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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-11-09
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we have very much questions uh submitted ahead of time do do we want to just Yap about anything before that I mean how about that election not a Harvard PhD in political science here we want to hear something don't we have to say what did you let the process work that uh just out of my own like intellectual curiosity is that uh obviously as you read more about this you you understand that that the history of Elections I mean this this I I heard this for the first time and you could probably confirm this for me like we're are we the first sort of real democracy yeah I mean there are lots of different explosions of it versions and semantics they're a big shot in in Athens you got to vote yeah sure right yes but but yeah as far as sort of the the ideology of an inclusive democracy and certainly Federal democracy yeah we're the first we're the we're the Pioneer right we're the grand experiment and and it was actually very well designed very well yes amazingly better designed than the people that copied us out yeah I mean that is that's the big lesson from this week right yeah and so now now we get to see a nice nice mess and we get to watch the the all of the little moving parts of the Constitution and the whole balance the government come out and just play it out like it it shouldn't be a problem okay there should be you know whatever evidence there is for whatever fraud there is should be analyzed by whatever court is supposed to analyze it the courts should be blinded nothing but Justice yeah and everything should play out at least close to it yeah as close to it as they can if only close to it by the fact that they've been appointed by different administrations there is some sort of inherent balance just on that on that Merit so right yeah but you you would hope and accept I mean it there there's a reason we call it the Supreme Court right and which is that this is so all the members of the the the government the the uh what Summit have actually vetted the hell out of all these people so I know that the conservatives have been unhappy with John Roberts you know for a while so what happened because they they were unhappy with Sandra Day O'Connor too it's like um and I mean that's these justices are to hold into no one once they have their seats which is exactly why it's set up that way yeah uh and so now now here we have a situation where we wouldn't expect the justices to be partisan I wouldn't I would expect them to uh to look at this thing follow the Law whatever that law is God knows what the hell it is it's yeah and it plays out however the heck it plays out and the end of the day whatever you know whatever happens happens so yeah Amy Coney Barrett's acceptance speech after she was sworn in have you seen that I haven't you told me that's so good it's so good if people have you know Google on hand um it's this impassion so she she gets sworn in and Trump is kind of standing in the background and Thomas Justice Thomas is the one actually swearing her in and she takes the mic and it's one of the most impassioned sort of you know I am no great fan of her personal politics of what I know of them um but uh I am pretty persuaded that she has earned her place on the court she is not my favorite person she doesn't represent any of my personal interests but I trust her to do her job more or less as much as I can trust anybody to to be impartial and none of us I mean we're evolutionary in evolutionary psychology you know no one's truly impartial everybody's acting in their own interests all the time um but they are doing as good a job as they as they possibly can be expected to given the fact that they are in this institution and for me the whole lesson of the whole week is the robustness of the institutions like they it's it's a really good moment to be a political scientist and kind of watch watch go under so much pressure and uh and to see them sort of Triumph it's really heartening I actually have felt very patriotic and very sort of sort of just proud and happy and relieved and fortunate and grateful to live in such a place with with these institutions doesn't mean they are fail safe but um we've put them through a lot and they were not really designed for the the last four years of that that Personality yeah that is not a presidential personality um but we've had other presidents who were not presidential personalities we've had some real douchebags in that in the White House and real self-interested narcissists you know he's really not anything new as far as what the Baseline for the bullies in charge of Any Nation um look like we just have had really good documentation of the blow by blow for the last four years and we're being of course manipulated by robots to be constantly outraged about it right so that's that's a big piece of it too so but yeah uh just looking through the political science goggles it's like damn what a good time what a country what a what a seaworthy ship like yes it's just it's been really beautiful to watch well said yeah I also uh obviously talked to people people call me and they assume I'm with them yeah and like and so no nobody quite knows what to make of a Libertarian you you look at a Libertarian for your own glasses that uh my my comments uh uh obviously when your team wins you're elated you're all excited and I can remember uh a friend of mine was very Pro Obama and five or six years later he was disillusioned it's like none of the big things happened okay and it's like of course the the the the nature of American government is inherently conservative I don't mean that in a left right way I mean small changes these are kind of distinctions from the parties but yes it's conservative not we don't do big changes it's not this revolutionary talk you got to remember you've got I mean it's it is true that you know he the the sitting president got more votes than any other sitting president before him it wasn't enough to win because the Challenger got more but that is a lot of humans that is a lot of humans in this country who threw in with this guy and he increased his his uh share of votes with nearly every demographic except white people yeah so you know doubled his support with black Americans and of course there's all of this discussion on the left about how now this is the false consciousness of minority populations and they don't they don't understand what they're voting for I think they know exactly what they're voting for and and the this you've got to respect that half the country you know if you're a Biden supporter and I voted for Biden we actually have a question this week about how do you talk to people in your family voted for different people and Doug and I I'm pretty sure voted for different people and it's very civil and we we agree on principles and we're both institutionalists at the end of the day and we're both small C institutionalists like nobody needs a revolution there's nothing fundamentally broken about the American project it's it's the greatest experiment in democracy we've got it's the it's the best option it's it's the it's the is it Teddy Roosevelt it's the worst worst government except for