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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-09-08
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all right I think we're in business now uh Motown has joined us um so I can't access the um there's a I have a Google drive folder with all of the questions that have been submitted and I can't access it this morning for whatever reason Google's just not letting me so we'll just uh take questions as they come in the chat so I'll keep an eye on the Q a here um and see what folks want to talk about today this is a very uh spontaneous session so unless we just want to we want to talk about whatever we want to talk about that's on our mind but I'll just keep an eye on what people have to say here I have no questions submitted yet let me bring up the chat nothing in the chat can you guys hear us I need to see some signs of life here a question about resilience oh I see that from anoki yeah yeah what about it what are you asking about in particular we wait okay that's good all right well we can just kind of start talking about it and see what if she wants to clarify anything specific on that so um you know generally oh is it tied to the big five um yeah I can say a couple things first since my I kind of dealt with this a lot in the context of my dissertation and this is a um it's a really misunderstood concept um because people throughout the social sciences in particular think that resilience can be created with the with the right kinds of Education or institutions um the context of my dissertation is that I was researching on different amounts of resilience among Alaska native populations with regard to climate change so there's sort of this observation that a lot of these Villages particularly on the west coast of Alaska are um they're slowly eroding the permafrost is melting away from them um the storms have gotten stronger every year because the ocean warmed up a bit so these these sort of climate effects have made their their location much less viable to live in and some of these Villages are proactively moving themselves and others seem to be struggling and so there's this Divergent resilience question so what what where does this come from what structures it um but what's really clear from the big five and the behavioral genetics literatures that resilience is essentially it's a it's a genetic quality it probably has a lot if we wanted to situate it on the big five has a lot to do with stability has a lot to do with IQ has a lot to do with conscientiousness those would be sort of the the main things that make you more resilient to the slings and arrows of life versus less resilient most commonly I think when we're talking about emotional stability we're really talking about what people mean by resilience when bad things happen to you how quickly do you bounce back how how personally do you take it when things don't go your way and that's really often when we're talking about emotional stability your neuroticism that's really what we're talking about so I think you can you can totally locate those things individually on the big five there's probably a much more nuanced literature in behavioral genetics about it that goes beyond neuroticism I'm not totally familiar with it I've looked at it a little bit but that's what I would mostly point to and you're not going to build resilience by getting the right kind of Social Work program in in a community that's going to teach people to be more resilient that's that's not possible so I don't know if Doug has other things to add to that my opening rant this morning all yeah yeah one thing uh we can wander back to questions but this is a uh so many questions can can fit into and be uh possibly some some light can be shed on on some of these questions um it's very it's clear to me the more you and I talk and the more we attempt to explain a lot of these things uh how how easily confusing uh life is when we're trying to understand uh personality and psychology so let me just back up for a few minutes and and try to give some context to this and some understanding because people will hear resilience and then they'll hear Behavior genetic View and then they'll know that there's such a thing as building resilience but they just don't they don't know what it is and they're not sure what it is that we're saying so let's get clear the um what you have uh a a broad a broad way of looking at life uh world of psychology is to look at it in two uh into basic camps so our two basic major ideas that uh uh are trying to be understood one of them is going to be what's called General psychology the other is going to be what we call personality so in in general psychology this is General psychology is exceedingly complicated uh personality is actually extremely simple so uh General psychology it would be the equivalent is the equivalent of anatomy and physiology in medicine so anatomy and physiology and medicine is unbelievably complex so you have literally tens of thousands of different kinds of little machines in the body that all work together in a coordinated fashion so the body is just unbelievably complicated now the individual differences in the body are not so complicated they're they're important so you see one person's knee and another person's knee they both have a lateral meniscus a medial meniscus uh you know abyss and a bad under this bone or the backbone and it fits here and it fits there and then the stuff wraps around and the tissue is made of the same stuff in other words there there are to a martian biologists those two needs are absolutely clumps they would simply call that Earth life knees and that that's more or less what they are it's not a lot different than a kangaroo's knee but they would say oh some grad student somewhere knows the difference between a kangaroosney and a human knee and by God that's a human need okay so that's that's the anatomy and physiology of the human knee but if you're an orthopedic doctor you're very interested in the individual differences between those two needs and so this one's got a little tear in the medial meniscus okay that then we see that the that the human is limping we see that it's limping in a particular fashion now the terror in the medial meniscus versus a no tear on a medial meniscus is in an exceedingly simple concept it is not even remotely as complex as understanding what the hell the media meniscus is and how it fits in the overall scheme about organisms biology so General psychology is unbelievably complicated okay now so that is is going to include uh so so General psychology is the all the neural circuits that build up a human and how it is that they work in a coordinated fashion the uh I spent the first well spent 10 years of as an academic you know student in Psychology learning General psychology