background it's still it's a it's a intense dense book it is uh Blank Slate is greatness yeah it really is I took months to read the blank slate you should take months it's just a [ __ ] yeah and I took uh copious notes and then I in years I think I read it again cover to hover one more time perhaps and then I certainly have gone back and read stretches of 30 or 40 pages many times uh they're they're that you bow down you know you bow down to the to the Towering intellect of Stephen Pinker uh when you read the blank slate so the uh it's a different experience so those are uh basically you would if you ever want to read Pinker you should you should read best first you want to be extremely well versed in evolutionary psychology you want to have the basics you don't have to take a test on it but you know work your way through at least 10 chapters of the new science of the mind so it's like okay I got it I got it I got it I got it I got it okay and then when you when you are a graduate you know deep graduate school level thinker and evolutionary psychology where it's it's under your fingers and you actually think reflexively about it then you are ready to take on Stephen Pinker who makes a a a once in a once in a millennium sweeping argument about human nature culture the state of the science of our field and social science the crisis of 50 years uh the the the subtitle is the modern denial of human nature okay that book I believe was published in was it might have been 97 or in 2002 I can't remember yeah 20 years later yeah it is it is a hundred ten percent relevant it is more relevant today than it was when it was written so uh so that that's that's where that's what I think of the blank slate as well as obviously Jeffrey Miller there's no Delight in the world like reading to me well the mating mind is so great because he he's so self-aware so you know one of the core arguments of the mating mind is that basically everything that we do is a display so all of everything that we prize about human nature are you know sort of the flowery speech and the music and the art and everything it's all just a sexual display it's all it's all for the greater purpose of mating and he has this great passage early on where he says that you know he is the latest in a long line of men who have written books to impress women and and this one is no different and his is sort of a Devotion to the to the pros in that book um I know that it's off-putting to some people because I've heard multiple people say oh yeah interesting ideas but he needs an editor I'm like you're missing the point this is this is his Grand display just like the blank slate is also Stephen pinker's Grand display and because the blank slate is pinker's Grand display and he was hungry he was status climbing and he was still trying to prove himself at that point in his career it's very it's much more sort of risk-taking and bold than his subsequent work has been so if you've read other things that he's done since nothing really stands up to the blank slate because that's when he's at his most sort of he's got the most to gain and he's really like sticking his flag in the ground um and it's just it's a it's a Masterwork so um yeah both both of those are great there's so many other great things to read um we have a reading list so this comes up frequently on the beat your jeans page and we we will post it at some point on the in the library as well um but the the library um the living living wisdom Library um uh we will uh we'll post we'll post it there too if we haven't already but the there's a whole list of every book that we've ever referenced on the podcast on uh beat your genes.org and it's a special tab for the reading list so there's no particular order to things and some of them are more relevant than others but it really just kind of depends on your uh how much background you have how much tolerance you have for Flowery language and and uh really long run on sentences like you're going to find in some of this stuff there are some easier things more approachable things the moral animal is pretty approachable [Music] um the um I can never I can never remember it's not a disagreeable inheritance what what is it oh yes a Troublesome inheritance Troublesome inheritance Which is less about EP specifically and more about behavioral genetics and and group based differences um very very easy reading relative to these other things and super fascinating um but yeah like if you're going to read about behavioral genetics and group differences you've got the you know sort of Nick Wade versus Charles Murray they're they're saying very similar things that one is much more approachable than the other so you just kind of have to pace yourself according to your interest and your time and your capacity and all of that but um you can start with that reading list for some other ideas one of the one of the great comprehensive um Works ever written on human nature is um is the rational Optimist oh rational Optimus also very easy to read yes very comparably to these other things and sweeping you know covering a lot of ground very at a quite a clip um but yeah Matt Ridley is that's a it's a great book for people to get sort of a general overview of things too yeah and again not specifically EP he sort of he's he's really just kind of uh this is the way it is on a lot of different things and it happens to overlap a lot with EP type thinking um but he's he's coming from more of a polymath kind of perspective like um like like Nick Wade is too so yes yeah yeah brilliant I love talking about these guys we'll do book reviews yeah we're we're I'm working on a book review of Jeffrey Miller's other book stent which will be posted soon um and then we'll we'll hit these other great great works as well because we want to sort of summarize them and give an idea about what they're really about so people will have a better idea of what they what they're getting into all right there's a there's a question in the chat that's gotten um Echoes that people would like to see it answered and it's also very common I've I've gotten this a lot from clients and heard it before versions of it so um it's uh Melissa is asking why is it that I get older at 33 I feel as though I have 33 not older I feel as though I have less and less patience with people I was really outgoing as a kid and I love to be around other people but I find I'm getting really picky as I get older and it's hard to actually find friends that I genuinely am excited about hanging out with I want to be more social and have a few good