all the rest I think that's that I may be totally getting that wrong I.E two cheers for democracy yeah you said that yeah yeah I was gonna yeah I was also gonna say about the what's interesting to me is the um the emotion of everybody involved including everybody that votes right and the what's interesting what emotions are is they are signals of evolutionary costs and benefits or wins and losses so the uh if you lost and you were feeling devastated uh that's because your nervous system is Computing that this is a substantial uh Gene variance outcome in the negative in other words you're you're the odds are your nervous system is saying this is bad for my genetic code I.E my life and my Offspring and so on and so forth and the um the reason why you would think so is be because in the Stone Age there's only 30 or 40 people in the village right and the leadership if there's a change of the Guard right if you're on the wrong side that's not good for you yeah and um you might have institutions you don't have institutions protecting you you're you're just you know if you're let's suppose you had a wise Fair stronghold Alpha that kind of took a shine to you because he liked you for some reason and so you you and your little family all Enclave of eight people out of the 40. you know definitely got at least your share of the kill you know I mean and you were in disputes about who stole who's corn nuts he he sided with you when you told your story so you are a bit better off than maybe the average Enclave of family in the village now there's a change and it's people that you clearly publicly had conflicts with now you're in some pets now you're in bad shape you're now there is a substantial and you're a real survival is at stake like this is not I mean there's there's Twitter is all about you know this is a matter of life and death like this yeah it's it's for most people it is not a matter of life and death and real practical it's an actual daily here's what it is it's a matter of two or three percent more taxes yeah that that's I mean that's where it comes down that's really that's in practice that will practice that's actually the third term of the Obama Administration that's what we've got now that's right and so however well or not well off you were under Obama that's what you can look forward to in this term yeah and it's a very small adjustment this kind of goes back to the earlier point we were talking about where these you know we we have these big all of this pageantry and all of this wailing and gnashing of teeth about who will be in charge and you're talking about a shift like this minute little shift from one direction to the other I mean if people really audited their lives under Trump you know the one of the most interesting things and the reason that I I kept saying both to clients and in Q and A's and on the podcast is I you know just from a political science perspective he was well positioned to win re-election and the reason that you know that's what I would have predicted up until he got coveted and kind of went off the rails like I was I was completely I really there will be all kinds of posts mortems on this but his his behavior around his own case of government was weird and I think uh alienated a lot of people but but before that he's got all of the marks of of who we would predict to win the election based on everything we know in political science he's he's I think he's taller I'm not sure so the the tallest candidate they didn't get to meet at the middle and shake hands so we didn't get the kids yeah so the things that actually matter in in these political science papers that have been replicated over and over again or this is gonna you know be a little scary to take in but it's height it's the it's the um the how expensive the clothing is so people can actually pick up on uh you know that's a thousand dollar suit versus a 400 suit we can tell um uh Timber of voice so the the deeper The Voice the more likely the candidate will be elected these are all kind of independent of all other factors um and the incumbency advantage like that's huge it's it's we we are we are very loath to vote out and incumbent um and so he he had all of those things going for him and he the main question the main survey question that also is very predictive is are you personally better off now than you were four years ago and one of the most interesting things about this election was that that most people said yes they personally are better off than they were four years ago they have more money in their pockets they're they're doing better um but then you ask them is the country better off than it was four years ago and they say no so the the it was actually this really split survey result which was very very interesting but people don't vote on behalf of how the country is doing or they perceive it's doing they vote with their own strategy their own rational interests in mind and most people felt like they were in a better situation than they were four years ago so curious yeah well that's why plus yeah and it was uh once again just as in Trump's Victory you're you're going to have a hundred thousand votes and that separate this kind of where they're distributed right and that that's uh this extraordinary weave of of how the forefathers set this up what we would want like if we're going to coexist with 50 of people who think really differently than we do like don't we want to sort of enforce a a small C happy medium where nobody's really thrilled about it yeah just pushing back you know instead of a wildly vacillating revolutionary winner take all like the the stakes of that are undemocratic by definition when when the main problem that we have right now with uh you know I I blame social media for a lot of this is that we were really losing the sense of I do I know I heartbounded all the time it's legit people um but we've lost this concept of the loyal opposition which is um you know we're watching this in in the moment right now which is like yeah okay fair enough I lost the election May the better candidate win I you know we would have hoped it was us but it wasn't us so we'll do our best to cooperate with you for the next four years and then we'll we'll be in charge and we'll carry out our our planned changes in our strategies not this kind of like oh God we've lost and so [ __ ] it you know it's all over we we have nothing to lose anymore like that's a very dangerous that's that's getting into kind of French Revolution territory and that's anti-democratic and so we we want this kind of um yeah not what we wanted but okay we'll suck it up and and we'll work it together so that is under assault that is that is the biggest stress on our institutions right now is this erosion of the loyal opposition which has been a tenant of democracy forever and was much stronger when you didn't have de facto popular democracy on social media where everybody kind of you know thinks that they're entitled to to an opinion about how things are going so you just you let the elites kind of do their Elite thing and you have a you have a more robust situation so interesting we're running into some trouble there um so it's a trade-off it's trade-off for inclusion and broader participation um but the founders were very worried about popular