although they didn't call it that and then another 10 years in in uh as an evolutionary psychologist essentially focusing on learning the general psychology what we call evolutionary psychology it's only in the last 20 years that I started turning my attention to personality okay and so uh even though there had been work done on it I I wasn't paying very much attention to it I was too fascinated with the extraordinary complexity of General psychology now General psychology in general psychology there's going to be learning programs so it's going to turn out that there are instincts for learning it's very clear in many ways how those instincts work in other ways it's not so clear how they work but uh one of the instincts is that if you do something and then you suffer from it and then you record what the cost benefit was and then you you look around and you see what other people do about it and you you estimate your abilities relative to their abilities and if it sees that they are toughing something out then you think that you can tough it out okay so the point is is that you've got instincts for computing how much energy that you would be willing to put up with some pain in the ass fight on your hands whether it's the weather or whether or not it's your mother-in-law or anything else Under the Sun these are General Psychology programs for resilience okay now within those so does your can your resilience increase of course it can your physical resilience can increase if you lift weights and you get stronger whether you go out in the sun a bench and get a tan now you're more resilience against future Sun uh whether or not you you went up the mountain and then you increase your cardiopulmonary function now you're more resilience against if they dunk you under the water and hold you under the water for three minutes whether or not you're going to survive so does your resilience change absolutely it changes okay here's what Jen is trying to get across and why this is difficult your personality does not change your personality in terms of your the innate natural characteristics of your the individual differences between people do not change uh in other words two people uh who have neither one of them have undergone some difficult challenge pain in the ass situation uh one of them is more inherently resilient than the other by virtue of their genetics they're inherently more naturally stable remember personality is super simple compared to General psychology so we just we just pick our way through the big five and we say well look we can see huge understanding of the differences in two to people's resilience it's really quite simple to look at them the same way looking at two people's physical size tells us you know it doesn't take a genius to look at individual differences there you know looking you don't doesn't tell you about the bone structure the muscles strength they've how fast twitch the fibers are two different athletes one of them 6A 250 pounds ripped muscles another one you know five eight not so muscular Etc you look at those two things they have the same medial meniscus but their athletic capabilities are vastly different you can tell by looking personality is very much the same way it doesn't take a genius to look at somebody who's very smart highly conscientious but not Super Hyper conscientious and enormously emotionally stable and say you know what they can put up with a lot of [ __ ] should you know normal problems aren't going to rock their world that bad it's got to get bad before they get upset so somebody else much less stable much less intelligent much less conscientious uh more disagreeable Etc you start looking at things as you start saying whoa let me just blow the wind a little bit of that person's upset they're upset five times a day just working in a pleasant office okay resilience so individual differences in resilience are huge in the same way that individual differences in intelligence are huge individual differences in every personality characteristic are huge okay and so and those innate differences in your resistance your generalized resistance or your response and ability to deal with stress are basically what they are across your lifetime they don't really change you don't change relative to your cohort but are you tougher at 33 than you were at three yes okay all of you in your age cohort changed over that time so the question is did you well my personality changed no it didn't relative to where you are relative to your cohort you haven't changed at all I will I will interrupt to say because I've done this deep dive in the in the Twin Cities literature that actually your neuroticism score does go down longitudinally over time that is like a population-wide effect so your personality does change if we gave you a test when you're 20 versus a test when you're 40 you will be less neurotic you'll be more emotionally stable when you're 40 all things equal than something when you 20. so but what Doug is saying is that it's not you fundamentally the genes didn't change but your your CB and your calibration of what is worth responding to in an emotionally unstable way like how how much you're going to be rocked by the circumstances of life you have a better picture of what you're up against by the time you're 40 than you did when you're 20. right right and this is part of what we're trying to say is why it's confusing talking about this you didn't change relative to your age cohort if you were an 80 percentile that's 13 years old you're 80th percentile at 45. exactly five year olds inherently more stable than an 18 year old why the reason is because they have learned a great deal more about what they can handle and what they can't handle and they've seen vicissitudes and things that look like catastrophes at 18 turned out turns out well you this was the first time of many that you were going to get dealt okay so it turns out the first time you get done does the catastrophe the seventh time you get dumped it's not such a good house okay that's how that works that's a general learning program okay so this is this is where it gets sort of tricky when we start talking about personality it's your quote personality change interesting question and that now we have to be like Aristotle and say well how do you want to Define your terms okay did you change as an individual yes you could in principle say that everything that you learn in this life of any significance changes your personality because it's changed who you are as an individual and uh it may have even changed who you were as an individual relative to your cohort but actually from my perspective and the way I think about personality and the way I believe Jen thinks about personality you didn't change in other words your your genetics that make you and uh with a set of brand