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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-08-22
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all right can you guys see and or hear me I don't see anything in the chat this is always a strange experience when I do it by myself because I can't it's a feedback uh deficient environment okay I see a high in the chat okay all right it looks like we're in business okay hello I see uh there are 23 of you which is awesome Smoky Southwest Colorado what is not Smoky right now everything is so Smoky I am watching the evacuation maps in Santa Rosa and Santa Rosa was like sandwiched right between two massive fires and it's really uh terrifying to watch so I hope everybody who is in Sonoma County is doing okay and is safe and everywhere else that it's Smoky and fiery um all right okay I think it's I think it's good so I have um you know we have just a ton of questions that have been submitted through the website and then emailed to me or emailed to Doug and we just have we have tons and tons of questions some of which are specifically for Doug or for both of us so I'm not gonna ask those or they would just be better for the podcast but I do I have quite a backlog of things which I can just dive into unless there's reads reads Reeves in the house um but uh if you have sort of really intense I don't know it feels wrong to say burning questions given the current fire environment but if you have uh you know major questions that you uh want to ask today go ahead and put it in the chat I okay there's also the Q a so this is like this is a multi-dimensional thing to try to run by myself um oh awesome so Jim is asking about the human nature series on the um on the website which is in the members area which if you haven't watched that's the the nearly four hours that we did that is sort of just a general overview of evolutionary psychology 101 um really Doug goes from the from the beginning from Freud from the beginning of psychoanalytic thinking uh and what the intuitions behind psychodynamic thinking were and how they went awry and uh what they're missing about particularly behavioral genetics and just the conciliency of evolutionary thinking so if you haven't watched if you haven't submitted yourself to the four hours of mansplaining on the human nature series Doug does sort of an overview of um you know the basics of psychology I do about an hour on personality and what personality really is um and then he comes back and talks about esteem processes and how to tie it all together um in terms of designing your life to accommodate who it is that you really are and the kind of relationships where you're going to really Thrive so um so Jim is saying he he enjoyed that and he's wondering and he took the personality test and what he should watch next um so I would watch uh you know it's really the the thing about the way that we tried to design a website and what we're trying to do on an ongoing basis is that it's really just a kind of uh um all you can eat buffet it's it's really there's no particular order apart from the human nature series which you really do benefit from watching in order because it's it's cumulative knowledge um that I would just poke around the site and watch the the true north lectures that are posted um that have you know he he in particular I think I have one on there or I should maybe it's still in the editing phase but um he gets into some stuff that builds on all of the fundamentals that are in the human nature series and we've actually been telling people who are sort of new or who have um even if they're not new they haven't gone super deep with all of this there's a lot of people have this impulse to kind of go back to the beginning of the podcast and listen to every single podcast and work through that way because in the early days of the podcast before I joined uh Doug really did do a lot of that fundamental work you know really taking an hour per show to explain the the fundamental concepts of everything but I think even that approach while it can be useful is better informed if you watch the human nature series first because that sort of is your um it's your Cliff's Notes to what you're going what is going to be most Salient when you go through the podcast and certainly we've gotten to the point on the podcast now where we sort of have an assumption that people are up the learning curve on a lot of the key Concepts and we'll just jump into things so we start talking about personality Without Really explaining behavioral genetics every single time or we talk about the ego trap without explaining it every single time so um that would be that would be the way to do it and then um sort of as you find Concepts that maybe are not fully fleshed out when you encounter them as you wander around the site going back to the human nature series and the esteem diagram and everything that is included in that would just be a good way to guide you okay um all right what else do we have here so that's uh looking in like three different places okay so Emily is asking I'd be interested to know how evolutionary biology explains gay people and people who don't want children uh it's what I've been wondering about is I've been exploring these ideas so so the those are those are obviously two different questions we talk about both of these in the book um so they they kind of each get a good chunk of a chapter um the the question about sexual preference is a little more um it's a little more hypothetical like we think there there's that's one of the areas in evolutionary psychology where there's some academic debate about what's really going on there because it would seem on the face of it that it's sort of uh counterproductive to the the survive and reproduce impulse like what's going on here uh the the explanation that I have seen that makes the most intuitive sense and seems most grounded in consilience and you may have heard Doug talk about this before and it's it's what's in the book um is I mean it's it's fundamentally just a it's just variation it's just velker variation all all preferences um all personality features are falling on a bell curve and there is going to be some percentage at which people are going to um have preferences that are on the face of it sort of um counterproductive for evolutionary success and those seem to be linked to uh we can look at some other things like exposure to androgens in utero um the there there's uh there's a whole line of hypothesizing in the literature about it's it's