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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-10-24
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unstable connection that's interesting wow [Music] okay we're on new technology so I'll hail them omniscient okay um so let us know if you can hear us and see us because we don't know because we're on a new platform um in the meantime we will just fill that air I was raised in a radio Newsroom so I can do that how about them Cubs uh [Music] help me out here okay Dan can hear and see okay okay good all right I think there's a little bit of a lag viewing over here yay okay we've got all kinds of people who can see us that's good okay um so just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started um I I know I've emailed a lot of you guys who are the ins you're on the installment pay or you were on the installment pay for the lifetime membership for the site and there are several of those memberships that have been ensnared in this mystifying technical snafu uh essentially if you signed up in June you were you were you thought you were doing the right thing by being an early sign up um and you paid with a credit card the system just keeps charging you so a lot of people are getting charged for now even five times for what it's supposed to just be I think yeah this is actually the scheme all along is how we were gonna just you know break a bunch of extra money off the table but no we feel terrible about it and we're trying to fix it and we keep thinking it's fixed uh and then I hear from you guys that you're still getting charged and um so we're doing everything we can it may we may have to recreate accounts for those of you who are in this group um uh and just kind of eliminate the current account delete the card that is associated with it I don't know we're trying to figure it out um but do nothing about this is automatic so if you've been overcharged you have to email me and if I don't get back to you it means I didn't get your email so there's there are like five different emails that people will use to try to reach me and some of those are very spam prone and so I don't always hear from you um and I also just get a lot of email a day so if you don't get a confirmation from me that I have issued a refund it means I didn't see it so if you've been overcharged there's nothing automatic you have to let me know um and I will go into the system and I'll refund you but you've got make sure that you follow up and that you know that I got it because otherwise it doesn't happen magically Doug Doug I want to point out that I'm not responsible for any of that it's like the Biden Trump debate all over again China's responsible all right all right so that is all of that um and uh yeah so I think that was the main housekeeping if people have other sort of administrivial questions go ahead and insert those into the chat um we have looks like a new kind of chat format so we have a separate q a I'm not sure if people are using that I don't think so so yeah if you have questions go ahead and put them in the chat we do have um a couple that have been submitted ahead of time so we can just get started with those if you're how uh on on the spectrum of uh scandalous how scandalous you yeah we can handle anything go ahead because we've got a few that are hot button issues um but a couple that have been uh sort of we've we've meant to have for the past couple of weeks and we haven't gotten to uh we had a couple of questions about alternative personality inventory modality so Myers-Briggs um the Enneagram uh also kind of related kind of not questions about whether there's any utility to EMDR to you know the the eye movement therapy um any of these kinds of things so we're going to just kind of lump all of those into alternative modalities I guess they are kind of two different questions yeah so we can tackle the personality one first so any utility to other personality no [Music] um the uh the buyers-briggs is bogus and and so is the Enneagram now what will disturb people about this is that they're talking about legitimate Concepts okay so I mean there's there's little pieces of I mean you haven't discussion about personality you're not talking about airplanes so as a result they're going to use language that that sounds like yeah that that's true some people are more this and some people are more that isn't that true yeah but that doesn't mean there's any sense to the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram they're useless so the uh they've been proven useless multiple occasions there's you know plenty of science that's been done on that uh no Myers-Briggs is a bogus instrument it continues to be used widely in in uh workplaces and workplace because the because there's no integration between academic psychology uh and you know Myers-Briggs has no place in academic psychology it was pilloried uh a psychological test to get a legitimate psychological test um is it's It's tricky to do it takes uh it's it you you have you have to validate uh little pieces of it you have to identify what you consider to be a characteristic that you're attempting to measure you have to have multiple ways that you're going to measure it once you develop the test and you you have to use samples of individuals where you know some things have about them so that you can actually know whether or not when people answer a certain way on the test it has anything to do with any behavior of people out in the real world Myers-Briggs fails completely at this and and the Enneagram is just a you know an ancient uh astrology right I mean it's just it's all very good there's always statistic astrology yeah scientistic astrology so no the uh the you know there have been attempts and there have been legitimate efforts across the history of psychology to to come up with personality tests uh obviously the most famous is the Rorschach which is totally useless the um uh I had to learn it I can give a standard Administration what did you see in the blog just the real reason that you went wrong so what is that uh what are we trying to say here there are a lot of really smart people have worked uh long and hard attempting to find uh the true elements in personality and to try to measure them and one of the early and and most important forays into this was is known as the mmpi the Minnesota multiple basic personality inventory that was the the standard state of the art um and you know for decades and the mnpi has a lot of legitimacy to it it throws a tremendous amount of spaghetti at the wall um and it it actually finds some correlations with some things uh we Now understand that the concepts that