friends but I feel like the pool of people that I'd enjoy being around keeps getting smaller well yeah it is getting smaller because you're better calibrated as you're as you're getting older so this is such a um I think we've talked about this on the podcast too and I have certainly had this experience where I was much more extroverted when I was younger much more willing to engage socially with people partly because of distortion that comes with um the social inexperience but also alcohol is playing a part art and you know my my experience in my 20s um but basically you are moving through life and you are fine-tuning your cost-benefit analysis on How likely any particular interaction with a human is to be productive for you and you are building better correlations as you gain better experience with time where within the first three seconds of you you hear the guy say library and you didn't know when you were 19 that the guy who says Library probably isn't going to be worth another two hours of your time but by 33 you do and so you're much more likely to detach from that conversation and not invest the time so you just have better you have better expectations and inferences about how how positive how beneficial a given interaction is likely to be and overall most interactions are not likely to be that beneficial to you so you find yourself your little world of people gets narrower and narrower um and I think that's that is fairly Universal but oh you got all these therapists out there that are saying oh you're self-isolating and you really need to get out there more and your homework is to go join some clubs and socialize because only only really miserable people self-isolate so no you've become more introverted because most people kind of suck and you've gotten better at recognizing that all good that's our God how many hours I think I when Jen and I first started talking this was maybe three three years or so I had come up with a concept of a hundred thousand hours and we had an interaction it was very early I don't think we'd met yet uh but uh where uh where I said something like well you know what I mean wow that was really insightful what you just did you might have earned a thousand hours it was after the first time we met yeah so I mean this was uh and I mean I actually met it and I met it very flattering like it's a big deal to get a thing about I'm like literally you've actually earned 1 100th of my remainder of my existence don't think that's an easy thing for anybody to earn and of course and then your response back was you got to be kidding me it's gonna be a lot more than that I think we probably hit a thousand hours in the first three months so yeah and then that's exactly what happens in other words two people running the CD on how just how unbelievably Rich it's like you're mining for happiness and in our case we have a joy in discovering information about the same things we have we're like two people that are fascinated with igneous rock formations and we've we find each other and you can't stop talking about it so uh that uh yeah it's like that's what friendships are all relationships are are essentially like or you're Mining and uh you're mining for happiness and so uh Jen and I discovered that it we we share incredible uh Mutual interests and and so it was like a a uh you know it's been like a fire hose for the last three years that that got crimped when you met Michael oh well but that's another that's another domain in life where you find a fellow traveler and it's it's like well now I gotta you know I gotta rebalance gotta reallocate my hundred thousand hours that that's but those are great situations to be in that's what we call a good problem it is a very good problem opportunities you don't need a lot of people in life uh there's a beautiful phrase from the uh from the movie Miracle uh it was about the US 1980 hockey team yeah right coach heard Brooks and uh the the everybody put tremendous pressure on Brooks because they wanted him to uh you get quote the best players it's a it's a tremendous story it's a movie worth watching and of an individualist that knows exactly what he's up to and he's finally in a position of power to do do it the way he wants it and um all about team play and Herb uh in response to somebody saying you you've left you've left off you know most of the best players because I'm not interested in the best players I'm interested in the right ones it's a it's a it's a beautiful statement that I think probably is a is a interaction that actually took place yeah we don't need the fanciest friends uh you don't need the most brilliant friends or the most beautiful friends or the wealthiest friends you just need the right ones okay and when you have the right ones the the the the the print out emotional emotionally is just what it should be yeah well that's the and that's the flip side is as you find your world gets narrower and you you have this sort of guilty feeling that you're self-isolating that you've you just recognize that the the periods of time between meeting people who are worthwhile get longer and longer but when you do recognize when your your recognition you can trust it more um there's there's uh you're the the likelihood that you're going to misinvest your time with that person is much reduced um and so that adds a certain just general confidence and joy in life because you you know the most of the time it's you know you're not it's not that productive out there but when you do find good people they're really good people yeah all right let's see what else we have so Natasha is asking if there's any book we recommend on parenting I I or if we if we're going to include this in our new book which we will we're going to talk quite a bit about parenting in the new book um but as for something out there I don't know of anything do you do you have anything that you recommend to people because I've been asked this before and I always sort of don't know what to tell folks because I don't I don't think there is anything that really approaches parenting from from a behavioral genetics sort of standpoint that we would begin any analysis from yeah I think that um I think in general parenting uh is probably not that complicated um in other words I think there's a book called parenting something with love and logic something like that um I forget what the book was but um logic yeah but the point is is that that uh there's there's a few basic principles that we want to to be aware of that probably a lot of parenting books may not be aware of uh well they generally