democracy for a good reason right I just thought of something so people can be um uh from the libertarian perspective the libertarian perspective or from a perspective that would be derived from a Libertarian persuctor which is that the uh the libertarian uh perspective is is that you uh which is actually a core principle of the United States government which is that uh Allah Jefferson you want the government which governs best governments you want the essentially you want to maximize human freedom and have the minimum amount of government and intervention and then there's all kinds of reasons and rationales for government intervention that you you limit with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and then after that point everybody negotiating votes and and the culture morphs as it does is what has happened yeah so now we have social welfare level that would have been inconceivable 150 years ago so um yeah where was I with this no this was interesting so um I read a an analysis that it showed that the following is true and that is that uh it's it's the the typical feeling about uh Republican versus Democrat has been that the uh Republicans are better stewards of the economy and the Democrats are better at social welfare and human being it's oh they're the bigger Spenders right they're taking care of the woman right and and that they're going to spend more the Republicans are going to be more fiscally conservative this is like this is in the theoretically the DNA of the country yeah now here's actually facts the facts are different than we think so it turns out that the real issue is whether one party has control totals yes so it turns out that when you have the presidency the Senate and the House of Representatives if you have all three it doesn't matter whether it's Republicans Or democrats in charge they spend like hell yeah yeah okay it turns out that no matter who is in charge of the presidency if it's a mixed bag right it's gridlock and you have less government that makes perfect so I'm sitting here thinking well looks like the Republicans are going to win the Senate yeah so we have gridlock which is exactly what Libertarians want to see right in any fashion like we don't really care who's aggressive that as long as they don't have all three yeah gonna start jamming through all the things that they want which is quote big change it's big change even though it might be the change I want right I I don't want to impose my desires my will on the rest of the country half of which disagrees with me like that is the that is part of the social contract of living in a representative democracy like I have to be willing to concede you know I'm I'm gonna compromise I'm gonna get some of what I want because all of what I want is going to completely disenfranchise half of my fellow countrymen which is [ __ ] so yeah then what happens is that even if uh all three are in one Camp two years later the public gets to see what they think of that right and so the the and they can then vote vote the majority out of the House of Representatives so it's a i as a human being that has dealt with thousands of humans that are in conflict with one other individual yeah their mother right you know what I mean right their brother in business they're five grand I I lent my nephew when you look at all that human beings are inherently in in conflict of interest basically all the time yeah and then you say we're gonna have this huge country from sea to shining sea and Beyond and we're all gonna you can currently Beyond and you can move right and you can move anywhere you want and nobody's going to hassle you if you go to Missouri then you move there from California the guy could say where's your papers and you're not no you're you're a member of a coalition right and uh and that you have a a great relaxation that that's true and you're you can walk the street safely you can open business open a business anywhere it's beautiful yeah and when you realize this used to be a souped up chimpanzee right in tribal Africa right over the head and that's not very long ago yeah and it's like wow or you were Cyrus Russia regular Hitler's Germany impoverished little peasants you know scraping away to get a hunk of bread and some wool just you know two generations ago you're just you're just desperate you're living this desperate desperate life where you can't you have no Freedom you have no no freedom of movement no freedom of expression you're you're in line and your life is very small and very constrained yeah yeah that is human history yeah so if you lost this election no despair the the major key to your better future is you it's not what goes on in Washington and so if you if you won enjoy the gloating that really the major key to your better future is you know all right that pretty much does it it's funny we haven't actually had an opportunity to talk about it because we've been traveling and ships in the night so yeah yeah but it's I mean we're we're sort of similarly politically positioned as a evolutionary psychology drags you kicking and screaming toward a more libertarian perspective just as you integrate in April genetics and individual Freedom individual Freedom just being at the center of individual difference I mean if we are genetically so different and and we pursue happiness in such individual ways how can you how can you live a life that is is prescribing any version of Happiness on people who are not you you just you just can't do it it just doesn't it doesn't compute um once you really get it embedded in this way of seeing the world I I am in awe of the founding fathers yeah all of them and we are amazing dudes I'm really I'm I'm sitting now it's kind of like you you get you you've been you've heard that this is a Steven Spielberg Masterpiece you haven't seen it yet but you know 15 people that have and they say I'm not going to tell you anything but I'm just telling you you got to see this thing and you go into a theater and you've seen cannabis movies and you know what the guy's Talent is and you know actually a friend of mine knew about how good James Cameron was uh literally yeah Larry he was a filmmaker and he and his wife went in and the first minute of Titanic Titanic yeah turned into his wife and said this is going to be amazing yeah like he could tell by the grandmas yeah and so I I look at this moment now with all of Trump's legal challenges all of it the noise about fraud possibly there is some if it wouldn't as they say in sports if you ain't cheating you ain't trying it sure the question is how big right and and what what is the evidence if any and how unusual relative to any presidential election I mean it's it's so we'll we'll see yeah and we're gonna we're gonna watch this thing play out and what we will but we know it's a Steven Spielberg movie right in other words all there's going to be a bunch of players and a a bunch of uh decisions to be made and under it all there's the founding fathers from the rule of law and that is that is who will decide this game yeah that's how it works so what a country yeah now I'm I'm interested in watching that process yeah I'm gonna see see how it turns out and listen to all the the noise on either side about how it's going to yeah nobody knows right and we will we will let