they were attempting to measure in the mnpi and probably continue to measure I'm sure that cleansers I'm sure that out there in clinical psych programs they're still being trained in the mmpi and they're still being trained in the workshop okay yeah you guys know I love if you listen to Pop has to have a soft spot for reality TV and one of my favorite shows is Married at First Sight which is this absurd sort of concept where they introduce these people at the altar and then try to make it work based on their very sophisticated personality instruments so especially the first couple of Seasons I mean they have a real live decently trained clinical psychologist who's very proud of his instruments he keeps talking about his sophisticated personality instruments and he's really talking about the mmpi he's like this is the you know world class and I don't make mistakes and I I know who these people are and I know if they're compatible or not oh yeah mystified when it doesn't work out the mmbi can can pull pull some introversion extroversion out of there which is a legitimate concept it can actually pull some conscientiousness out of there in in uh sociopathy scale oh yeah those are easy yeah so you can actually pull openness out of there with the schizophrenia scale um the the depression I don't think is correlated to anything the there's instability also in the in the Scarlett O'Hara's bee uh there's some you know hypochondriasis also in some instability there's there's there's stuff in there that correlates with the big five but the underlying constructs they were trying to measure are not legitimate constructs in personality they're correlated with legitimate constructs the legitimate constructs were first discovered uh half-assed accidentally in the early 1960s and then basically forgotten by the science of psychology for more than 20 years and then resurrected in the 1980s with uh more widespread use of factor analysis and computer desktops on everybody's uh professorial desk by the 1980s and so by that time a data analysis of large data sets became much much easier to do and became something that started to happen and with that came the emergence of the big five and so big five is our is our best basic estimate of the underlying genetical structure Big Five wasn't aimed at Gins but we now know that variances in personality are genetic uh and so as a result what the big five are is they are a pretty good encapsulation of Suites of genes and how those Suites of genes are are biasing characteristics and human behavior that we observe okay so uh if you have quote a lot of conscientiousness it just means that of the 15 000 genes that are contributing to in every individual's level of conscientiousness uh if you're at the 80th percentile for that instrument means you've got a lot of those gins that doesn't mean that your behavior is extremely similar to someone else who has the exact same score on a big five instrument okay they also could score it exactly at the 80th percentile uh and yet the genes that are contributing them to that score are somewhat different than the ones that are contributing to your score let me try to give you a an explanation of what this looks like we could have a score that we would call athleticism okay and it would be based on 20 Questions uh various and 20 different measurements of your athleticism uh you and someone else could score at the 80th percentile for athleticism but you would not be the same athlete one of you might be able to jump a lot higher and be a lot faster the other one might be a lot stronger and have greater endurance uh third one might be a combination of some of it being more coordinated in other words 388 percentiles are not anything close to the same and that is also true across every single measure uh of what we call the big five the big five is a legitimate gross estimation of what the underlying genetical structure is of you with the common language that we use to describe a behavioral tendency across a bunch of situations where there's some consistency in those situations so we would say that there's a bunch of situations where introversion extroversion is relevant there's a bunch of situations where introversion extroversion is not relevant okay so but there are situations where it is and we would say in those situations somebody that scores 88 percentile for extraversion is going to be uh similar to someone who scores 80 percentile on the tests as well for extraversion but those two people are remarkably different uh and they they're that extraversion may look quite a bit different just as 280th percentile athletes can look an awful lot different in their athleticism both of them we would recognize as quote well above average but they look quite a bit different so that's that's how to be thinking about this so your score on test doesn't say who it is that you are it describes what we believe to be true and actually we know to be true about where you stand in terms of Gene frequencies uh in the population uh if we were to add up all of the genes that are associated with this Behavior with this type with this adjective that we are using to describe humans that we say we call it conscientiousness uh that's all it is but a lot there's a lot of quote very conscientious people that are slobs okay that's they didn't get the neat Gene but they may be they may be very good at being on time okay they may be exceptionally good at at being a proofreader they may do their taxes meticulously but they're a slob okay so that it doesn't all fit so easily you have to think of it as an estimation of Gene frequencies right yeah and I think people get really confused by that again we've talked about this before so you know I took I took a big five test and it said I was 95th percentile conscientious but my house is a mess and it's like yeah because you're a messy conscientious person it doesn't that it doesn't all necessarily hang together and there are some big five tests that just disaggregate and disaggregate and disaggregate so Jordan Peterson is the best known um with conscientiousness he just splits it into industriousness and orderliness and so he's like just cleaving it again into these extra types and he's you can do that indefinitely until you've really just described that individual person and their genetic profile so that's the ultimate logic of those kinds of personalized Big Five tests is you're just getting a a closer and closer description of who it is that you are and people love this I mean this is just crack for people um and I think it's why it's why all of these personality tests continue to capture so much public imagination especially the Myers-Briggs