new novel circumstances we will be unconnected to the thing that you just learned about but in other words for example you go out into sun and get tanned you're now more resilient against that but are you more resilient about getting dunked under the water no you're not so the resilience so as you learn resiliences through the stressors that you go on in life you're not becoming quote more generally resilient in other words your personality isn't changing you're becoming more specifically resilient to things that you happen to have learned about and have have climbed learning curves so in the same way that if you if you golf a lot and you get calluses on your hands it doesn't make your your thighs any stronger and it doesn't make your cardiopulmonary function any better and it doesn't make your tan anymore able to handle the sun it just made your hands easier more capable of handling stress in other words the the resilience is going to be the only resilience changes you're going to see are going to be highly specific to the specific learning programs that got activated in your general psychology plot your individual differences in your uh the way your genes are set up have changed at all and that that's why in Psychology through years of trying to essentially teach General things like anger management you're not going to freaking change people's anger such uh issues all you're going to do is maybe a highly specified situation you can teach them what to say when that specific boss does this that's it it's going to turn out that that when uh experiments or actually therapy programs have been attempted to change anything about what you'd call People's General personality they have always failed and what they've done is they've torn their hair out around a a frustrating concept that they called the transfer of training in other words it never it never widened out past the incredibly narrow thing that they educated the person about okay so you can teach some not very smart person how to do a tiny little bit of a calculus problem and by God if you simplify it enough that they can get it will they ever understand calculus no they will not okay because that that it's too complicated and they don't have the chops so this is the this is now I was sitting listening to you and it was so pleasant Jim I thought I don't even need to say anything yeah here we are 15 minutes later hahaha it's the mansplaining hour that's okay I I just I covered this ground um and some of the other questions are actually addressing this I have this 4 000 word manifesto that I'm about to drop on the world as soon as I finish writing it and editing it so I cover a lot of this stuff so that's my my version of some Hawk explaining so fine I'll explain it I love that that's great yeah yeah particularly the um there's a follow-up question here uh where um well there's a couple so follow-up questions from the original questioner about that I think we've kind of covered but then um someone else oh you're still going okay all right I I got two more minutes to add or one one minute and that is the same is true for trauma sure oh yeah that's very clear in the data is not going to do a system-wide damage to the organisms about adaptive capacities at all what it's going to do is it's going to sensitize a very particular set of neural circuits around a very specific adaptive problem so you'll you'll women that are raped for example don't are not terrified of sexual activity for the rest of their lives they're terrified of specific situations that remind them of the time and place that they got raped or individual Personalities in other words literally the smell and the sight and the behavior of specific individuals who are who remind them of the rapist okay in other words what happens is it becomes very narrow and incidentally it's not static just as you can learn something that is very dangerous you can also unlearn that it's not dangerous okay in other words it wouldn't do any good for the organism to be a one-way trap in order to be adaptive we're going to find women are sensitized for a couple of years typically on average behind the sights sounds smells personalities individuals that were involved in an assault like that in which they were and then it goes through a Decay function as they unlearn it they will never fully unlearn it but the point is is that they do a tremendous amount of unlearning as the as the brain recognizes that the CB isn't what they thought it was a weak post rape a weak post rape the whole world seems extremely dangerous two or three years post-rape it's now it's now compiled new evidence and it's running better more accurate uh estimates as to what they need to be nervous about and what they don't need to be nervous about so in the same way they become more resilient in a sense because they're going to be more effective at avoiding situations that are high risk okay but that does not make them generally anxious generally neurotic or anything else Under the Sun whether it's the changes should be very narrow they are not system-wide and that's how that's how all learning and resilience and change take place in humans when you go to school you don't learn one of the most absurd things I ever heard was you learn how to think you know learn how to think learn how to think in philosophy class you may learn specific individual reasoning um uh Concepts that you were not aware of okay and that that you can learn but you don't learn in general all right okay someone someone is following up on this asking this is this is a a third rail kind of question so does this mean that some people are just genetically Superior in the context of our modern first world environment and that's absolutely true I mean it's it's this is this is again what it's sort of a point that I make in my four thousand word manifesto but um that is I I that is fundamentally the source of real equality inequality in this world is that that some people just by the genetic Lottery are less adaptively suited to Modern competitive liberal democracy and consumer capitalism like that that's not a that's not a great context for some of us um as opposed to other people and this idea of resilience and and some of the qualities that we're talking about feed into that just like you're you're you can have very unusual genes in in certain ways that would be a great liability in certain contexts but a great asset in others I mean one of one of those profiles is the sort of unusual perfect personality that we both talk about that is that is best suited to dealing with the pleasure trap that is not a that's not a prototypical human that's not a human that's going to be sort of broadly most successful in every context that you plop them into they're actually going to be they're going to have a harder time in a lot of very typical