sort of the the beauty genes so essentially how this works is that the beauty Gene which is a disingenuous name for this process but it's the the the children of a of a given mother are more physically attractive which makes the women more beautiful which makes them more reproductively successful um and then it's just tips the estrogen over for the males that are born to that woman as well and changes their sexual preference um so that's that's sort of one kind of it's it's it's CR it's a little bit in this neighborhood an evolutionary psychology where it's vulnerable to those just so criticisms where it's like okay yeah maybe that's what's going on but what let's let's do this sort of more um more inductively let's let's actually like look at what's going on rather than sort of looking at the situation and trying to explain it post hoc so I think that is an open area of conversation and debate in the literature so it's worth exploring um some of the you know Stephen Pinker talks about it a little bit we dig into the debate in the book um and but it's not it we don't know for sure um and then the the children question is is interesting because obviously you know the evolution doesn't did not intend for you to understand where children come from it just set you up with a motivational system to be interested and motivated to engage in the behaviors and the displays that are most likely to lead to being reproductively successful so the fact that you don't want children I don't want children I it's never been part of my scheme but that doesn't stop me from being interested in and motivated by processes that happen to correlate with the processes that would lead to children so I'm interested in Romance I'm interested in sexual relationships I'm interested in being and having having a high mate value and all of the displays that are associated with that so unless you are you know people say oh I'm not interested in having kids and and therefore evolutionary psychology doesn't apply to me well does that mean you're not interested in how you were perceived by The Village as you go about your business it means you don't care about what you look like when you run your errands it means you don't um you don't do anything to make your your home more attractive you don't care about your if you're a male you don't care about your career you don't care about um any any kind of dominance climbing hierarchy process of course you you most likely do care about all of these things and those are reproductive behaviors even if they are not because we happen to live in an era where we know where children come from and we can we can interrupt that process uh with birth control you know it's very helpful like Yay from a modernity um but the whole all of the steps that get you there that improve your mate value that lead you into romantic relationships of course those are all those are all really the heart of what constitutes the um the impulse of the reproductive Behavior so I I have not met any people who are completely exempt from that um so that's how I would tackle that okay what else oh someone's saying I'm uh Raves I'm breaking up if the audio let me know if the audio has given you a lot of trouble sorry about that the Wi-Fi is generally pretty good here but we're we're working on making it better at some point I'll get hardwired okay it reads Portland uh uh related to the pleasure trap I've seen seminar Circle say know the why that makes you cry would you say this is similar to your view and affirmations they can be helpful to some people but it's not necessary or sufficient to keeping yourself out of the pleasure trap um so I think this is referring to sort of you know the the motivation for staying compliant with a with a whole food plant-based diet um and so knowing that I've never heard it phrase that way I know the why that makes you cry that's interesting that's a big 12-step thing like know your why um but just like it's that that is not sufficient to keep somebody free of an addictive substance like alcohol it's it's not not sufficient to keep somebody compliant with a pleasure trap as well but I yeah I guess it would be similar to my view and affirmations in that it's it's not harmful and it's it's part of you know your behavior is emerging from your it's emerging from a whole bunch of different things it's emerging from your sort of uh personality and your particularly your conscientiousness if we're looking at something like this so if you're trying to follow a certain specific diet the number one thing that's most important to how successful you're going to be is how conscientious you are if you're super super conscientious it's just going to make it really easy for you um to be more successful you're going to have uh you're just more inclined to follow a specific set of rules and to be really diligent and to stay on track with something so if you've got a lot of conscientiousness you have an advantage out of gate but if you have lower conscientiousness that just it's like this teeter-totter where you know you got high conscientiousness it doesn't really matter how motivated you are you know you you want to have some motivation or you're not going to have um you're not you're just not going to be motivated to deal with the problem at all so you're you know you're sort of interested in losing 10 pounds but you're super super conscientious you're probably going to lose those 10 pounds whereas if you're lower conscientious and you still kind of are just sort of interested in losing the weight but it's not going to make that big a difference for your existence then you're less likely to be as easily successful but if we drive that motivation up so you have some sort of scary Health diagnosis we've got a lot of crazy noises going on here there's a big truck dogs are barking it's very extra excitement for you um so you've gotten you know some some alarming you've gotten your your doctor says you're pre-diabetic or you're diabetic you can move the conscientiousness down and the other personality traits down and you're going to that that is going to the the full sum total of all of those inputs into the system are still going to mean that you're successful so I think the the why that makes you cry is more Salient for people who are maybe less conscientious um and you know can can go back to the thing that is really uh underpinning their their motivation and the thing that they're scared of but that's not enough for a lot of people you know I'm always using the example of the you know there's