Myers-Briggs it's worth saying about that one specifically too it's like those 16 types as Doug is saying there's some there's sort of they're capturing some truth because they're just describing General tendencies in the population but if you go back and you read those descriptions they're all very positive you know it doesn't there's no Myers-Briggs type that describes a real [ __ ] and we all know that there are just [ __ ] walking around so Myers-Briggs kind of has this Blank Slate baggage associated with it like this is your personality it's implied that your personality was acquired through your learning experiences as a child um it's implied that you could change some of those things to some degree if you become more aware of them um but fundamentally it's just there are 16 Myers-Briggs types there how many however many Enneagram I don't know with all the wings and everything I never understood the Enneagram even with my sort of tendency to embrace woo-woo nonsense the Enneagram never made any sense to me um uh and it I know has a spiritual event too so it's like you're you're using these tools for personal transformation to to understand like who it is that you're supposed to be and what your spiritual mission is in the world and all of these things are um they're very easy to sell to people because people really want to understand themselves better um and they're they're really they're chasing this sort of ever narrower definition of who it is that they specifically are so the the more specific the test seems to get the market Attractive people people find it yeah oh yeah I mean the psychologists trained uh classical trained psychologist uh in mmpi mmpi is was inherently fascinating yeah and uh and so it certainly was to me until I until I finally understood its limitations which uh didn't become evident really until the 1990s so until we started to formulate our thinking around the big five and basically push away from the conceptual basis of the mmpi but the mmpi was an empirically founded instrument rather than the Myers-Briggs which had nothing to do with Indian empiricism this was just cooked up wholesale out of Union yeah no no science at all the mnpi was uh was vigorously empirically put together a theoretically from the ground up which is why it has some stability uh even though it has no theoretical sophistication and therefore that that winds up being what makes it obsolete yeah okay all right okay so that dispatches that good um and then the the second part of that that a couple of people have asked about is um particular sort of like somatic experiencing or these other these other modalities that you'll find in different therapeutic environments um emdrs big one um you know Primal screaming rebirth therapy all these kinds of things yeah um I mean we we have talked about this before on the podcast and elsewhere and I think apart from there there can definitely be a little bit of a placebo effect in the in the short term um particularly when you are in a status Dynamic with a particular practitioner so people will have and I've personally had this experience where I've engaged in all kinds of weird therapeutic modalities with uh somatic re-experiencing and Trauma release Etc et cetera um and you want to impress your therapist you want to you want to display that you're an A plus student and you applied this this treatment and you're you're healed you're transformed and you may not be consciously aware that that's what you're seeking that you're sort of seeking the approval and the and the you're seeking to impress this individual but they're in a position of authority over you in that Dynamic and that is very much part of what informs that whole exchange and so people will often feel that they have accomplished something behind these kinds of things and they'll leave the office feeling oh my God I did such a release and you know I feel so much better and just the you know just talking about things and processing things and uh becoming acquainted with the distortions that they've been carrying around even if you're dealing with somebody who's not very effective and doesn't have very effective tools that that's not that different from what we're doing we're shedding light on distortions that's the main heart of the operation and so anybody who can do that using any kind of technique is going to um it's going to advance you a little bit and you might you might feel a little boost from some magical tool but it's not going to last it's not going to there is no trauma to be released in the body that that is not a thing um and uh and so even something like EMDR it's what is the mechanism what what is it what is it rewiring and and how is it changing your brain it's not it's just giving you this little this little placebo effect boost um that you feel you've done something and you've confronted something that's bothering you and you have a steam process with a practitioner I think that's probably uh best analysis I've heard I uh in in principle uh something might work and for reasons that we wouldn't understand okay and in other words so so things can can work and we cannot know why they work the um and so EMDR uh was was essentially uh a sort of a gimmick that that the practitioner looked it looked to her like it was working and um the hypothesis about why it's working then was was her attitude was hey here's some ideas about why I think it's working um but I don't know uh so it wasn't it wasn't created out of a theoretical basis that's not that's not a huge weakness although we would always want to be suspicious of that so uh one of the first first uh a problem with it is wait a second uh this is kind of a funny thing because a traumatic traumatic Pro uh experiences that you would maintain in memory um the first thing that we want to do is sports spinning out on this a little bit just for the heck of it we'll get back to the questions that we might have but in principle you wouldn't want a nervous system that would be um that would be shaped by it in its experiences in a way that would be maladaptive so there's no reason why trauma in fact there is actually zero there's tremendous evidence against the concept the trauma would be damaging to the organism quite the opposite uh trauma is design and memories of trauma are designed to assist the organism there would be no other reason for the organism to have the capacity to store those and to flag them as important to keep keep in mind During certain times so then the notion that um that what we need to do is somehow deactivate some bizarre destructive neurological learned structure um that we're going to now do that in some fancy way by moving our eyes back