human problems but they happen to be very well suited for an unusual modern problem that we actually have not collectively adapted to so you see this across the population with regard to how people sort of cope with the vicissitudes of daily life in a modern environment and generally the consensus and literatures that the higher the higher the values on all the big five um if if we inversely code neuroticism so the higher your conscient the higher your openness higher conscientiousness higher your extroversion higher your agreeableness and and the higher your stability overall that makes you sort of a more robust good personality but obviously it's really context dependent on on what particular problem you're facing right if you're trying to sell used cars right you want to be low conscientiousness lower conscientiousness so you'll be a great car salesman but you're going to have a terrible time getting out of the pleasure trap because that low conscientiousness is is beautifully suited into one context and is a complete liability in another one so it's always when we're talking about like do you have a good personality or a bad personality you have to be very specific about what problem you're trying to solve what context you're dealing with and when you're in the modern environment surrounded by problems that we didn't adapt to in our natural history that we've sort of imposed on civilization writ large some people are going to deal better with that and other people are going to really struggle but that that doesn't have anything to do with group identity it has to do with individual genetic profiles and personality characteristics and all of these things that we're talking about yeah and it's also true I know what you're thinking tonight I I yeah I can read your mind from across the ocean [Laughter] shut it down go ahead uh all right so let's see what we have we had a totally other we had a pleasure trap question since we're sort of touching on the pleasure trap a little bit so we might as well like completely shift gears a little bit here oh well just one more follow-up on the first question mark is asking could you follow up on what you said on beat your genes regarding identity politics in the blank slate um I don't remember which one of us said something is probably me um but that that is centrally what my Manifesto is about so just stay tuned for that um and that that will be um you can get all of my murky thoughts on that so okay so pleasure trap question uh Pam says I'm beginning mcdougall's 12 days to Dynamic Health on Friday um so she'll be hanging out with Doug um and I'm feeling a little bit depressed I've been binging on vegan junk food since I signed up for the program very typical even though I'm very informed about the dietary guidelines and I've been able to follow them in the past it feels like I will never be able never again be able to to eat again or enjoy food again as I begin to restrict myself seriously I know cognitively that that's a fallacy but my actions don't follow my knowledge I think I'm also feeling depressed because I have the belief that I will fail once again and that I'm spending a lot of money with little hope of permanent success given my history how can I Infuse more optimism into my thinking oh man you want to tackle that since you're you're um yeah I would say that um what's your what's your let's back up and just try to make this instructive as possible so uh your your thoughts and feelings aren't something that you can choose so we can't choose to be more optimistic the the um a lot of the thing the thoughts and feelings that you're having are simply reasonable hypotheses about what the cost benefit to this whole thing is so your uh you're you're running into as we're as we're binging on vegan junk food we've got all kinds of very interesting little uh little threads of motivation that are running around there like oh my God I'm gonna go into this mcjugal program it's really expensive you know I'm about to burn the boats because I'm supposed to then never never eat any junky thing again so am I Really Gonna do this or not so therefore I'm gonna party before I go okay this is like the Last Supper of the dying manner okay so that's so you're you're sniffing the constraints and the restrictions to come uh if you're gonna do this and you're rebelling against this because you're not so sure that it's worth doing okay so what we hear for example uh the the underlying message that's underneath all this is actually confusion about the cost benefit analysis the um and so let's suppose let's change the cost benefit analysis up and let's watch how clear it gets uh if we were to go one of two directions let's suppose I've presented evidence to you that doing a very strict McDougall program if you were uh 50 pounds overweight or restrictive McDougal program uh over the next year would likely reduce your weight by seven pounds okay now if I said that to you and I said well then there might be seven pounds after that the next year and then there might be seven pounds a year after that and you know over the next seven years uh you would you would you lose about half a pound a month and so after the in the next 84 months you lose about 42 pounds uh and you'd say you know what that that's clearly not worth it okay that's like way too slow way too much work I I don't think I'm gonna do it okay uh on the other hand if I said uh actually if you don't eat this way if you stray you're gonna be you will die of cancer in the next uh 18 months but if you do do this way it will actually cause a halt to that cancer and you'll survive well in that case I don't have any reasonable Choice okay so what we really see is that the reason you have confused motivation is simply cost benefit analysis which is why you have every thought and feeling in your head is because uh the thoughts are nothing other than essentially the result or the process of your conscious thought is there is the is your your recognition of the unconscious cost-benefit analytics that are actually going into making up your motivation uh we we can see that your motives are very confused now one of the uh one of the things that we're attempting to do in this life uh really all that you can do and the only therapy that there is in the world is actually to improve the Precision of cost-benefit analysis that's all the therapy that there is folks there isn't any other therapy there isn't any you know going back and soothing a little child getting some band and because your mom your left you with your grandmother every weekend and you never got over it I there is that there is no such process it's all ludicrous now all that you have in this world that's causing us problems is you have distortions in your computations or you have real live horrific choices and it's really bad okay so