the evidence roll in and watch the decisions made and I'll be fascinated to see what happens whatever happens I'm going to enjoy it yeah all good and he's the loser I'm not so sure all right all right what else do we have to talk about now that we've had the spontaneous all right yeah so we had a couple of here's a totally different question I haven't seen any come in the chat yet if you guys have burning questions that you want to put in the chat I can't move the laptop too much today because it's very precariously arranged um so be assertive um this was this was just totally different what kind of cars do each of you and I drive and are they reflective of our Big Five personality yeah I mean probably they are yeah yeah yours I mean actually you're moving on yeah yeah like you can tell them tell them your story yeah so I for I I have a 10 year old Kia Soul um that until very recently when it got smashed in um when it was sitting in the parking lot of my crap whole apartment last year was mostly uh distinct it was distinctive because of all the stickers on the back so my stickers were Big Five advertisement all the way like it was nice little mix of there was like Bigfoot with space behind him and a bunch of environmental crap from Alaska I insisted on keeping my Alaskan registration my Alaska plate so I could signal all of my sort of openness and I'm not just a typical Californian so I'm driving this around Santa Rosa um so the Kia itself was just an affordable kind of little wagon covered in dog hair that was a dog wagon so absolutely singling my openness um signaling my mid idling conscientiousness yeah the fact that it's not uh you know a super super like I'm not getting it cleaned and detailed every week I'm not taking beautiful care of it it's a it's a road trip wagon um and uh and because I don't want to miss signal to people that I care that much about my car so uh yeah happily dented and scratched by all of the adventures that it had so I'd say a fairly accurate representation of the personality right yeah yeah you and I had discussions about mine yeah that this was uh a shop for a car a year or so ago and and I was sharing with Jen all the all the little details that would go through in my head and the um the first part of it was uh just the mathematics of depth so if you want to know foreign hanging out with Dr Lyle the mathematics of death sure we talk about the mathematics a lot I'm very interested in mathematics Michael calls them micromorts he's obsessed with micro Marts oh gosh so uh anyway so uh looking at uh my life and it's the biggest threats to it biggest threats that we'd obviously derail anybody's life or health threats and uh and I'm not too worried about cardiovascular disease cancer I can't stop if it happens uh so that's a that's more up to fate than it is anything else even though the vegans think otherwise though they've been misinformed so most of that uh you know obviously I do what I can but I'm not I'm not feeling bulletproof about that the way I did 20 years ago when I was writing plus drop I was Colin Campbell's work was misleading and unintentionally misleading about that the um so overconfident yeah it's not misleading because he didn't try to yes it was simply overconfident yeah that's well said thank you Cyrus so anyway um yeah so really a big issue would be accidents yeah or it would be the something something well especially with all the driving you were doing yeah a lot of freeway driving constantly just hundreds and hundreds of miles a week yeah I was driving 30 000 miles here yes so as a result of that um I then I discovered for some reason I was doing you know there's there's things worth doing on the internet and things not worth doing anything one of the things we're doing is analyzing your debt that's where we're thinking so anyway it turns out that as you people have heard me say the big cars are the big SUVs are much safer so uh quite surprisingly so yeah so as a result of that and I also knew that it doesn't just it's not just death statistics uh and and incidentally you're risk of chance of death in cars is not trivial it's a hell of a lot uh bigger than it is going to be lifetime around coveted for God's sakes not even close much much lower than it used to be even yes 20 years ago way better um but even including for the seat belt divide like cars just get safer every year yeah so yeah so it's getting better all the time but I I wanted a big badass SUV and um so the the best deal was and believe it or not in Acura so they had a really good deal on an Acura and but the problem is it out of leather and that bothers me from an animal rights perspective it just it gives me it isn't that it isn't that I won't let wear a leather shoe but I won't I'm not thinking about it but I I was just buy a new car buy a new car it's all about leather and I know that they slaughter 100 million specifically for Carla no I wasn't gonna do it so I uh so I I had I had to I wanted something that I really liked and I wanted something that was uh I'm not a flash Seeker so the Acura was too flashy for me anyway so it turned out Subaru Subaru is a nerdy conservative-ish but a little bit open a little bit open a little bit open yeah people think you're a little more liberal than you are he's living in Northern California you know yeah just so that turned out to be the right car for me someone just commented I'm guessing he has a Toyota that was before that was very good give it away right yeah Highlander would have been the other option yeah uh I can't remember what I didn't like the Subaru is just nicer yeah I liked it better and so and also a little more open showing a little definitely has a little more adventurous yeah slightly yes I'm a little more adventurous than the guy that's in the Toyota yeah it's interesting there is a subtle distinction yeah Subaru is sent yeah and it's a beautiful really nice color so yeah I think they they to answer the question we definitely have cards that represent both the big five but also aspirational big five I mean cars are not just they're not a mirror of who you're either who you want people that think you are um and so thank you very much I would say that that tracks with us and most people that we know and they're ours yeah yeah yeah and when when I haven't had the car right yeah it's bothered me yeah sure yeah and that's why you put stickers on it yeah got it you morph it yeah because the soul wasn't quite right it wasn't quite adventurous enough it was you know I would have preferred something like a Jeep like a Jeep or a Highlander or something you know more four-wheel drive right ready to off-road right which is you know front wheels right so pretend it's under underpowered um but it was very very cheap and I was very desperate to drive from Montana to Alaska and it was what I could find and um and he put a bunch of stickers on it it's fine there you go beautiful but uh yes I'm currently between cars the Kia and I our relationship is coming to an end it's it's I put lovingly put like 80 000 miles on it since I've had it yeah it's time time to pass it off to some broke college students yes so yeah if anybody wants to buy it let me know all right what else we've got a good question um so she just traded in her Toyota this is a personal question for