and forth while the therapist talks through the thing that that somehow that this now fixes it um I don't know like a mental Chiropractic adjustment and Etc now is it possible that some people have uh sequelae from traumatic experiences that that are uh dysfunctional for some interesting reason um and we could talk about that and we we could we could argue that that that that's true and I'm sure it is true in certain rare instances um but a lot of times the trauma that people are uh may experience and continue experience is it's there because it's served a vital useful uh warning function and uh but if it's we're currently on in super sensitizing to a particular individual which is actually pretty rare uh but but when that does happen uh for example with rape trauma uh rape trauma usually lasts about two years uh that's because that's about the length of time that the cost benefit analysis of the organism has been designed to essentially signal to you that you may have been careless you may have used bad judgment and you you possibly paid a very a major mistake by getting a pregnancy from a real [ __ ] okay so in other words there should be a warning device that's put into females for this like oh these guys are more dangerous than we thought okay and so I have to be more careful so that would lead there to be hyper vigilance uh in circumstances where a rape would be more likely to happen so think back don't think of the modern environment think about a African savannah situation uh that that's an expensive event to take place for a female so it should be marked in memory and coded with anxiety and it is but there's a period of time uh subsequent to that where the nervous system is basically cataloging well how wrong was I how freak of an accident was this and if I go at two years with no subsequent incidents um then the system is going to say well we can now relax the hyper vigilance so in other words the trauma so Trump from a Fallout corrects itself overwhelmingly now in the rare instances when it doesn't I will argue that I mean those are interesting incidences and in my experience clinically it's because there's something that the person didn't understand about the the traumatic loss or threat and they don't quite figure out they're suspecting that there's a that there is profit in continuing to draw mental attention to this issue and therefore and therefore the mind the mind uh is is not doing something by choice it's doing it by automated survival and reproductive algorithms if it's continuing to turn its attention to traumatic memory and continuing to have anxiety and disturbance around it it's because it's got unfinished business uh the unfinished business is not symbolic it's a it's a it's a concept that the person is saying wait a second I had a big loss or a huge potential loss I don't there's some important variable in here that I believe that I can sense I can feel and my subconscious is sniffing that it's there but I haven't grasped what it was it's like making you know a mistake as a surgeon and you cost somebody their life and you're thinking you know where did I go wrong what mistake did I make and you do a Monday morning quarterbacking over and over and over again okay because you recognize you could be at risk for making the same mistake again and you don't want to make that mistake again because it was very costly okay so it's going to be costly incidents I.E that are traumatic which means they're going to be coded with high levels of anxiety and and post-mortem Analysis of those things those will fade as the organism gets clear about what the variables were and and how it is that it's going to manage it that's going to be the vast majority of outcomes of traumatic experiences who's fallen off a horse who's been in an auto accident a lot of women have been sexually assaulted all kinds of things happen and the system goes through an appropriate traumatic Arc that's how it's going to work when it doesn't do that those are kind of interesting circumstances now are there tricks that can be done to somehow shake the system out of it well it's a weird system if it's holding on to it anyway so I don't know maybe there are but that is not the solution to the problem of traumatic process in humans the the notion is uh the notion that underlies a lot of this stuff is that the reason why the person is struggling in their life today in a various many dimensions of their life is because they've had traumatic experiences that is not why they are struggling okay the dramatic experiences have impacts on your behavior and your feelings that are narrow okay they are they're designed by nature to be extremely narrow so as to be as efficient as possible at rearranging behavior in ways to defend you against mistakes it's not gonna it's not gonna leap to a high concept and say oh my God I can't interact with men because they're dangerous that would be insane the organisms the only reason you have a traumatic uh uh impact of of for example of sexual assault trauma is to protect your sexuality so that it is spent intelligently it's not to stop it okay that would be crazy so the notion that that people do all kinds of various self-destructive things in order to avoid sexual in the future because they had a sexual assault ludicrous doesn't make any sense at all from the standpoint of evolutionary history it makes all kinds of sense from some kind of convoluted psychodynamic logic that doesn't hold together so whether whether EMDR or something else might may shake shake a nut loose every now and then and fall into the right hole maybe okay uh but but it but as a as a uh is sort of a powerful method for actually trying to look at what the purpose is of the traumatic outcome that is hanging on in a way that it shouldn't be hanging on according to them according to every analysis that we have of what would be an Adaptive uh traumatic uh outcome for the individual then the right thing to do is to be looking at what are we missing okay what about this situation makes you think you're still vulnerable that you haven't figured out why this happened and you haven't quite identified the situation this is uh the best work to my knowledge that was taking place in trauma theory was done by Edna foe at the University of Pennsylvania and this was about taking people through careful analysis of the Moment by moment processes of traumatic events so that they could clearly and objectively get a handle on why the thing took place and whether or not there was anything that they could have possibly done to have awaited it that that in in a gentle careful uh very uh sophisticated process of questioning looks like to me the best way to