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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-11-25
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okay I think I am live although it is saying that zero are watching now so I will I will stay tuned for signs of life okay I got one person interesting the okay still says zero are here so that is clearly inaccurate all right well I have no idea how many people are here if I can't trust the analytics what can I trust um so I will just go ahead and get started it's always strange doing this alone um Doug is traveling again this week so I am I'm on my own it was too logistically fraught to try to do a split screen um and it's always very strange because I'm sort of like looking at the chat and talking to myself but I can't hear anything back so it's a strange experience so I have um several questions we always have a huge backlog of questions and then I had a few that came in that are a little timely um and were particularly that we're uh clarifying things that one or both of us have said uh either on the Q a last week or the podcast last week um or uh uh in one case things that Doug said on Chef AJ last week so I just wanted to kind of address some of those things just to get them out of the way um although some of them I will save uh for when he is here either in a q a or when we do the podcast this week so I had a bunch of people like six or seven people write in and ask um for him to clarify his comments that he made I think on the last live q a um uh about uh okay to say and tell people to join the chat so I can see you yes if you're here just join the chat because it still says in my in my view of the thing that nobody is watching so um so last time uh we we were talking about diet and cancer and um Doug mentioned that the the sort of the findings of The China Study are um a little over ambitious in the way that they've been interpreted by a lot of the community where you know I had the same I had the same effect when I read The China Study I was very taken by this conclusion that you know we're turning cancer on and off uh in the lab with these rats and so it's it's not that that is not true the findings of the study are not inaccurate it's just in with time the the applicability of those lab results with a toxin um that that generated mutations in those cells that could be could be treated in the way that Dr Campbell was treating it in the lab the the portability of those results to a more organic process of cancer um and particularly cancer just in general in humans is probably a little bit overstated we don't want to say oh here we have this lab result where we have this aflatoxin generated mutation uh that can be corrected with with you know plant protein versus animal protein and the specific findings to that study I I think this is coming from um an observation that Doug has had at true north and elsewhere and I have had two where a lot of people have this sort of over General interpretation that comes primarily from The China Study and also just sort of Elsewhere in the plant-based world that if you eat a plant-based diet a whole food plant-based diet you you're cancer immune basically and that's we don't have any evidence to suggest that that is true um what is true and and again Doug knows a lot more about this and can speak to this next time we talk um but you know that this is not an argument to not eat a plant-based diet there's certainly is some kind of effect and particularly for certain kinds of cancers so for Digestive cancers in particular um you know diet seems to make a really big difference and we know that a whole food plant-based diet is is generally sort of the best way to go for for everything that might Al you and it is a very clear um it's it's very clearly the evidence-based way to go to prevent and to reverse heart disease so you know if even if that's all that you're getting from it that's good enough reason to to do it in my opinion um and you're certainly not putting yourself at greater risk of of any cancer process by eating a plant-based diet if anything you are improving your odds to some degree just not wholesale like a lot of people um tend to want to believe in this in this Greater Community so that was the point that he was trying to make we also he addresses this very question in the um in the I think the first true north lecture in the membership section on the on the library page um it was one of the questions that he got at one of those True North questions so um you can you can get into more detail there but that was the that was the basic kind of take on that that I just wanted to contextualize for people because I had so many people ask about it um the other thing that has come up a couple of times is he uh again you know I'm speaking for Dr Lyle here and I I wasn't I wasn't there I don't know exactly what he was thinking I haven't discussed this with him but uh on the Q a with Chef AJ he clarifies some coveted comments a little bit and I think some people interpreted something that he said to to mean that he was suggesting that that um kovid was created in a lab um I think that is I think his language was a little imprecise and what he was really trying to say was that the vaccine has been created in a lab I.E they have they have found a a fix for this thing um I think if you go back and listen and carefully it's just sort of a weird mix of languages that he that he used in that moment I I do not believe that that Doug believes that uh that covet is some sort of great conspiracy that was created in the lab to poison the world I'm pretty sure that that is true we can clarify that directly next time we talk to him but um I that's my interpretation of that whole situation so those were the big is there anything else to clarify yeah those were the big questions that emerge just kind of based on on last week there were also some bigger questions about um the uh sort of the politics that we were talking about um some some people that were accusing us of essentially coming from a very privileged position saying that the who is in the white house doesn't matter to practical life outcomes I would say that there are a lot of a lot of ways to respond to those critiques and I appreciate them and I I understand where people are coming from um and but the the specific points I think will will wait for when the two of us are together and we're talking politics again most likely on the podcast this next coming so okay I think that's all the that's all the old stuff so I can go into new questions now I have some some new stuff but um I also if anybody's got anything in the chat that they want to they have any burning questions to bring forward I'm keeping an eye over there too looks like there are oh yeah 25 people here yeah I don't see it's very strange it's not telling me that at all so I will have to trust you guys um all right so if there's nothing anybody wants to bring forward over there I'll just go with some of the some of the stuff that I have um in the backlog so someone someone wrote in and asked um how can you tell if you're a seven or an eight or a nine and so this this might initiate a little bit of a rant on my part because I we get this kind of question a lot um I hear it from clients actually clients will like send me a photo and say oh am I what number do you think I am um and so my my general answer to this is that I made a video about this I made a video called don't let evolutionary psychology ruin your life um and so you can look that up it's posted on the site it's on my YouTube channel um it's on my website and the the gist of it is that I think I think this is a this is a trap that women um women who were