you do you want to deal with that is that your your golden years and your relationship status with all the relationship talk on beat your jeans is Dr Lyle concerned about heading into his golden years without a committed partner or relationship or is he in one foreign concerned about it probably any more than I ever was yeah so the um I think from the outside when we when we look at people and we look at their ages we're like oh man that was it now man it's almost over when you're in it you don't feel anything I remember uh looking at my mother I actually I hadn't seen her for a while and then I went down to see her this was more than 10 years ago and visit her in San Diego and because she's older older people they can look tired and I went on a walk with her risk walk uh you know in the Hills overlooking the ocean and I said Mom do you feel tired I was just trying to fish you know I wasn't trying to indicate anything and fortunately she's not a suspicious human so she goes no I feel great I'm like God that's I'm really glad to hear it because she was enjoying her life fully felt great physically at 75 to me she looked tired but really what tired was was old you know so yeah I'm not worried about my golden years I'm just not looking not looking forward to being any more golden that's how that works all right see this is this is a softball Natasha wants to know what our two Brilliant Minds have been thinking about lately uh the election yeah you can't stop talking about the election and politics just in general and institutional strength um yeah I've been obsessing about social media and sort of the harms to democracy that come with that and and the the sort of the changing personal incentives of people who are sucked into outrage as a currency so it's been a big concern of mine and a big sort of intellectual football that I've been passing around yeah yeah can't remember what I've been thinking about I've been very concerned about what we could call for shorthand sort of wokism too um which I think is a this is an emerging fissure on the left between sort of more institutionalists small C leftists like traditional traditional liberal Democrats um and the the far left side of Bacardi and sort of what is the difference between equality and Equity um why are we getting into the business of social engineering to try to engineer Equitable outcomes instead of Equitable opportunities that that is a path that history seems to have shown us does not work very well and often leads to Great human catastrophe so um the intersection between woke politics and social media is a is a topic of great concern to me as it is to a lot of what we could call the intellectual dark web or there's there's a bunch of people who kind of are part of that Community but but I think we're wandering into Uncharted pretty dangerous territory with that stuff so I am concerned about it interesting yeah I I just can you know you you're I mean a lot of the stuff that you bring up your your concerns are things that uh they sound similar to concerns that I vote for 30 years sure except that you may have a bigger point now yeah so in other words I I'm I'm uh whenever some smart friend of mine was worried about this or that and connects three dots I'm like listen big Battleship hard hard to move it relax but um but I have uh I've actually um I've I've actually uh now had very close quarters with people who have been had uh business operations that were intimidated yeah and and it was like a lot of clients that's not uh that is very uncool that's a that that's a that's a new territory for America yeah so that that's troubling it's a new territory to see um you know just just today I need to I need to pull myself off of Twitter because I've just been spending too much time this last week I have such a love-hate relationship with social media I've I've ixnade Facebook for good like Facebook is good to me but I can't quit Instagram because of all the cute dogs and I can't I can't quit Twitter and fits and starts because it's that it's that ancestral circuit for you've got the scoop you know you got the scoop on the information before other people do and you can you can uh you've got the first mover Advantage with venting your outrage to your community I mean these are such such Primal important things to be able to do to say hey I've got the truth I've got information that nobody else has and then me let me do it so I get sucked into it and then I shut myself out for 30 days and then I get sucked into it again but today I'm just drinking my coffee scrolling through my feed and something from Harvard Medical School is some some update on um how I I don't even remember what the article is about it's that Health outcomes for women of color uh more broadly I forget the specifics of the question but instead of saying women this this little news this little press release from Harvard said birthing people so this is this trans-inclusive language that we're seeing more and more of Scientific American has used it nature used it Science magazine uses it and now Harvard is using it in a press release and it's I mean it's really kind of insane so um it's this this movement this drift of this this this you know we don't want to use wrong think we don't want to be trans exclusionary I've been accused of being a Turf which is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist because I want to call women women because I insist on the biological whole certain dichotomy I'm not to say that there are not you know there there are humans who are capable of of giving growing and giving birth to a child who do not identify as women and I would never call them a woman out of out of respect to those individuals if that is the process that somebody has gone through and they identify either as a male or as a gender non-binary and that's an individual process with that person um my my respectful relationship with them dictates the the sort of parameters of that conversation and I will use that preferred language but that's very different from compulsory language that is Shifting the entire dialogue about how we talk about men and women away from the biological reality of a gender binary and so like that's a lot of people have asked about this and I keep sort of saying oh we'll get to this question on the podcast or whatever and we just haven't um for the last couple of weeks because travel and everything else um but that in in some is sort of where I am on that position I'm very concerned about seeing this drift of compulsory language coming out of Institutions like Harvard and these these you know science science defending institutions that are moving away from biological basics um I forget why I got that I can't remember this is all wokism yeah totally yeah there was an amazing the other thing that's very common on social media which you would know because he has escaped all of the the snares and traps of social media which is brilliant but it's kind of this unspoken virtue signal now that you put your your chosen pronouns in your bio so on Twitter you click on about that person so about Doug while you know oh you know uh contradictory contrarian you know public intellectual like whatever we could call you next year little face and then pronouns he him so you know you're a