are number one they're not aware that the personalities of children are genetic okay so they're they're not aware of the notion that you're not trying to use a bulking hammer and nail that kid into some kind of sculpture that is the shape that you want it so we begin the the solution to Parenting by recognizing that these little people are individuals with their own complete set of individual neural circuits and their variance on a theme in other words they're human but they have their own individual personality just as you do and if they don't like broccoli they don't like broccoli and if they don't like ice skating they don't like ice skating and if they thought they wanted to play the piano and then after like two months worth of lessons they don't want to do it don't make them do it you're not going to teach them conscientiousness by forcing them into doing something that they want to want to do our our job is to do with them what you would hopefully do for yourself which is to see this life as a process of self-discovery where you're trying to find out what your neural circuits are okay so you you can't your job is to try to figure out what individuals you really like and love what kind of pro life processes and challenges and and uh stimuli if you like and love don't tell me but I should Love Jimi Hendrix because that would be really cool what if I adopt okay what if I like Lawrence Welk so the the point is your job if your kid's a big fan of Lauren float like you might seek community on the internet at least so point is is that so our job as a parent is to do two things uh number one is to to expose kids to domains that you can afford the time and energy to expose them to so that they can discover things for themselves that they might enjoy in life and your second thing to do is to see to it that they also understand that in a family they're part of a group living situation there's going to be sacrifices and your job isn't to roll over and to give everything to the kid you've got your own life you've got your own sex life you've got your own Recreation life you got your own friends you've got your own career goals you've got all kinds of things that you want that may be in comfortable with that kid or children and the truth is is that there has to be reasonable uh essentially reasonable processes by you are not feeling like you are self-sacrificing uh you know it's you you should feel like a a pleasant uh a pleasant synergistic process where you find Joy when they find Joy but that isn't the only joy you have in your life is having them find Joy you've got your own too so uh but what we're not doing is we're not in a feverish pitch to try to make the child a fancier display process so that somehow they can reach higher Heights to make you look cool and don't worry about their own ambition they'll find it okay they'll find their own way to to find their own pathway up the mountain and they know what halfway feels easier and more exciting for them than you could ever figure out your job is to set reasonable boundaries with very reasonable expectations for performance in reasonable areas and otherwise basically try to figure out how you can cheaply and easily and kindly help them enjoy their existence that's Carrington yeah so there you go you don't need any books someone someone in the chat did just remind me that Plowman talks about it a bit so um you know if you want to pick up ploman he he doesn't say a whole lot but he Echoes exactly what Doug is saying here so um that is that is one thing that you could you could read yourself or recommend to other people who are asking um Barbara says okay so can you then give advice for parenting adult children oh yeah I mean let them make their own money and otherwise leave them alone and let them come to you and interact to where the two of you have a friendship level level overlap in your lives yeah if they don't want to come to Christmas because it's a problem and there's acrimony then they're not coming and don't don't be pushing them around yeah these are friends now they're friends which is actually there's another segue here so Blair is asking I've I've done a lot of learning and growing in the last few years and most of my friends have not breaking up is hard to do with friends any tips so you really like I I tell people all the time you know family members are essentially as as adults the the relationships are the same as friendships the CD that you're running on them is the same the sort of reciprocity and expectations are very similar um and so they should be treated as such you know never mind if you happen to be related to them or not so the these two things kind of go together and the advice would be the same like take take people at their word you know don't don't try to drag people into relationships that they don't want to be in just because they're related to you don't try to demand that adult children come to Christmas if they don't want to come you know all this kind of stuff and then with with your just your friends friends who I think it's very normal for friendships to to you know distance themselves over time um the CB is just going to change as people have different life circumstances and uh just evolve out of that friendship and whatever purpose it was serving in the moment we talk all the time about friendships essentially being insurance policies that that's what friendship really is that you're you're paying the premium by investing your time and energy in that human because you're you're expecting that they're going to be there for you when you need them and people's behavior over time is is giving you cues about how good an insurance policy they're going to be and how well they're going to pay out if you're actually in trouble um and that will change it changes depending on their priorities you know people will get married they will get you know have other sort of Demands on their time and energy they won't friendships are just going to change over time and so it's natural that your CV on the friendship will change as well if you develop new interests in things that they don't share that's a different CB2 so this is all very normal and there's no need to have a big uh come to Jesus about it you just you just distance you just socially distance yourself you you uh um just stop answering their emails as often and their calls as often and just kind of fade on them essentially this is what ghosting this is a productive ghosting I think it's almost it's very rarely the right thing to do to sit down and have a big kind of conversation