the stories of the people who have the triple bypass and they're stopping at the drive-through on the way home from the hospital because it's just that's not obviously that's a why that would make them cry and a lot of people cry but it's not enough to keep them out of this fundamentally addictive super normal stimuli so it's individual for everybody I think it's uh but like affirmations there's absolutely no harm in getting clear on what your motivation motivation is and human nature is just more responsive to negative inputs than positive inputs so a why that makes you cry is just innately more powerful and has more leverage on your motivational system than than a a positive goal that you might want to accomplish um okay let's see what else we have here how is the audio okay people are saying that the audio is good that is good ah Jim's saying he's watching the videos with the dogs the dogs are great they are uh we've got the gate open right now to get um so the mail truck can come in so the doggies can't be wandering around the yard otherwise they would be joining us on camera okay I don't see any other new questions oh boy brene Brown am I up for tackling brene Brown Mark is saying what's your take on brene Brown's perspective on shame the idea that someone feels like they're Unworthy of love and that that causes turmoil in their relationships well sure okay so she's not wrong um the the what brene I don't know if people are familiar with Renee Brown or not she's sort of she is perhaps the most successful and famous Ted Talk ever um I love it when people kind of share her Ted talk like it just it just happened when it's been it's been around for years and she talks a lot about issues of vulnerability and shame and how they affect our relationships and our self-esteem and all these things so I think brene is very well intentioned she she's you know she's very intelligent she has really good intentions she doesn't understand personality she has no evolutionary basis or behavioral genetics basis for understanding personality and individual difference so she's one of these self-help gurus who's prescribing a very certain course of action and ways of improving your life that have worked for her and the kind of personality that she is and the sorts of struggles with self-esteem and shame and these feelings that have come up for her at various points in her life she she views this through her egocentric bias as we all do all the time and thinks that it's a prescription for the species when it really yeah okay it's a prescription for people who are like you um and so I think what she's talking about when she's talking about people feeling um a lot of Shame and and the wrong kind of vulnerability or not not allowing themselves to be vulnerable enough in relationships she's really just tapping into personality traits that have to do with sort of agreeableness which is always underrating that your self-worth so somebody who she's clearly a very agreeable person she's she's a sucker Triad person you know it takes takes one to no one I look at that woman and I'm like oh you were kindred spirit you've got the got the sucker Triad you're you're codependent you know you're sort of very agreeable you're very conscientious just um and you're you're open and you're going to get yourself into these sorts of situations and so she is is trying to develop a working understanding for how to navigate that and to not feel uh undervalued in her relationships without realizing that she's going to systematically feel undervalued because it's being driven by that high agreeableness and that high conscientiousness so so it's not that it's an incorrect world view and it certainly works for her and people who are very similarly wired to her um but it's not it's not the prescription for everybody out there in the world um but I do like brene I I enjoy her personality and her sort of overall um presence in the world I think she's doing a lot a lot more good than harm um okay okay oh I think this is I think I'm reading the second part of a question that had a first part the problem with not having Doug here is I can't scan and talk at the same time um Emily is saying I suppose if humans are supposed to function in groups it doesn't mean each and every individual has to support reproductive success of the species in the case oh this is a follow-up on that okay okay yeah yeah yeah good good thinking it's um we we will definitely get into all of this in the book so that'll be a fun conversation that we can have when that comes out okay I've got some other stuff in the chat so you guys are asking in two different places Gina is saying she's coming back at my uh talk about brene and challenging me here isn't your prescription for the species evolutionary psychology is other well yeah okay so but we evolutionary psychology is not a it doesn't it's it's a it's a it's sort of a framework for understanding how you operate it's not prescriptive so it's it's like describing this is how the machine works and now that you know how it works with your particularities there's going to be a prescription for you based most specifically on your personality so talking about this is like I always I always like an evolutionary psychology to sort of Newtonian physics you know you're really you're just explaining this the laws of the universe and the laws of human behavior and relationships but the specifics of how that plays out in your life are totally based on your individuality um being driven through your genetic personality traits most most specifically so we need to know that that's why I'm harping on personality incessantly we really need to know where you are in the big five and and even more specifically than that to come up with anything prescriptive for you about what's going to be best about how to create the environment that's best for you and how to negotiate whatever recurring issues you may have in your relationship somebody who's really disagreeable and really low conscientious is not going to have the same kind of issues with shame that brene brown has in her entire life it's just not relevant for them um and so the her recommendation is not useful to them but the the person who has those issues is still subject to the broader laws of evolutionary psychology that we talk about so I'm I'm never I'm never going to tell people that there's um we're very much not a one size fits-all as far as what your your specific life should look like but there are certain laws that are governing uh how we operate as an animal