cisgendered heterosexual male so you identify as he we're not going to call you they we're not going to call you she so this is totally like a ridiculous virtue signal most of the time except for gender binary people who are difficult to type upon site or whatever so director if you guys haven't seen it it's really it's one of the best films ever made but that that moment um but so our our new Vice president-elect has her pronouns in her bio she's sort of the first major public figure to do so so there was a bunch of noise on Twitter about oh Kamala can do it so where are your pronouns this like outrage that you know if you if you're not listing your pronouns in your bio you're you're transpho basically is the implication so of course Twitter claps back at that there's this whole conversation that goes on and then the original people who were all upset about you know people who don't have pronouns in their bio have to come today to apologize because it's a it's an additional microaggression to insist upon pronoun use in your bio against those people who have not yet settled on a pronoun or who might not feel safe using their pronoun it's this endless kind of uh you know some people call it a purity spiral and has different names I mean this says this is insane this is just insane just so you guys today too bad for them yeah Doug specializes in my questions now the truth is is that this microaggressions aren't going to hurt you any yeah and the uh what will hurt you is to get shot at in a foxhole that'll hurt you the uh what will hurt you is is a catastrophic auto accident that wrecks your spinal cord no me being a little bit insensitive from your perspective that's too bad for you you know I accept no I I'm a uh the concept here is are you a decent uh person that treats people well that's it and I I don't need to be charting what what goes on in your head about it it's my standard about whether I treat you decently and that's it and that that's where I begin and end is with my own personal Judgment of this and so all of that is just disgusting as hell to me in case anybody wants to know well these poor people who have asked Can you can you talk about this you just got your answer it's disgusting as hell disgusting as hell I mean there's it's I think like with with so many things this started with really good intentions you know this is um the the author who um most reflects my thinking on this and has really helped me understand uh all of the Dynamics is Shelby Steele who's been writing about this for 30 years um and you know he he distinguishes between the civil rights movement in the 60s and these good intentions that began that emerged out of true bigotry true racist institutions true like real social problems that needed to be fixed so did the the feminist movement that followed it I mean these were these were real problems where humans did not have equal opportunity at a real fundamental level um and so these movements began and these these seeds were planted with very good intentions and and to good effect and then they have morphed over time um in these really counterproductive uh status minded fuzzy directions and now we are seeing these the the real chickens come home Jerusalem yeah early movements and very interesting and it's um this is not the intended goal I mean there's it's it's really it's it's moved very far from where it began and so he speaks about that really eloquently um I I have talked about this in my dissertation and elsewhere like this is we're we're dealing with a different world now than what the problems that the Civil Rights Movement intended to solve um and that would go for for women's rights and trans rights and gay rights and everything else I mean it's all it's all the piece got it yeah so your question here wow you and I talked about this retiring and getting Social Security early can you share your thinking on this oh my God who did I talk to I did talk to somebody that happened more than one person uh LK or ik yeah literally I have to have this conversation three or four times um yeah this is uh I don't know what this has worked it's worth two minutes uh the Social Security uh some gold in years I'm headed in my goal it's a disaster so anyway yeah you will hear some interesting um analyzes from people about how to deal with your just for for anybody that's the slightest bit interested in Social Security you could start taking it at 62. uh you can decline to take it and then all the way to I think 70 and a half that's 70 and a half you will start taking it no matter what I just send you the check and obviously if you wait till you're seven and a half it's probably going to take about twice as much money uh per month as if you take it when you're 62. well there's a reason for that and the reason is is you're only going to live to 78 statistically so therefore if you take it at 62 you're going to have it for twice as long then if you take it at 70. so of course it's uh so this is these numbers are just being run by actuaries it's not designed to give you an advantage statistically when you take it so if you think that you are I think the way it would work is if it turns out that you live substantially longer than it's expected you would be better off having it taken it later okay uh you can think in principle as you were to Live 24 years past what is expected then two-thirds of that time you would have been at the higher paid two-thirds times double two-thirds times two is four thirds whereas otherwise it's three-thirds it's what it's so you'd be 33 better off ultimately income but that's not taking into account the fact that those early years you could have saved the money and then had it make interest income so here's what it amounts to it's a push there's there's no economic Advantage uh to to waiting for your Social Security at all other than the following issues if you're still earning a bunch of money then then you're going to be taxed uh so the whole idea of Social Security is to wait until your income finally is dropping because then the first 25 000 worth of income isn't isn't taxed or however this works so there's tax advantages that the people that would gain a lot of freedom and would change their lives if they were to take their social security at 65 but they're being intimidated by some Financial brain that's telling them they're way better off to wait till they're 70. it's not true it's uh that person is not figuring that if you took it at 65 and stowed that money in the bank uh then by 70 the interest income that would be drive from that and the the capital that would be there would at least make up for the additional payments that you would be getting over and above your your check by waiting until 70. so no this has all been believe me I mean the government isn't very confident but they have hunched the calculator enough times to figure out how to make the rules so that it's all basically a push so it it really comes down to what do you feel yeah that's what it amounts to and how's your health and how's your health you know if my if my health were poor right now yeah and I wasn't planning on working uh that many more years then I would take it early yeah okay so I'm planning to take it late probably we'll see I'll I'll look at I'll take some blood tests every year