go about that yeah I think there's a lot of consensus that that's the best way to go about that and that makes it even more interesting that the that is completely the opposite and completely at odds with things like safe spaces and Trigger warnings and the sort of expansion of um the avoidance of discomfort and what Jonathan height calls safetyism and these kinds of ideas that have become increasingly institutionalized that because you you've experienced bad things in your life you have to be ever more protected from and insulated from even thinking about them or situations that might even bring them up it's actually completely the opposite of what what is demonstrably the most effective strategy for moving through the lingering effects of significant trauma trauma as sort of originally defined in the early DSM not not the diagnostic expansion that it has undergone in the last couple of decades where uh you know it used to be a a very unusual physical event that was all that constituted trauma and this the the creeping definition of what trauma is has emerged yeah it's it's like it can be it's um you know just watching someone else's traumas kind of secondary effects and all of these things that um you know ideological trauma all of these things it just gets the the net gets wider and wider for what is encompassed by this definition and that is just a perfect storm with the the sort of human tendency to um to embrace energy conservation to face to to confront problems that are very difficult to to solve and to look for outside explanations of why you're not able to fix things in your life or move forward in the way that you would want to and then you run yourself into a therapist who is armed with the the dsm-4 who is is gonna say oh it's your trauma it's your it's the six it's this expanded definition of you've gone through some uncomfortable things in your life and this just this coalesces into this really perfect situation where people are being over diagnosed with trauma they're they're over are over believing in the notion that it is having this long-term amorphous consequence on their life they're over medicalizing it all of these things are part of the same system um and so it's it's it's a very unusual situation that someone like like Doug is saying someone actually does have lingering effects of a singular traumatic event that can't shake loose from the system by being overwritten with new experiences um under the same conditions or very similar conditions that's a really unusual situation but everybody who goes into their psychologist office thinks that they're in that situation and thinks that it is having effects on other parts of their life that would not in principle be related to that original event whatsoever so this is just a big mess yeah there you go yeah yeah if you get a car accident you're not afraid of going in a hot tub right right the whole point of learning and nature of learning is is that of specificity so the uh that is completely lost on the trauma trauma-mongering therapy business yeah it's all designed to be extraordinarily narrow and the major impact of trauma is highly specified anxiety behind such uh stimulus forces a stimulus arrays that are reminiscent and activating that memory structure okay so I don't often think of Gone With the Wind but every now and then I do okay but you don't and so people aren't thinking about their trauma and it's not having any impact on all the fact that it's in memory doesn't mean it's having any impact at all it's uh neither does the fact that I've seen Gone With the Wind have any impact on me but you've never seen it yeah I have what I'm saying is it's not having any impact on me there's no impact on Monday interesting example because I think of Gone With the Wind exactly once a year because I used to have the sort of Christmas Eve ritual of watching it with someone that I no longer have a friendship with so I'm really sad that I no longer have the Friendship so when I when I'm reminded of Gone With the Wind or it's Christmas Eve or other things remind me of her I I all of those things kind of emerge but yeah I'm not walking through life all the time thinking about any of that it's this very situationally specific kind of thing it's file that gets called up as needed yeah that's his point yeah and you can imagine just the the conciliency of this too is that you know what which animal is that the evolutionary advantage in a traumatic situation the one that overestimates gets it gets it too broad you know it's the the deer has a near miss with the fox and and so then it doesn't it doesn't want to go out on a cloudy day and it doesn't want to go near trees that look like that tree and it's scared of anything that makes any kind of sound that's way too big an estimate for all of the stimuli that were associated with that event um and that that deer is not going to make it through the natural selection process it's not going to survive and reproduce as well as the deer who has a narrower uh take takes away a narrower estimate about when it's going to be in similar danger and conversely if it's too narrow you're also in trouble if it's it's like oh well it's only when the moon is three-quarter is full and the you know that this time of day and that specific tree that's too that's that's also incorrect so we are very well calibrated a successful evolutionary animals to have this very narrow and appropriate range of what is well I'm live here we are theoretically live hopefully people were able to come over here and find us um see if anybody's there again let me solicit in the chat if anybody's there uh it should show up in the chat hello I have trouble for coming over there's one person so there is somebody's somebody's with us all right three four okay all right people are people are making their way over here although we don't know if they're the same ones that were on the on the member q a this might people might might have just gotten an alert hi everybody uh welcome back for those of you who just got booted off of the Vimeo feed that's the first strike against him you know I think our internet here is strangely crappy as well today much more so than usual so um or even hardwired into the ethernet and it's giving us um some trouble so we uh if you're just joining us because you saw the alert on your YouTube uh and you are not a member of the living wisdom Library we were doing a members only q a which is now public q a um because this is the only other way we can broadcast after technical technical difficulties so but we answered all the really cool questions already so now unfortunately I lost the other ones what else were people asking there was