you know if you've got a a mafia Chieftain with this gun uh to your to one to one of your two children they say well which one do you want me to kill because it's one of them you gotta choose one it's like that's Choice that's a hair for hair incredibly bad choice no wonder you're upset okay the uh but what we have in this circumstance is we simply have a mind that is confused about the CV and that that's what's so nasty about the pleasure trial this is the pleasure trap causes very interesting distortions uh and the distortions are super potent and they're so they're so dramatic that they remain vastly underestimated by basically everybody in the whole plant-based movement under the including Alan Goldman okay in other words the the potency of the pleasure trap and its force on human nature is is much greater than is appreciated and as a result that's why people think that just because they want to do it and just because they're smart just because they're conscientious and just because they Pony up a lot of money and they talk to the leading experts they think they should be able to do it and my attitude is no you're actually mistaken all of those things aren't even close to enough to have any sort of assurance that you would do this at all and the reason why is that the pleasure trap is an extraordinarily Insidious distortion okay so it does two things it not only teases you into thinking that you are absolutely doing the right thing by eating the Richer food but if you do it consistently enough then what it does is it reduces the sensitivity that you have to Natural Food and essentially makes any comparative tests between the two of them the natural food loses okay so the pleasure trap is a fast and you know it is it is a it is addiction that's all we're really describing here and addictive processes this is what they do they not only reinforce by very positive feelings the self-destructive mood but they also make the process of getting out of the self-destructive Loop painful okay or unpleasant so that's what the problem is so the problem isn't with you uh the problem you you are real realistically recognizing the fact that you have been confused before and have lost your way easily and that your resolve has not been great enough and then etc etc okay so it's like okay yeah so you're we're staring down the barrel of unless something changes in the CB uh then then we're in trouble true okay so let's talk about the things that that we talk about that Jen and I talk about uh that we attempt to try to help you focus on in order to make it possible for your CB to change okay so the things that we want to do is we want to have a concept that we are not on the lat we're not entering the Last Supper that's not what we're doing because that that activates the feeling of being trapped the feeling of that we have to make a big decision you know when Etc and therefore we're not going to we're not going to go down without a fight so bring on the soy ice cream before I start this thing okay so you're already walking into the concept of a permanent trap and therefore you don't want to do it and you're like a cat that doesn't want to go to the vet because you feel like you may never come home okay so instead what we want to do is we want to have the concept in your mind that this is an experiment and the point of the experiment is to find out or have your mind discover just how how illusory the distortions are now the truth is when you say gee I'm thinking that I may never be able to enjoy my food again well I actually know that that's that is clearly a distortion because once you get the palette out of the pleasure craft for long enough it turns out that you like every other animal on Earth that ever lived love your natural food yeah you you can't not love it you're designed to love it literally you're the the dopamine and endorphin processes that are built into your tongue and olfactory system uh they are you're basically before you ever sexually reproducing creature all you were was a creature that ate you're basically a stomach on two legs with two hands to put stuff into it okay so you are absolutely fascinated with food you're fascinated with your natural food the only reason why the natural food these it feels like an enormous sacrifice right now is that you're in a distorted uh trap okay so our goal here is to look at this and say okay okay spending a lot of money I've got some other reasons not just you know the Ethereal issues of being healthy but I got some way to lose for example uh that's a major motivation for most people doing this and so if you have health reasons fine but the the truth is most people it's about weight so you know but I've got a CV on it because I'm not sure how much weight I'm going to lose and how much pleasure I'm going to have to give up and all that sort of thing so it's the CB is the problem okay so since the CB is the problem uh essentially enlightening us about what the real CB parameters are is the solution and so we're going to do that openly we're not going to try to browbeat you in anything we're going to try to get you to Simply have an open mind long enough to experience uh what is that we're talking about what life is like on the other side of the pleasure Drive okay so just going to try to do this we're going to try to take a run at this thing for the next three or four weeks and try to see whether or not we can get to the other side if we get to the other side of this thing we may find out that one of your great fears is mistaken and maybe that it's not so bad at all okay but there's quite a bit of pleasure in the food I've got some watermelon cut up in my refrigerator right uh right now now is it is is as good as Haagen-Dazs vanilla Swiss almond it's different it's a different experience it's not a supernormal experience um and so when I go down there and eat that watermelon it's going to be excellent it's going to be a very good experience okay so the uh so your our job here is to to get your nervous system to say am I willing to uh to experiment let's go find out okay oh it probably you know it probably won't work I'll probably maybe so okay but all we're after now is is new experiences new information and therefore that is the way that we will alter the cost benefit analysis that is the only way that we're going to actually cause you to have a greater feeling of optimism and motivation is to uh have the have some experiences and then let's see what happens yeah the only other thing that I would add to that is just it comes from my um own experience uh with pleasure shot both with food and with alcohol so a lot of you guys have heard me talk about this before but there's a phrase and 12-step um that is relapsed as part of recovery so I talk about this all the time because I think it's a really it's an important