starting in a few years and I'll run some algorithms you're a robust organism I had promised I would answer it's sort of um personal questions about uh my my alcohol recovery um which I can talk about sort of generally in terms of addiction and the process out of addiction so in case that's of interest to anybody um the I mean I'll answer some of these questions in an email back to this person but the um it did did I stop cold turkey or is moderation possible um and how do I deal with temptation those are sort of General general questions that I think would apply to anybody in any iteration of the pleasure trap not just alcohol um and there may be different answers to different kinds of relationships with the pleasure trap for me um I found moderation impossible but that took a a series of experiments to discover for myself and I think that that is true uh for most people particularly around food so we get this question with food all the time oh can I just never eat the red light Foods you know if I if I can't stop does that mean I can never have it again and for me I I uh you know I I tried enough times that I had to teach myself that this is not something that I can do moderately I really wanted to be able to drink water early and what would happen is that I would have some period of time where I abstained usually a couple of months and then I'd start to get some arrogance and I would start to feel like hey I've got this got this licked that was just a real bad phase I was going through a breakup whatever so I can I can have a glass of wine on a date or a glass of champagne at a wedding or whatever um and and then you just you just wake the sleeping the sleeping giant dragon or whatever whatever metaphor we want to use um in AAA they say your your addiction is out there doing push-ups in the parking lot waiting for you so it's keeping its strength up um and it would just every single time it would reignite this process where I I would go from kind of not thinking about it very much at all and not feeling a lot of active Cravings to once I had a little bit my all of my bandwidth was taken up with the with fighting the cravings and thinking about it and thinking when's the next time I could have just one when's the next time I could have just two um and it's a very short slope as I discovered through several efforts from that point to right back to where I was plus a good Notch of worse um and that was followed by increasingly um terrifying withdrawal syndrome withdrawal symptoms and so that was a big piece of my educational process and that's something that's more unique to a psychoactive substance like alcohol than it's going to be to Donuts um but I think it's similar for everybody that you you've got to find it's just about knowing myself can can you do this reasonably or not like you've got to be rigorously honest with yourself everybody wants to be able to do these things in moderation very few people can um I I have a little bit of a bias toward alcohol that I don't think anybody who has come to a position where they feel they have a problem with alcohol I don't think really any of those people can then have a moderate healthy relationship where it's not taking up a huge amount of their time and energy and interest not to say it's not possible I've just never seen it I've seen a lot of people try to believe that for a long time and and lose a lot of a lot of life and a lot of joy in the process um and with food it's really just finding out where what those things are what's reasonable what's not um and just being honest with yourself and willing to go through that process it's really there's no easy answer there's no and there's no Universal answer either yeah so yeah the more the milder the pleasure trap disturbance gets the the more play there is so so you're going to uh coffee is going to be way less potent than alcohol it's not even close uh yeah I feel like I quit alcohol and I can't quit coffees yeah but you also don't have your life just love coffee and coffee loves me back in a way without alcohol so it's a different CV yeah and this is how it's going to go yeah and so uh cigarettes are going to be tougher than coffee sure and and the uh they're getting towards where alcohol is so uh food is going to be lower level in bulk because you're not going to have withdrawals that are going to look like even coffee withdrawals so uh the fact that food is a very low level addiction doesn't mean it's not an addictive process it is an addictive process it's just not one of great intensity addiction doesn't have to be intense to get you no it can be very mild in there uh and therefore it's disruption to your life cannot be anything it doesn't have to be anything close to the catastrophe uh catastrophic it can be something that very mildly over a 40-year adult period so you should do a heart attack you know what I mean it's so subtle that you can't see it uh and it and you may not never pay the price for that heart attack so an awful lot of people don't pay big prices behind the pleasure drop sure so uh that that's going to be different than other addictions most you know the the more intense the addiction gets the more problematic it is and the more difficult it is to get out of it that's how it works and there's there's variation within food for different types of food I mean this is what people miss all the time so like some people the the the the trigger foods that I would have are different than your trigger foods you could put me I've said many times in a room full of donuts I would not be that interested in them it's just not my jam it's not going to hit those circuits for me or some people like that is the most dangerous thing that could be left alone with I just don't have much of a sweet tooth put me with some really good you know deep fried chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant I'm in some trouble it's like a whole different process so you have to know what your where your parameters are and you have to you know engineer your environment accordingly to protect you against yourself um it's just really it's it's a it's a process of investigation and and you know I've said many times another AAA saying is the relapse is part of recovery you you don't get to that relationship you don't get to that Reckoning with your own truth until you run some experiments and you find out that you can't get away with it and you look at that very honestly and very reflectively and you're like yeah I can't I can't get away with it and if I keep trying to get away with it it's going to keep getting worse and I'm going to wind up killing myself in the case of alcohol and with food it's never going to get better I'm never going to be able to get away with this I really keep convincing myself I can but it's just keeping me back from from the goals that I have set out for myself and I've made some progress toward but it's three steps forward four steps back every time I do this so it's it's just a not an easy process right all good yeah all right is the actual cause of unequal wealth distribution down to genetic differences in intelligence and conscientiousness in a given gene pool in general yes yeah we would say that that's um now uh in a in a free market situation there's going to be um it's a it's a scramble