on this planet just like there are certain certain laws governing the behavior of dogs that are Universal to all dogs and then you drill down and you've got a lot of individual variation from dog to dog to dog just like my my two dogs could not be more different people who have met them will attest okay let's see what else here um yeah Bernie is a sociologist my my neighbor discipline uh okay I think that is um audiobook um there probably will not be an audiobook uh early of the book so um that is something that we sort of have in the works for after it's been out for a while but it's the there is a visual component to the book a lot of um a lot of sort of artistry and artwork and maps and diagrams and all kinds of things that would not lend themselves very easily to an audiobook so it's going to be a kind of a different Enterprise to put that together and we do intend to do it at some point but it's going to be going to be a print edition first and and really just a print edition not even sort of an ebook Edition and I know that I I'm an ebook addict um that is how I I get most of my books these days but this this particular this is a little old school um and it's I really think of it as half self-help book and half textbooks so the textbook aspect of it it really requires the physicality and the pictures and the whole thing so that's that's likely how that's going to play out at least for the first first year or two of the book's existence um and we're still aiming um you know the whole this whole Hawaiian writing Retreat scheme was supposed to start like four months ago so we're running a little behind schedule um but we're getting there so we're this is a uh we I would say the book is probably 85 finished in terms of the actual writing so we don't have that much more writing to do but we have a lot of sort of thinking and editing and coalescing and um pruning it down to the essentials so we're still shooting for early next year hopefully assuming we can buckle down in the next couple of months and get it done uh stick figure eggs uh in the book maybe is there will be stick figures no eggs I don't know what you guys are referring to with the eggs I'm missing the reference have there been have there been eggs you don't know I know Doug draws sharks a lot and Birds um so Regina's asking about severe child abuse and does your model think counseling is not helpful so I think you know this is a much bigger conversation and and we should we should give it more full treatment than um just a q a especially with just me but I I do think that often we're a little misunderstood when we talk about trauma and childhood trauma and um what what its significance is and what it means it's not we we're not saying that it doesn't matter and that it doesn't make a difference in a person's life of course of course it does and it can and especially really significant um significant and chronic issues and this is Plowman is a good guide on this as well because he he touches on this a little bit although I would like it if he did a little more so the way to think about this is that it's you know plummet has all of this kind of language that I think is also confusing and we're we're trying to work on ways to communicate this in a more effective way than either he does or that we have been able to so far so he you know he says things like your childhood matters but it doesn't make a difference and that sounds almost like a like a riddle right it's like what what do you mean what does that mean so it matters in the sense that you know uh your your immediate environment like what how how you're spending your days matters for how much you enjoy your life or how much you don't enjoy your life so you know the fact that I am in Hawaii matters in terms of how happy I am compared to whether I you know if I was living in a in a in a gulag in Soviet Russia obviously that matters but neither situation fundamentally changes the core of who I am and what my personality really is it's going to it's going to change how it is expressed in the moment with what I am experiencing and as I go forward but it doesn't it doesn't really change who I am um and the same is is the case with any sort of childhood experience good or bad and so something like really significant drama or chronic chronic significant trauma in particular it matters a lot because it really um detracts from that child's life experience it creates a miserable environment for that human being which is really that is not what we want to happen if it's not it's not an ideal situation but it does not fundamentally change who that human is or what their personality traits are or how resilient they are or how capable they are of becoming an adult and living a life that is once we get them out of that environment but it can skew their perspective for a very long time because all trauma and all experiences are going to continue to inform your cost benefit analysis to the degree that they have been unchallenged by subsequent experience so if you've had a really intense experience that has been laid down in your brain and told you if x then why you know if I'm in this situation this is what happens and this is what I should expect you will continue to infer that in similar situations until and unless you have a very similar experience that challenges that preconception and starts to dilute your perceptions and your inferences about the world so if if you've been in a really abusive situation as a child that will continue to inform your cost benefit and your inferences about how safe you are how other people are going to treat you how triggered You Are by particular things um until enough time goes by and you accumulate enough life experience that that that it softens the initial perceptions with with competitive information essentially um and that's you know sort of this this intuition is behind uh cliches like Time Heals all wounds you know as you get distant from the from a particular event apart from other events that share all of the characteristics in common with that initial event you're not thinking about it all the time it's not infer it's not it's not informing everything that you're doing and it certainly didn't change your basic personality it changes the expression of your personality relative to how you're going to modulate your personality with respect to different environmental cues because if you keep looking at the environment as relevant and Salient to to your situation because you haven't essentially overwritten that experience then you