component for people who are particularly dealing with the the dietary pleasure trap and who are not hyper hyper hyper conscientious Nut Cases because I think there's a lot of distortion that happens in the space where the the leading lights are all hyper conscientious in that cases and so people that have demonstrated success um who uh it's make it look easy who sort of like have sets of rules and they're like all you have to do is be very compliant and it'll be fine that is it's it's an unrealistic expectation that you can follow in those footsteps if you have a very different personality so one of the key things to you know you're asking about how to build optimism is to sort of adjust your expectations a little bit for yourself and realize that it's very unlikely that this is going to be a linear process for you it's a linear process for almost nobody for most people it's three steps forward one or two steps back and then you and then you start again and every time you you have learned a little bit about how it's really not worth it to go back out and eat the crappy food and feel really lousy and regain weight and and you just you just you pick yourself up a little faster next time than you did last time you you your relapse is a little shorter than it was last time and that is a very subtle iterative process and there's no way that you can predict what program or what book or what lecture or just what aha moment that you have that that sort of tips the balance over into very intermittent periodic occasional relapse you know oh you're traveling and you have some Haagen-Dazs or whatever it is rather than the the sort of All or Nothing vegan junk food binge that you're on now that's it's going to be a gradual process where that happens less and less often and it's less and less significant and painful when it does happen and it's there's no overnight Silver Bullet for most people that does happen for some people but the the selection bias of the people who are in the space preaching the gospel who have been very success tend to be these Silver Bullet people so just realizing that that's very unlikely to be your path in your scenario can be reassuring and helpful people God did I draft the right person fabulous absolutely fabulous just learned it the hard way myself so it's uh you know I just try to remind people of that and to just be gentle with yourself so beautiful all right so let's see what else we have um there's Dan has an interesting question here just curious have evolutionary psychologists now gotten most of the basics of human psychology pretty well figured out or is the field still young and full of black holes that are poorly understood oh it's interesting yeah there's there's very little interface between academic evolutionary psychology and what we're doing which is sort of clinical evolutionary psychology the academic people are engaged in these really interesting debates and they're publishing these books and they're having little conversations with each other um but they're not thinking in terms of practical applications to everyday life for actual humans most of the time so the clinical evolutionary Space is really undeveloped there's there are not many people in that space at all um I you know Dr Lyle really is kind of the the Pioneer the who invented it um and there are a couple of people who use these Concepts in their work um and touch on it but not in a really coherent organized um not in the way that we've tried to put something like esteem Dynamics together which is a collection of clinical tools and guidelines that is drawing from evolutionary truths to to improve human life so I think the the academics if you press them on it like if you really set them down which I know Doug has done you know sat down with John 2B and Lita cosmides and sort of like poked at them to you know what what do you do comprehend x-clinical problem if they really churn on it and think about it they're likely to come to the same conclusion that anyone else who is rooted in consilience and evolutionary thinking is going to come to because the the rules all kind of converge if you've got the big picture and everything has to line up with consilience the unity of knowledge this idea that if it's true in one field it has to be true across all Fields you're going to get to the same notion eventually the evidence is going to take you to the same place but they're just not in my experience they're not always thinking about it or they're just too siled in their academic Niche to be interested in it and they're not they're not talking to people outside of their little Ivory Tower so that's my that's my assessment but you're a little closer to this yeah I would say um yeah we're guessing a little bit about the question because the when it comes to see the question of EP and it's it's his EP sort of wide open the answer is no in other words what has been accomplished by ep since 1992 since the publication of the adopted mind um we're now 28 years later it's phenomenal that there is no component of human life that hasn't come under the microscope of some evolutionary psychology there's probably 500 of them in the world and those 500 people have accomplished a tremendous amount you can see what it looks like by reading David buss's new science of the Mind as a textbook in other words he you could basically go back look at Psychology in every in every uh subsection in subfield and look at the EP logic and apply it and in other words uh is It Wide Open well wide open the way chemistry is wide open in other words there's always going to be new discoveries uh in any scientific field that what has been accomplished in 30 years in evolutionary psychology is is uh spectacular okay now uh however as Jen's talking about that doesn't include clinical in other words clinical uh the clinical world has many reasons why it has been um essentially immune uh to EP there's a whole bunch of reasons why that's true uh and so that just happens to be the case so the clinical world is wide open and I watch uh constantly just the interactions between Gemini as we talk about things I watch the limitations of my own mind as I now listen to her uh say things and have different ways of doing things of explaining Concepts and even different little angles it's like oh well I didn't think of that oh yeah so you know basically I've been an engineer that had a toolbox and I I built a house and it looks like the kind of house that makes sense to me and it turns out that if Jen builds it it looks a little different and that's because there's it turns out there's there's plenty of room for great imagination and Artistry when it comes to figuring out how to help people uh and the the you're trying to essentially how do you distort the human mind well if you're me it's pretty freaking linear okay and it