a let me see there was an interesting one that had been sent in uh let's see some of these um I know that some people are asking some things about uh sort of brain chemistry and things I've added those to the queue for the podcast those seem more podcasty kinds of questions and we've we've dealt with some of them before so stay tuned and we'll we'll get to that um trying to keep these social process kind of questions today um so I'm I'm experiencing some sadness over not having friends to share little wins like work wins this covid coveted context um the one friend that I told a win to is a disagreeable he didn't even congratulate me and said some random thing about it I am in a new place I feel alone and lonely covid makes it infinitely hard what to do or how to feel better uh you know you can't fish where the fish are when when it's Cove in time so yeah this is a this is interesting there was actually I think in the New York Times some I'm pretty sure it was in the times this week there was actually an article about this like we've lost water cooler culture they're they're people no longer have a built-in peer group who know exactly what kind of week you had and kind of can share that experience in this very organic social way which is very Village that that's a very typical Village experience like everybody's kind of going through the same thing in the same specific little area and can um come together and uh you know communicate about it so yeah how how do we create Community during covid in ways that are not immediately intuitive finally the the utility of social media yeah the double-edged sword of social media that's true I actually had someone who uh what uh as a wider principle and then you remind me where I got lost where we came from okay story of my life people the uh the uh What feelings are his feelings are the the result of of inputs of some kind of energy so some some some kind of input of some kind somebody's smile uh the the wind you know uh a piece of popcorn there is some kind of change in the environmental inputs that impacts the nervous system and then results in in a a cost-benefit analysis about whether that's a good thing a Bad Thing whether there's now a threat whether there's an opportunity Etc so that results in a thing that we're going to call feelings so if you're bored that means that environmental inputs that are hitting your nervous system none of them has an exciting opportunity for expending energy and improving your circumstances in a way that appears worth the effort that is what boredom is so boredom is actually causing you to basically say you know what I need to do I probably need to make a fairly a significant change in my location in the environment because the environment that I'm looking at right now doesn't have a worthwhile behavioral Target okay so that's what that feeling is so loneliness depression Etc all this kind of I I.E well what this person is talking about is loneliness and this is one of the faces of loneliness I.E I want I want to have the experience where I have a win and I have somebody uh I I get to watch an empathic process because if somebody is happy about my win then I know they're on my team and that's one of the ways I find out that I've got Coalition so it's a coalition affirmation circuit that is looking to to to get to get information and so when you don't have that you feel Coalition deficient so what the person is really reporting here is Coalition deficiency uh I.E that's what long loneliness is is Coalition deficiency in the same way when you're thirsty you're water deficient okay so that's why I had one person fix this problem by believe it or not you know starting some Facebook group which would be like the last thing I would ever do in my life but you know but that was the logical thing she's in a small town she's sort of unusual personality wise I think she's real smart she's a vegan living in somewhere on the Backwoods of Wisconsin or whatever it is it's like cheese country like there's where were you gonna make friends and the answer is Racing for all the hate mail there you go every Green Bay Packer fan I always get that doesn't get the email I get the you know disparage midwesterners I'm too disagreeable everybody's worried about what I'll say back so uh so anyway the point is is that what she needed to do is develop some Facebook group around so bad I can't remember what it was but I got an email from her about three or four months later saying it worked like an incredible job yeah she had a couple of old old friends from high school that found her or whatever and a way big lift of her of her mood so we solved the Coalition deficiency process you don't actually have to be in proximity with anybody what you need is the energy or esteem signals that come that they find you valuable and they like you okay that can be over the phone that can be over uh digital media uh it's it can be nice in person but it doesn't have to be so the Coalition deficiency can be solved and so that's how we solve it we're looking for you know repeat exposure situations that lead to the uh the gentle support forward across examination processes and and willingness and and uh sort of openness and appropriateness of sharing our our small victories and and our defeats that's what the IE Coalition that's where we're at I think I I know the questioner here so I know a little something about them and I know that um you know there's there's a there's an aspect of the social media Coalition or just the sort of uh Anonymous internet Coalition that applies in this case and I think to a lot of people because this is a very high IQ person um uh somebody who already has like a lot of you know there's connected to a lot of people with a lot of shared interests around uh plant-based stuff and things all those kinds of things but I think there is the the feedback the value feedback that you get from other humans um that you are valuable is only as good as your estimate of the value of that person so so some random person on Facebook who's joined your Facebook group who says oh my gosh I just what a great I love your recipe or whatever it is it doesn't mean much when you are the Coalition that you're seeking is that those those would have to be people who are adding value to your experience and so it's really only their the feedback of people who are adding value to your experience that is really meaningful and takes you out of that kind of loneliness equilibrium and and that I mean that's sort of the this is the cost of doing business as a high IQ person who has a narrower um just just a higher standard for who qualifies for Coalition um if you if you were just a little