will continue to kind of keep yourself in that position I hope that makes a little bit of sense this is a really complicated terrain and I'm really aware that we have have um have not spoken about it systematically in a way that makes it super approachable to people and we're really working that's a big heart of the second half of the book it's the the main reason that I am on board with the book is we're trying to really pin that down and articulate it in a way that helps people understand and make sense of it so I actually think that counseling can be helpful uh if you if you are not dealing with a trauma-mongering psychodynamic therapist so if you can find a sort of a cognitive behavioral therapy informed uh therapy therapeutic environment that can be incredibly helpful it's it's really it's just about sort of untangling who you are right now versus who you were with your past and how you responded to it like an animal in a certain type of situation and realizing that that is not that is no longer as relevant to your current existence as it once was and moving forward from that point the problem and the reason that we rail against psychodynamic therapy is those practitioners are really incentivized to to keep you in this Paradigm that you are your trauma that the trauma has is what has made you who you are um and that you you have to heal it or you have to integrate it or there are all these kinds of really kind of confused ideas about what that is and how it affected you and what kind of relationship you should have going forward but if you really look at what they're doing they're just they they are they are incentivized to keep you as a forever customer you know they really they want you to just keep coming back we just need to we need to dig a Little Deeper next week you know we did really good work this week and and we're just beginning to scratch the surface layers of of all of the ways that you've been affected and so we just need to go a little deeper where are you going deeper to what is your ultimate goal here how are you going to to ultimately heal this trauma and restore this person back to some kind of um Blank Slate where it never happened of course it happened it's information just like everything is information and it's it's bad information because it was specific to a moment in your life that is most likely no longer relevant to your existence today so um that's kind of the general overview and my rant on that for the moment so I hope that was more helpful than confusing but probably not okay let's see what else we have going on um someone's asking about my necklace my this was it this is a gift this is my T-rex this is when I'm in an evolutionary mood the T-rex skeleton comes out um so I am I am not sure where it was sourced but it's it suits my mood today I'm feeling very darwinian okay uh how do you help kids who know that eating Whole Food plant-based no oil is healthy for them but they really want to eat a tasty sad diet it can be a struggle for them sometimes they don't eat sad um yeah so we talk about this a lot this is um you know it's We Touch Doug touches on this in uh getting along without going along and many other places so um interesting that they know that it's it's healthy for them and that they I mean they're in exactly the same position that most adults are most adults know what healthy food is they know what unhealthy food is and they're struggling just like the kids are because the pleasure trap does not play fair you were dealing with a super normal substance that is acting on your nervous system in an addictive way so um I would say you know the general rule here is to keep just like you're keeping your environment clean um I'm assuming that these are your kids that you're talking about so you just want to you want the house free of um foods that are going to create dissonance for them don't put them in the situation just like you don't want to put yourself in the situation where you're having to count on your willpower to do the right thing and to to execute the correct Behavior with regard to a supernormal substance it's just like that is a it's a losing proposition that would be like me as a seven year alcoholic in recovery stocking a wine bar and just being like nope I'm just gonna grip my teeth and get through it like yeah I probably could it's been long enough but it would cause some really unpleasant dissonance in my system and I would be I would it's Russian Roulette in terms of one day if I am in a really shitty mood or I have a really hard time and I get knocked way out of my Healthy Living Groove and I'm feeling really really sorry for myself for some reason and it's sitting there um like I don't want it sitting there I want to create as many Channel factors between myself and the the thing that I don't want to get into as possible because I know that my willpower is a really limited resource just like it is for everybody else um and no differently for children so keeping your environment clean is is just the is really your only defense against that uh and not worrying too much when they're out at a friend's house and they get some pizza or they go out and they eat whatever um I you know getting back to brene I would not um I would not lay a bunch of a bunch of trippy shame on them about that or or contribute to their own process they're running their own cost-benefit analysis they've got their own relationship with their internal audience and they're they're moving toward adulthood where they are keenly aware of their mate value and the ways in which Super normal food is compromising their mate value just like adults are so if they get to a point where their relationship to a standard American diet is becoming like the balance tips in favor of the cost being higher than the benefit then they're naturally their motivational system will move in accordance with that and they will they will find the motivation to do the difficult thing and try to clean up their diet and be compliant just like you have gone through that process um in the meantime you know they they're they're doing the best that they can with the environment that they have and to the extent that you have control over their environment you want to be uh doing doing as well as you can by them by making that environment as healthy as possible and you know the other principle there which is also very important for people um adults who are trying to be compliant is that it's all about it's it's not like you've got the standard American diet out here and then you've