it's a scramble competition and so you're competing for trade opportunities and so we're going to so there's there's an element of luck involved so you you could be uh there's also also other personality variables that aren't going to be painted by the big five but they're going to be subtle individual differences you're not going to pick up from the big five what Young athlete loves basketball is as opposed to football as opposed to swimming okay uh he he or she may be in love with Athletics but you can't tell which uh thing that they're gonna love and uh and you might even you can't even tell by virtue of what they would be better at so the young John Elway was uh had a phenomenal Canon of an arm and he was uh he was he was deeply ambivalent about whether or not to be an NFL quarterback or be a major league starting pitcher he could have been either uh and there was no doubt uh that he would have excelled it either and so at the but he couldn't do both so he finally had to do a coin flip on which he was going to love more and he chose football so uh but there's nothing in the there's nothing in uh with the big five that is going to tell us which choice he's going to make right so people that uh have conscientious and intelligence uh one of them wants to be a lot of it one of them wants to be a neurosurgeon another one wants to be a mathematician or an engineer one of them wants to be a petroleum engineer they can make a lot of money one of them wants to be a civil engineer they don't make so much they're incredibly similar types of problems but they're in a different Market with different supply and demand characteristics at a given time and it turns out that one of them makes 250 000 a year and the other one makes 94. and so this is so but as a as a first pass uh what we call in in math for first approximation what are the characteristics that are going to predict most uh of the wealth variance it's going to be those two variables it's going to be intelligence and conscientiousness will most definitely be the two major things that are going to predict success yeah definitely yeah the it reminds me of the Scandinavian studies that the sort of this question that plagues social scientists of why are there not more women in stem careers that one of the Paradox here is that the more equal you make opportunity and the conditions the the more variation you see in that that ultimate income measure because you have women who are just less inherently interested in stem careers who are going to have just as much intelligence and conscientiousness oh uh science technology math engineering yeah not inherently interested um and uh and so they're less they're because of the Market processes that Doug is talking about they're they're going to wind up as school teachers or as nurses or as something less less well-paid so we can't measure their pure income on their conscientiousness and intelligence because they are in an environment of great opportunity and equality so there's it's really a paradoxical way of thinking of how these things because if you've got free market processes and you have a quality of opportunity you're actually going to see more Divergence in on on measures of something like income than you would expect to uh but but yeah I think it's um there's in political science there's the euphemism is always human capital cross National studies that are looking at what nations are most successful and it's always down to how much human capital they have they're really talking about intelligence they're really talking about you know sort of Baseline conscientiousness much much less and and and institutions that facilitate fair trade and and um you know the process of actually climbing these ladders but that's really that is what it comes down to I tell you what place I'm going to visit one day maybe in the next year just for my sheer entertainment to look at it Liechtenstein okay this place has by far the highest incomes in the world oh it's not even close okay and what we're going to find there is a bunch of high IQ people and a little in a little town of about 40 000 people yeah that all of them are going to be wearing glasses and they all are going to be Germanic Ashkenazi Jewish people and they all are going to be involved in finance and you know they're working for big engineering companies in Germany that's who's walking around so they have high intelligence and this like X Factor of interest in careers that happen to compensate them very well in a free tracking process yeah that's that's really what's amazingly sitting right over there their average income is more than twice that of the United States wow it's not a little bit it's massive yeah and that's just because there isn't anybody of low conscience well there's less genetic diversity there's less inaccurate they're all they're they're all named Dwayne and they all came from [Music] [Laughter] so anyway yes the answer to the question is basically yes yes all right yeah nope nothing there somebody knows an old has an old friend over there there you go you got a hookup uh oh I had two people ask is is a little salt okay in the diet that's a very common question that we get just pleasure travel eyes got it yeah yeah uh yeah a little salt is okay in the diet provided that you personally don't have some help amazing that identified and can understand how precarious that would be so yes provided you don't have high blood pressure problems yeah yeah the uh our general rule of thumb is one milligram per calorie diet and that's that's a very good rule of thumb so uh I'm eating more or less 2 000 calories a day probably so I'm sort of aiming my diet at a couple a couple of thousand milligrams and that's probably where I'm at and uh Alan's at 600 because he's singing and he's he's purest I'm not so uh but yeah that that's the idea it means uh I I have never had a salt shaker anywhere near me no and I've never shaken salt and put it on anything any sodium I'm going to get is going to be at an Italian restaurant in their tomato sauce yeah and so is that going to happen sure but that's I'm not worried about that unless for you specifically you know there's some reason it's a problem yeah yeah okay I'll say the the um go ahead and put in a plug here for my good friend Dylan Holmes who just released if you go to wellyourworld.com um he has a new salt substitute which is called I believe Stardust which is a very cute little name um and it's really similar to uh Benson's table tasty if you guys have had that but better uh and less processed with all the stuff that you wouldn't necessarily want in a salt substitute and no potassium chloride and uh good stuff so go go give Dylan some money yeah there we go good and he has a lot of other great stuff including a um a pancake mix an SOS free pancake mix made out of bananas and oats and everything's SOS free for those people who are care about such things and goes to a great cause which is Dylan and Reeves there you go yeah all right so I think that is that's it we don't have any other pressing questions so yeah we're good yeah fantastic managed to knock the computer down so that's our job is done you got it so thanks for coming everybody we will uh we'll see you next time
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