and if you're Jen it's more imaginative and if you're me it's pretty pretty no-nonsense and if it's like it's uncomfortable oh well it's uncomfortable this is the way it is and if it's Jen it's more gentle and more smooth so in other words the personality is uh become part of what it is that I'm I've been able to accomplish uh and now I find out beautifully that there's uh that there's other it's not just personality it's also life experience and actually even different knowledge bases in other words there's there's a tremendous amount Clinical Psychology should uh undergo a Renaissance in the next three decades as what as the realities of both Behavior genetics and the revolution in general psychology behind EP uh start to be applied and actually they will be and there's a reason we know there will be but we're not going to tell you that reason okay just keeping all kinds of secrets on this okay we know we know that the world is going to have to uh confront this knowledge uh because we're going to bring it to him they can't hide so uh the world is is due is overdue for a clinical Revolution and uh that will take place all right all right are we do we want to take one more are we about done we got some that are like really big that I'm Gonna Save out all week yeah it's ridiculous you're so far away You're supposed to be here in Maui it's like oh what is this it's too thick teeth fixed and things like that yeah ridiculous um so Enoki had a couple of follow-ups which were which were shorter and I think we can hit uh in the next couple of minutes so she's asking um these two kind of go together and they they stem from the earlier question too so is pessimism up slash optimism genetic as well is there truth in the happiness set point Theory um and then she's following up with that with what is the evolutionary role of humor and how do I generate that skill I've noticed it's genetic so slightly different but also I mean this is this is just speaking to these These are genetic attributes that are interacting with the environment to lead to certain equilibria so uh optimism is absolutely genetic and if we want to plant it on the big five we can sort of do a stylized version of that although it's more it's more complex than just what your big five rating is I've noticed a lot of people in the in the living wisdom Library community and generally that are following us get very attached to their big five scores um and are uh you know seeing them as sort of the the their fate is written in the stars and you know I'm 78 this what does that mean and we had we talked about this a little on one of the recent podcasts and how that's not really the way to think about it that this really is it's a it's a very it's an environmentally Dynamic number and it's it's interacting with all of your other personality traits so you can be extremely distorted on one dimension that if you have compensating attributes and other dimensions it's going to manifest a lot differently in your life than it might for somebody else who has exactly the same measurement of of conscientiousness or instability or whatever we we always use uh Alan goldhammer as our example there who is 99th percentile disagreeable when we make him take the test but nobody sees him that way because he's so conscientious and he's so intelligent that that really sort of tamps down the disagreeable and stable and oh and the stability yes yeah if you were literally 70th percentile or stable yeah 99 percentile stable then he would have periodic wages yeah well like his son does although I think anyone who's been to True North you know he shares a genetic profile and I adore gar is one of my favorite humans but he has rages I think he would be the first to admit that he's he's susceptible to like these like just blind fits of Rage that come out of that same disagreeable chip yes you'd really never see his blood pressure go up about anything no no he comes he's just God's sort of got this chronic irritation with everybody but it's not explosive sure yeah so therefore you would you know you'd think he's really not that bad a guy at all yeah he's kind of disagreeable and a little sour but but you have no idea just how unusual that mind is by General interaction you just you wouldn't know a lot of people just you know it always got very dry humor not realizing that it rained if it's it's liquid by the disagreeableness We Love Alan but he is a he's a study in in Big Five for sure so so to go back to the point I mean we can say yes optimism has a lot to do with your openness because openness gives you a wider field of possibility so it's just by by definition if you've got more options available to you at any given time because you're more open to things that other people wouldn't think of or be be open to doing that expands your your possibilities so you don't feel as trapped by any circumstances so openness is a big part of it agreeableness is a big part of it somebody who is super super super agreeable is almost never in a bad mood they're just always they're just kind of like okay well that's fine you know okay I'll go along with it um and someone who's very disagreeable is not very optimistic at all they're they're always feeling chiseled they're always feelings like life is unfair so that like Alan does um and stability is is part of it to unstable personalities if you've got an agreeable unstable person um they are capable of immense optimism in in moments and their incredible they're capable of immense pessimism if things are going badly they're going to swing really really widely so all of these things are interacting but I think it's mostly agreeableness um uh openness and yeah those are those are the two things I mean would you add stability to that in a systematic way I I don't think I would so much I think I want to point out it's a tiny little different way of looking at the openness issue which you're you're all over it and that is that remember the feeling of wanting to be more open and explore more of the habitat yeah the only thing that would drive that would be optimism hmm okay in other words it's basically the inference that the CV says it's worth expanding my my radius of exploration because I'm probably going to find something better than I've already found um so yeah that's essentially you're looking at the algorithm of of optimism yeah so we're just describing somebody who is optimistic is likely to be open because that's that's what's driving it yeah yeah yeah so yeah closed people have a harder time it's it's just they're they they feel more stuck it's they're good they're just gonna it's their their threshold for feeling stuck by circumstances is gonna happen earlier than for somebody who's open so um and then for humor uh humor is is an interesting I don't know about how you can definitely genetic