got broccoli and carrot sticks at home and and nothing nothing exciting for your nervous system at home you want to make the compliant food competitive competitive at the pleasure trap level with the pleasure trap food so it doesn't mean you need to spend hours and hours and hours in the kitchen making special meals for them but you do need to have options at home that are you know B plus kind of options and you can get these pre-made now I mean the the market has has has met this need in a way that it had you know absolutely meeting at all 10 or 15 years ago or even five years ago so you know reasonably healthy uh like engine to veggie burgers that you can get at Whole Foods that are that's a competitive option for them to eat healthfully at home so they're not the cost benefit is not so exaggerated between what they could get at home and what they could get not at home um so just whatever you can get that's maybe a little bit processed maybe it has a little bit of salt in it maybe it has um you know even a little bit of oil it's not it's not a perfect a plus food but you don't want to let the the absolute perfect be the enemy of the really really good and um particularly when it comes to kids who want you know special treats at home okay all right what else do we have it's always a very strange experience to do this by my by myself because I can't hear any of you I'm just reading um yeah allow them to eat occasional sad on their birthdays or outside with friends yeah yeah I mean it's really the this is really not a big deal and it's like those occasional um uh departures from an otherwise very healthy diet are not gonna make or break their existence or their health just like they're not gonna do it for you I I one of the the best interpreters of this thinking is um is Penn Gillette so if you guys have read Pen gillette's book Presto that he wrote after kind of doing an amalgam of um Eat to Live and a little bit of McDougall and he ate just potatoes for some amount of time he talks about how he you know eats a very very healthy diet most of the time but then he has you know every month or every two months he has what he calls rare and appropriate so you know he goes out and he just gives himself permission to eat whatever he wants when he's out having some kind of special social event some kind of Celebration um and what happens when you do that and you're eating really clean otherwise and the kids are going to have the same experience is that you learn over time that it's not as great as you think that it's going to be that you're paying a higher cost than you expect because the food's really salty and oily and heavy and you feel like crap the next day and so Penn you know observed in his he was very surprised to observe in his own experience that his motivation to look forward to and to plan for and to anticipate with excitement the rare and appropriate episodes diminish finished over time as he started to become aware of the contrast between how he felt eating the healthy food and how he felt after eating the crappy food and that's just a natural process where you're recalibrating how worthwhile that departure is over time so if you're making it sort of forbidden fruit for them um you are depriving them of that calibration process and coming to the same same truth that even if pengillette can come to that truth then anybody can okay let's see what else we've got foreign trying to like cover um multiple pleasure trappy and other stuff let me see if there's anything in here I did have it's um I had a couple of versions of a question that were submitted ahead of time that were very similar and sort of build on what we've been talking about which is like the um the forbidden fruit aspect so you know why is it if uh certain personalities are told that they can't have something that that becomes sort of more of a trigger to go get into it um and I I this is a common thing and I I've thought a lot about like what's actually going on here and I think it's less about it's less about being you know just a rebellious personality and and oh you told me I can't do it so that makes me want to do it I think it's totally the if you're running the you're running the cost benefit analysis on the ability to do it anyway so you're not people are not triggered by being told that they can't do something unless they have the opportunity to actually do it I think there's a stone age inference that's going on and this is just I'm just sort of developing this idea so I may be totally off base and maybe Doug will totally shut this down when he hears me talk about it but I think it's it's really like the there's a huge gain to be had by being told that something is impossible and then sort of proving that it can be done to yourself and I think it's tapping into that Stone Age like there's this thing that would massively improve our existence and no one's been able to do it before and it can't be done and but I see a path to being able to do it um and I'm going to get all the credit for it if I can pull it off I think it's that energy that's being harnessed and hijacked by that don't don't eat the thing oh but I could do it and nobody nobody would even know and I could get away with it and so by God I'm gonna do it so I I think those two things are very interactive they're PR there almost certainly is a certain personality component a little independent streak a level question authority streak um but uh it's it's more to do with the opportunity structure of being able to act on it and getting away with it so if you if you can't do that then it's not going to be it's not going to exert that kind of pressure on your motivational system um okay Jim is clarifying esteem Dynamics is the work of Doug Lyle whereas evolutionary psychology is already a known but perhaps relatively new science yeah exactly so evolutionary psychology is primarily just an academic discipline that was really born in the early 1990s um and uh you know we talk a lot about the it's pedigree and um John Toby and Lena cosmetes as undergraduates at Harvard kind of beginning to develop this notion of of applying consilience and darwinian thinking to the mind in addition to the body um and so it has it's preceded by Leaps and Bounds since then and it's tackled a lot of really interesting questions but pretty much all within the confines of the the academy and Ivory Tower thinking and little insular academic debates where people write papers arguing with other papers about things like you know what what is the evolutionary advantage