about it usually because both people are pretty aware of the the fact that you've just naturally Grown Apart if there's some if there's some just like a romantic relationship if there's potentially a really big misunderstanding that's sitting underneath the whole thing and contributing to the difficulty in the relationship and and encouraging you to distance then it might be worth Crystal clearing that conversation and really sitting down and you know really uncovering whether there's a mutual misunderstanding or a misunderstanding on one person's part but other than that just an organic um growing apart I I don't think you need to make a big confrontation about that most of the time beautiful yeah even if you're related to them yeah let's take one more one more so we had I think we're gonna save we had just have all these pleasure trap questions which um we can we can kind of do a designated pleasure trap show because a few of them are whole diverse from last week too so for all of those those of you who are asking pleasure trap questions we'll get to them we just need to be a little more focused about it um let's see uh so what are David says what are the evolutionary ramifications of men and women being friends I would think that men and women were not friends in our evolutionary past so what types of genes do we have to beat in order to have successful friendships between men and women or is this just asking too much that's a simple question yeah the truth of the matter is is that um this is this famous sequence in When Harry Met Sally right kind of the uh but it's it's simply not true uh that there's any problem with men and women in France so I I have a number of women friends and this is not a problem it's it's simply the the CD is different in in um in a variety of ways there's uh potentially sexual processes out there hanging over the thing like some grapes that haven't been picked yet uh on the other hand they're uh but you could also have situations where there's no implied or potential for any sexual Dynamics at all and nobody's even thinking that way that they're just thinking about that that they are that they have respect admiration and mutual interest and that's how that goes there's nothing that would rule somebody out uh uh of a friendship just because they happen to be the opposite sex so it doesn't make any sense at all it just so happens that that we would expect that men would would be mining and getting insurance from other men uh because that they would have such a likelihood of of uh what do you call it confluent interests and women would be the same so you would expect be because they each of each gender is going to face their own adaptive problems and so the best people to be alongside them solving those particular adaptive problems are people of the same sex so you would we would expect you know uh so Alan and I like to do mock Warfare called basketball well I I haven't I haven't met a woman in in my life that wanted to you know uh invest as much time and energy and competitive basketball as Alan did okay so uh is it would that be impossible no it's just not very likely statistically so but there's no but there would certainly be no reason why that that would be a problem and so anyway that's the real issue so there's no there's no evolutionary block or problem or anything else with respect to men and women being friends at all well all there is is that there's a there's an additional uh and sort of unique possible conflict of interest and the fact that two guys or two women together two guys you don't have a situation where one of them might want to be sleeping with the other one and the other one wouldn't want to or something like that that isn't going to be an additional possible complication that can arise in a man and woman Dynamic the uh that Dynamic doesn't have to be an American woman relationship at all but it could be and therefore it's an additional possible complicating factor to a friendship but in no way is that particular Factor any impediment to men and women being friends at all in fact at this time I would say my my good friendship score runs uh one two three three to one and a half in favor of the female [Laughter] okay I would say I have three uh two really good female friends I.E Jen and Melissa and then I have another one who's quite a good friend and then I've got one and a half good men we won't say who's to fall I think they might actually swap back on back and forth on who constitutes the 100 at any given time but they're also there part of that too is it's uh that the the those two males happen to be quite disagreeable relative to all three of the females I mean females are sort of we're on a bell curve of disagreeableness but both of those males are quite disagreeable um and so it's there's gonna just be more conflict of interest just because of the disagreeableness I need it and they get more than a full points me they're they're deaf yeah well you've gotta I mean it's it's essential for people to have you got a free ride on some friends that are more disagreeable than you are especially if you have a tendency toward agreeableness um either across the board or in specific situations you need disagreeable people in your corner to kind of you know be the heavy and and do do the dirty work when you're not able to do it so it's important that you have them on retainer but they're not always the best CD foreign we actually looked at at my sheer sheer hours of conversation it's vastly more between my two good female friends than between my two male friends now the two male friends it's more like uh sort of serious business yeah all right you you froze up so we're yeah you you just I may not even be being recorded right now no can you hear me um because yeah you also froze up but I can still hear you all right well I don't know if uh the listeners can hear me or if they can hear either of us but it looks like the Zoom overlords have determined that we are done so thanks everybody for coming I think we lost Doug um but uh we will see you at some point we'll we'll do yeah it looks like looks like I'm still here but Duck's not um uh we will be back at some point these are kind of erratic they're not they're not every week or every other week they're just whenever we can kind of find the time and make it happen so might be next week might be a few from now but we will let you know via email and um always they're posted on the website so thank you everybody and we will see you next time all right bye
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