definitely has you know sort of greasing the wheels of many social processes building coalitions where they don't exist you know signaling solidarity and and additional membership and bringing people in but cultivating it is a harder thing to pull off I mean there there certainly are I'm sure some some techniques um uh Doug I know you've talked before about sort of self-deprecation and self-effacing humor and how you can cultivate that to build a rapport with an audience um but it's hard to genuinely pull off if you don't have the chip because it will come across as as Too Fake and too too mechanical and but it can it can be done if you have other personality attributes I don't know of any good resources for that though yeah yeah all you can do is you can you can sort of work this is one of these fields about there's no transfer training so you can you can learn a few good jokes that can make you more competent in a novel social situation I can remember once I I went to a I agreed to go to this uh opening show of forks overnights and the guy there I hadn't met him and I'm there at the front with some other doctor or some gal and um and the guy's introducing me and bragging about how funny I am I'm like great just what I needed in front of this audience of a couple hundred people in Berkeley and it's like I'm not inherently funny particularly like every now and then something funny occurs to me uh what I can do is in a performance with my little slides in other words you you uh I I I'm comfortable essentially telling a story and if I have my goofy little slides I I can construct something that's entertaining but it doesn't just happen naturally okay and so I'm sitting there and it's like I can feel the audience expecting you know I don't know Jerry Seinfeld and they're not going to get it and it kind of goes on and it kind of goes on kind of goes and then finally I had some opportunity and I came up with something and everybody laughed at like thank God thank God it wasn't a total debt okay so I I survived but no you're not going to change that personality when uh like Alan goldhammer is by the way as we're talking about it he's very witty mm-hmm you just he just has it he has a he has a reverse uh what it what do you what do you call that uh cynical yeah upside down cynical thing that comes naturally to him about and it's when you're listening what he's with his when he's rolling along and you're listening you're just rolling your eyes because it's insulting whoever it is he's talking about in this really upside down way like oh wow look at that look at that waitress like really doing his great job oh yeah we wouldn't we'd want to wouldn't want to rush to you quickly you know what I mean we wouldn't want the food to not be lukewarm but blah blah you just sit up just it just rolls out of them and it's it's entertaining even though it's it's disturbing you know that you're you're in the club and it's not as long as you're in the club yeah as long as you're in the club you should sit right there and he's witty as hell because it just comes to him naturally and uh yeah I I just I don't have anything like that so yeah the uh so yeah oh my brother's hilarious yeah my brother just has this oh unbelievable quick wit puns everything else I can't even follow it no and an immense just Czar repertoire of obscure knowledge like he I mean he can just draw on baseball statistics from the 50s and then tie that together in some anecdote about cars you know the the Mustang in 1984 and what it like he can just put it together and it's it's incredible to witness and he also has that um uh you know he's able to sort of modulate and empathize with a particular audience and so he's he's constantly sort of adapting his humor and adapting his delivery which even if we could teach somebody who's not inherently witty you know here's a way to structure a joke it's still you're only half of the equation because you've got the other half of the of the dynamic on the other side of the thing and Doug and I have both had the experience of having really great material and a dud audience that doesn't laugh at our best stuff and it's really like you sort of have this moment where it's like whoa like I feel really exposed up here um and it's tough and it's even worse if you're in a in a close situation on a date or with a friend and you're you're like trying to cultivate humor and they're just not responding to it because of their personality not because of of the techniques that you've developed so if you really want to be inherently uh you know known for being funny you have to have both the components you have to have the kind of technical component the the and the Artistry the empathy that someone like my brother has just naturally yeah you could I I couldn't even become half of their clock in a thousand years nor could I and I'm I'm 50 related to him you would never get though yeah so yeah the issue is yes it is genetic and this is a great example of what we were talking about earlier that all all that you can do in this life when it comes to changing who it is that you are is changing your performance in a highly narrow fashion behind a very specific specific bunch of learning or adaptation I.E send you know you don't change all of your skin by just getting sun on your on the back of your right hand you put you sent your back to your right hand that back of your right hand is going to get sun and nothing else is going to get him and that's the that's the nature of how that's going to work I think you keep bringing up that example because you're sad you're not in Maui so true the rest of us are working on our teams be back soon yeah yeah all right all right well I think that's that's yeah it's about an hour so this is as as you guys I think if you're all here you got my email it says this is our new our new regime here is that we'll be doing this every other week on the weeks where there's not a podcast or a new podcast there will still be a you know a Classics episode A Greatest Hits episode um but we we don't have a regular day and time that works for both of us right now we may in the future like do these Tuesday at 10 or whatever um but uh we're not we're not ready to commit to that yet we're commitment phobic about our schedules so but we'll we'll let you know um I will always send out an email I know people who have some spam filter issues with the email so it's also always posted in the what's new footer on the front page of the website so you can always get the link there too or you can just email me um so yeah I think that's all the housekeeping kind of stuff to add and that's it so thank you for joining us you guys fantastic well we'll talk to you next time great to see you Jen yes likewise have a have a good one all right bye
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