to um to homosexuality or or uh Divergent sexual preference or anything like that and you know there's not always an evolutionary like the the there are there's always an advantage on the whole on the bell curve but then you've got all these little scattered you've got you've got people at every end so this just launches a sort of permanent industry of academic conversation that happens and Dr Lyle is really he is the as far as I am aware the first and really the only uh clinical practitioner because he was in uh he was doing his PhD at in Clinical Psychology right as evolutionary psychology was being born into the world and so he was right there on the front lines of it and as far as I know he is really the only consistent practitioner who has developed clinical tools to use evolutionary psychology pretty much exclusively in clinical practice and esteem Dynamics is the set of principles and ideas that that are informed their their clinical tools that have been informed by evolutionary thinking um and particularly clinical Tools around esteem processes so self-esteem and the and the esteem of others in the so-called Stone Age Village so the yeah these two things are very much intersecting but you you're not going to find you cannot contact a uh somebody who's published an evolutionary psychology and well versed on on all of these topics they are unlikely to know what esteem Dynamics is because esteem Dynamics is its own little container of clinical ideas that Doug has really invented um so that's the relationship between this okay let's see oh that's the wrong window okay I've been yammering for about 40 minutes so I will only I will take one or two more questions here um am I that strict that engine two burgers are bad no engine two burgers are not bad but some people for some people they are uh because they do have salt in them um and they are uh they're going to be a little too processed for some people depending on what your goals are so but for most kids you know they're they're going to be totally fine but there are people who um they're either going to be pleasure trappy enough in the sense that they are you know they're moving down the Continuum of being more processed more flavored I mean to at some point there's a threshold for everybody uh at what becomes processed enough that it starts to initiate those the sort of addictive-like impulses and that is a very individual process so they're they're very well could be people out there who cannot just have one engine two Burger it's like way too much for them particularly if they load it up with a bunch of condiments and a bun and all these other things so it's really I'm just a huge advocate for kind of knowing what what your particular um slippery slope kind of foods are and making sure that you're engineering your environment to keep it free of those things is totally different for everybody like I am completely not safe around chips and salsa um but I don't care at all about sweet things you could have a kitchen full of donuts and brownies and cake and I would just be really like whatever but if you've got crunchy salty thing things I'm in trouble so the my particular environment is a different environment than maybe what you need to be successful and that's going to be true for your kids too um okay that was a question about uh Regina I think I tackled the what you emailed me or they say attempted to uh presto um Huda saying since my first facet sure North and fasting escaping my own I've been trying to quit processed food but can't should I give up um no you shouldn't try to give up eating processed foods I mean you should you should realize that there's um I mean yeah kind of it depends what you mean by processed food like how bad is the processed food that you're eating are you really into super super super junky stuff that's going to have a really detrimental effect on your on your health long term um like really nasty ingredients that are gonna going to actually actively create harm or are you eating processed foods like engine two burgers that might have you keep an extra five or ten pounds of weight that you ideally might not prefer to have but that's not really causing any major health consequences there's a big difference between that and and what kind of processed food gets you to those different equilibria I mean we can talk about processed food that keeps people at a higher weight Plateau we talked about this last week or two weeks ago when we did The Joint q a that's just by virtue of being in a very abundant environment where you can get lots and lots of compliant food at the grocery store and eat sort of a higher calorie higher higher starch ratio of food very biochemically healthy probably contributing to more more Optimal Health than you would have experienced in the Stone Age in an environment of great nutrient scarcity but probably the trade for that is an extra five pounds of weight that you don't want because you're just eating more calories you're not scrounging around starving all the time so there are trade-offs to living in the modern environment and having having access to richer Foods in general and and just the processed nature of foods even I mean even putting balsamic dressing on your greens is is a it's not processed per se but it is super normal to some degree because you never would find those two things together in nature there weren't chefs around the campfire at the Stone Age being like Oh I'm going to do a little a little wild berry reduction to pour over the your freshly dug tubers today like it's not that didn't happen it was really mono mealing seasonal eating uh whatever you could get with with no additional flavors and certainly SOS free so anything that is combining flavors and textures in some interest way and some recipe all of that kind of variety constitutes a type of supernormal jacking up of the pleasure of your food which you would not have experienced in the Stone Age and so that can all be very very healthy food it can all be very compliant food it can all be SOS free um but it may result in having a little bit of extra weight it's not going to result in any major adverse Health consequences whereas living on corn dogs and Doritos and Twinkies or whatever will advert will lead to some adverse health so there's a real distinction there okay all right let me take one more I've been pretty pleasure trap Centrics and see if there's anything that's not pleasure trappy um let me just make sure let me check my let me check my cue and see if there's anything these were