dumber and your standards were a little lower and then you could you could have lots of friends who could share you could share your wins and those that feedback would feel meaningful to you in a way that it does not um because you have a very big brain forever start eating lead paint chips and if that doesn't work just you know bang your head into things yes I can recommend drinking you know product drinking for 15 years or so that'll take you down a few points yeah [Laughter] but if you're if you're a chick go to a men's emitting oh my God oh my God like the locus my favorite little fun fact about Mensa is that the um there's this again reality TV I have a soft spot there's this amazing documentary series called The Vow I don't know if people are watching this or not but it's this kind of inside view of a cult um essentially and it's really incredible that I never interacted with this cult's personal transformation spiritual it was all happening right around the time that I would have been very susceptible of course it turns into like this just filthy bizarre sex cult where they're like branding the women and uh selling people into sexual slavery and all of this [ __ ] but the guy the guy at the top of this whole cult was in in addition to what's her name Marilyn monsant or oh yes so for those of you who are not the old like we are and don't remember her column and parade every week um she was the highest IQ person or one of the highest IQ people in the world according to Mensa according to this test apparently this guy the founder of this cult Keith reniere was was in that group with her there were like three of them who tested at that same level yeah he's supposedly like oh super high IQ dude and so this attracts all these people into his cult anyway you just reminded me of men said don't go to a Mensa meeting if you're a female because you will be captured by Keith meniere and sold into sexual slavery it's worth it was it was worth it was worth thinking about yeah yeah yeah but yeah I mean I I'm very sympathetic to that whole set of problems um and yeah it's it's shitty and hard in covid because you can't like if you've already got kind of a limited pool of people who qualify for Coalition anyway um it is harder and harder to fish where the fish are um and you either have to just let your nervous system settle for inferior applicants um or just kind of look at this as an unusual period in time that you're you're waiting out until you can interact with humans again I could be wrong but I'll uh all of the the uh the the uh great character of uh The Big Short oh yeah yeah I could be wrong but I don't see how kovid has got to be ending soon anyway in other words I would be very surprised if it is not if it isn't a moderate problem you know 90 days from now so yeah the the reason I say so is the sum total of deaths per capita that have taken place around the world in other countries uh and we are reaching sort of that level now everybody is hovering around I guess whatever it is six for point six per thousand to point eight per thousand whatever it is so uh the point is is that you know this isn't some indefinite process for crying out loud uh so sooner or later this mess this mess dovetails down is something sane and reasonable so you know the problem you can just go ahead and suffer for a while longer because it's not going to be it's not going to be another six months of this that's I could be wrong but I don't see how social strategies that yeah yeah yeah but uh I would not recommend that those be Facebook social strategies for all of the reasons or all the complaining I've done about social media lately and reasons I've left Facebook and that's a whole other conversation all right so we can we can get into that I really am going to make a video on that soon as soon as I get my [ __ ] together I've been busy with hacked email ironically and many other things okay so Dr Dr L talks about disagreeable distance and I have a question about this is it a good move to make it known to a disagreeable person that I'm aware of their dishonest ways especially when it gets malignant probably not dishonest isn't the same thing as just a rebel right these are very different issues so that you'd have to clarify what it is that you're really trying to figure out there and what you're this is a begin with the end in mind kind of question too so I mean disagreeable distance we recommend with sort of just you know [ __ ] this kind of the theme of the day there was a question before we moved from Vimeo the guy saying he was personally felt personally attacked because he's been called a [ __ ] many times but it didn't happen by accident but even that guy they're they're people in his world who relative to him are bigger [ __ ] and um you know I I have talked I I have I have one friend in particular who is just a disagreeable sob and it is taken me a really long time to kind of come to terms with that we we make these reference all the time to you guys remember Charlie Brown when Lucy would hold the football for Charlie to to kick it and she pulls it away at the last minute every single time and he falls for it every single time so this is like Lucy in the football with this Sky it's just it's always the interaction is always the same I always kind of feel chiseled and exploited and manipulated and taken advantage of and there's no specific dishonesty that I would want to necessarily call out or there's nothing there's nothing that I'm entitled to that I'm not getting um the that those would be different circumstances than just dealing with somebody who's who has personality cancer that you want to get some distance from which is what we're usually talking about when we talk about disagreeable business strategies if you're if you're paying some cost um behind their dishonesty and and not confronting them about it that that's a different that's a different situation we have to know more specifically somebody else is asking uh I like to know why you call it disagreeable distance I find the distance from descriptive people to be actually agreeable oh oh yeah yeah it's I.E we're trying to get the distance from the disagreeable people yeah the uh yeah just think about disagreeable people as people that sort of Stack the deck in your in your Friday night poker game so they're they're just kind of stacking the deck a little bit they're just giving themselves a little advantage and you know you might even like to play poker so there you go again and then you walk away and you're down 35 bucks like what happened and you're like you know what why am I always down 35 bucks I can count the cards as well as this guy can why is this keep happening