all mostly pleasure trap too oh this one was fun um I always like to rant about this so this person this was specifically for me too so I'll just go ahead and hijack it on this one without waiting for Doug so you've said that even with your openness you don't dabble in psychedelics Sam Harris Advocates LSD and claims it doesn't damage your brain do you think he's wrong is there really no safe way to get high and admire the unraveling fabric of reality um so I've talked a little bit um about my my intense intellectual love affair with Dawn Hoffman um and uh sort of other people who are working in the space that are exploring the idea that we are living in this matrix-like interface where the reality that we are living in has nothing to do with the reality of the universe all it is is a bunch of shortcuts that are Fitness cues to to tell us like in that direction there's food and those things are good for my survival and these things are not but it's really it's like a virtual reality overlay on top of whatever sort of mysterious crazy reality might be out there and there are many different hypotheses about what that reality might be um some of them are that it's just Inky Blackness there is nothing and that we've devised this kind of virtual reality to help us navigate the Blackness I I don't know about that others are uh there are other hypotheses that people Glimpse the nature of true reality when they do psychedelics so all of the crazy trips that people have particularly on Ayahuasca um to some degree on psilocybin as well but but I've seen more of the literature linked to the particular visual interface of the Ayahuasca trips that that is actually reality um and that it's just way too overwhelming for our poor little nervous system and so for us to be successful as a physically bound creature we had to simplify the universe that we live in um Hoffman talks about this being like a the interface on the on your computer on your desktop there's not literally a little blue folder that says important documents that lives in the upper right corner of your computer there's just that's that's not what is there but that is representative it helps us navigate it helps us operate within the interface in a more effective way so this is all very mind-bending crazy stuff uh and and I love that Hoffman in particular is informed by evolutionary principles so he's he's running these um these game theoretic evolutionary natural selection games where he takes uh two organisms of equal complexity and he exposes them to reality and every single time he actually has developed this into a mathematical theorem every time if you've got two two animals of equal complexity and you you wire one up to C reality as it is and the other one to only be attuned to the fitness cues of that reality he in his words uh it drives reality to Extinction that the successful organism is the one that does not see reality is it is it only sees the fitness cues so this is all all just crazy talk and it's been my sort of um the main thing that I've been chewing on intellectually lately um and so you would think as someone who's really passionate about this and would like you know very curious about what's behind the Matrix that I would be Pro psychedelic use and I am not because I don't know what those consequences for the brain might be I I know that Sam Harris is a big fan and really downplays the consequences but he doesn't know just like everybody else doesn't know because there are no long-term double-blind controlled studies of long-term psychedelic use for you know it's like very few people have been using them for long enough consistently enough there's no control group like how how would you figure this out whether this is that's true or not and it's just not a risk that I'm willing to take and I'm mostly not willing to take it because one of two things is true either psychedelics are truly a portal into the true nature of reality behind the Matrix in which case there has to be a way to to to infer or access that reality through meditation through some kind of uh some kind of work with your own Consciousness that does not require a particular kind of uh drug agents so that could be true or psychedelics are just this kind of um uh entertainment they're they're just something that is creating this sort of forms and excitement and entertainment for the mind in which case it's really not worth the potential cost that it could have to my my brain and my poor brain that I already put through 15 years of heavy drinking like I don't I just don't want to assault it with any more chemicals so um that's my general stance on it uh and that's sort of somewhat informed from my my long Buddhist history and hanging out with people who took themselves on silent Retreat for three years in the cave and Tibet and saw the true nature of reality doing that and I think if there are if there are paths into that kind of self-understanding that those paths would be independent of drug use is is my general thinking so okay so now that I've gone completely off the rails with a crazy psychedelic rant I think I will wrap it up uh unless there's anything else really really pressing wild hi otak yeah I guess with the high openness what do you what are you gonna do but High openness this is where my conscientiousness means that I am not dead because you know I'm so high open um but I'm also pretty highly conscientious and it has kept me kept me on the straight and narrow and kept me from getting into bigger trouble than I might otherwise get into okay all right guys I think that is it I will try to grab the rest of these things and um throw them into the queue for the next time or for the podcast and uh yeah that's oh Chef AJ's reminding me to uh let you guys know that um I am doing her show which which day is it is it Thursday I gotta check my calendar it's coming up soon but Dr Greger and I are doing it together um so you'll be able to catch both of us I think it is Thursday at 6 00 p.m Pacific um so uh yeah I'm way out here in the boonies in the middle of the Pacific so my time zone is very different from your time zone so it's going to be 60 a.m Pacific on Thursday the 27th so I will see you guys on her show then along with the esteem Dr Greger who will be joining me so um awesome awesome okay all right thanks everybody for coming is it's always good to see you and uh let me know if there's anything that I missed that you want us to tackle next time all right I'll talk to you soon bye
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