disagreeable people are just gonna sort of Stack the deck about the cost benefit uh process between two individuals and when you once you identified that's what's going on we we try to have the interaction between those two lives it's kind of I think of it as a Venn diagram that if it's you've got this much overlap you're in the red so it's red the the intersection between your two lives is red I.E you're in red ink it's negative for you if you keep moving and keep moving it there can can be at some place where it turns green or black it turns positive okay it's like okay well in little doses that person is actually a positive in my life any more than that it flips the negative and so that's what the distributable distance is is how far did the centers of those two circles to those two lives need to be sometimes that that's the the origin of the phrase you know the I don't know this town is is big enough for the two you know what I mean yeah this is all like okay yeah all my exes are in Texas that's why I'm in Tennessee you know like whatever the deal is you get as far enough as you need to be but close enough to to maintain a relationship that may be worthwhile yeah yeah I think it's uh often people who really need to be practicing this agreeable distance are agreeables too I mean are certainly agreeable relative to the disagreeable person and um It's tricky because that overlap is often of great utility to the agreeable person so one of the reasons that I I had trouble with my disagreeable is that as an agreeable I needed to free ride on their disagreeableness when I was in a in a tough situation so there were many situations where um I really needed that disagreeable assistance to extract myself from some some other relationship or some other job or something like that and so that was a that person was a real asset to me but then I'm paying the cost of the relationship all the rest of the time and putting up with all the other chiseling disagreeable crap and it just is too high high price to pay for the any benefit that might come out of that relationship and by the way I met that individual you know that's what I'm talking about yeah and Andy the 11 minutes that I have spent in that individual's presence were all unpleasant hahaha yeah yeah unfortunately the feeling was Mutual yeah it was a fair fight it was it was and hilariously like but none of it looked from the outside like you know there was no overt conflict or anything like that but you know they're both having this disagreeable experience [Music] so yeah that's good I mean if you if you are uh agreeable people need reality checks on on these things sometimes and so you're you're my new disagreeable insurance policy instead of that person because you slightly less disagreeable than that other human was but just as effective when I need uh to free ride on a disagreeable human to solve some problem I can't solve and so so it's you need you need people like that to be a reality check on these other other individuals in your life and how honestly they actually are there you go and it also just takes time how many times does the football have to be yanked away at the last minute for you to be like Jesus Christ I feel terrible about myself every time I interact with you so maybe this is not a great relationship to continue investing in so good all right one more one more we had let's see thought I had a short one I was gonna throw in there maybe not all right um um see what else we have I have no idea for years I have experienced a deep loud bass tone in my skull that makes sleep difficult and rare even with the medical world has nothing for me other than more pills do you have any insights very new I do not being attacked by a giant insect yeah no that's uh who knows some some unfortunate strange neurological abnormality have I have I don't don't know anything about it it's the first time I've ever heard of something like that yeah that is that's one of those things where yeah I think you're you're stuck in the on the medical world Merry-Go-Round until you just run into some genius who knows I mean if fasting is you know yeah a go-to yeah I've had I've had very weird consistent neurological problems dissolve with fasting so you know look up Nathan gershfeld if you're Southern California or elsewhere or Alan goldham or True North Health those are two two individuals with two places that are uh places where you can get uh legitimate experience individual to supervise a fast and that I would suggest has a has a decent possibility of resolving it believe it or not yeah well above zero you know what I mean so it's worth a try I definitely haven't gone down that road no question it's worth a try the reason why something like that might resolve is the following and that is that that could be as a result of some kind of mild inflammation where you've got a structural abnormality that a little bit of inflammation winds up causing a problem and then puts pressure on a on a nearby nerve and then we get the experience and so if we have a massive anti-inflammatory process that goes on you don't want to be taking some nasty story to do it then they wouldn't give it to you anyway because it's a hypothesis that seems you know that that they don't have enough evidence that that's what it is uh but but I have seen on many occasions bizarre you know brain uh abnormalities uh resolved with water fasting so give it a shot yeah that's where that is good I'm glad you said that yeah I just didn't think about it yeah yeah it's usually it's a sort of a modality of of final efforts you know it's like don't don't go there right away but go there if you've tried other things and nobody can figure out and it's persistently mysterious it's worth investigating so so yeah um we had a lot of really other interesting questions that I've told I've emailed some of you guys about about sort of um we're being attacked by like not just one giant insect but a couple of them um uh gender identity um uh sort of general wokeness and protests and all kinds of these kind of social political questions um but the several questions about gender identity and sexuality which I think are a big topic that kind of deserves their own show so we may do that on the podcast this week or we'll tackle it in a more designated space rather than just trying to give a quick picky answer to it on a q a so yeah yeah all right all right thank you all for coming over to YouTube with us I'm really sorry about the technical schnafus we continue to try to work them out Mercury must be in retrograde all right all right everybody all right thanks we'll see you next time
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