drawn to EP are I find them stumbling into this all the time I stumbled into it myself I think there's this kind of you're you find the keys to the universe it's like evolutionary psychology is this this amazing tool to understand yourself and to get this Playbook of human behavior um and you perceive that there are all of these advantages if you understand how things work that make you so much more competitive um and that gets into your head in a really problematic way if you're a certain kind of female and I think most of the women who are drawn to this this community and to this way of thinking about the world are bringing in a fair amount of IQ and they're bringing in a very high amount of conscientiousness and um that combo makes this information um it can it can become distorted in its practical use so you know the you are not a seven or an eight or a nine objectively speaking you have not been stamped at your emergence from the human Factory as any specific number that number is relative to who you're trying to qualify for romantically or or anything else and it's going to vary it's going to vary within 10 or 15 points most generally um depending on who who is who's being consulted to evaluate your attractiveness who your competition is all of all of that kind of stuff so this idea that anyone and I'm assuming that this question came from a woman it may not have I know that men worry about this too but this like in my experience I just see this more commonly from women who get very obsessive like how can I make myself more attractive by these rules of evolutionary psychology because that's all that matters and so it's this very tunnel visiony sort of way of looking at the world um and that is all geared around male feedback and I think there is a fine line and I talk about this a lot in the video a fine line between sort of living as competitively as you can and and enjoying the positive feedback that comes from that specifically to your self-esteem process knowing that you are bringing your best self to the competitive Rumble of life and and getting the um the sort of results that you should expect and deserve from that versus this kind of um this this oppressive living under the male gaze kind of like uh you know I I must do everything within my power to be you know the the 10 that I could be including and up to plastic surgery and everything else that sometimes gets talked about in this community um and that we have talked about on the podcast as well so I always get a little troubled by that and so there's there's all of that and then there's also you know you want to make sure that you're not completely tipping into the other side of things where it's you're in this competitive avoidance space um where you start to get people who who have um you know they're so disgusted by society's Norms that they just they give up on the process and everyone is beautiful Health at every size all of these kinds of Notions which are sort of pushing too far in the other direction because there are very important esteem processes and self-esteem specifically that can only be generated by by being as reasonably competitive as you can legitimately so so this is it's a tough balance um but I just want women in particular who are kind of sucked into the self-loathing that can accompany this um oh you know if I if I have extra weight on me men are thinking that I look pregnant and therefore they would never be attracted to me and my hip waist ratio is all off and and oh I'm I'm over 30 and so I've got the Aging cues and my eggs are dying and no one will ever be attracted to me there's this whole kind of swirling stew of of a process that women can get sucked into behind this way of thinking about attractiveness and about qualification and everything that uh it has been imprinted in The evolutionary psychology World by a lot of men and a lot of men kind of talking in locker room bro kind of ways um and I don't think that is as reflective of reality as it could be so that's just my my rant today um yeah Kate and in the chat is saying the one thing that women can do is be healthy um to bring their their best self forward which is is likely you know you're pursuing that goal and so you're likely to get to a healthy weight in that process um so this is kind of That's The Sweet Spot that we're aiming for you're trying to be the best version of your yourself in kind of a stone age frame that you would be without making yourself insane and crazy and flying around the world for plastic surgery and everything else so that's my that's my little rant about that which just got generated by that question the more practical answer to that question is that you know how do you know if you're seven eight or nine that's just your range you know you're not a two you know and I hate to use these numbers at all but this is this is how the language works and so we we know from David buss's work that beauty is somewhat objective in the sense that if you have photos of a hundred different women and you you have men and women evaluate those photos to put them in order of who is most attractive the those results coalesce around generally the same answer plus or minus 10 so so some people will say oh she is the most attractive of the of the 100 some people will say she's second most attractive some people say she's 10th most attractive but almost nobody is going to say that that particular woman is the least attractive of the hundreds so there's this General agreement on a range so depending on who we're asking you're a seven you're an eight or you're a nine or maybe you're 10 or maybe you're six but you're you're not you know I know that that is that is not as specific and helpful as people are looking for but the world just doesn't work that way we're we're not we're not in a factory with sex dolls okay so let's see what else we've got here uh I don't see any new questions trickling in so what else do I have what else could generate a rant today I'm feeling a little ranty so if you've got questions that are rant adjacent please ask them um oh someone asked about love languages is there any utility to the idea of Love Languages so I I used to really like the whole concept of Love Languages a lot I would use that in my own relationships I think Love Languages um and I I don't even know all of them offhand in case people are unfamiliar I think most people are sort of familiar with the concept you know there's sort of like Words of Affirmation touch quality time acts of service gifts is there are there any that I'm forgetting I think that's most of them um that different the idea is that different people uh Express their affection toward people they're in a relationship with differently and they also receive affection differently from the people that they're in a relationship with so you know some people you can give them a lot of gifts and it doesn't it doesn't feel like love to them the only thing that would really feel like if you're not touching them at all they need to be they need to be touched um so of course there's there's individual difference here and of course something like a pithy little the five is it five somebody who knows more about this should correct me but the the love language is it's it's got the same kind of utility as when we talk about personality tests so something like the Myers-Briggs you've got 16 types and people get very excited about this idea that they're one of these 16 specific types um and it you know of course yes you're probably very similar to that type you probably share a lot of characteristics with with how that type is described and and the traits that are um ascribed to it so I am a I'm a pretty classic ENFP whenever I take the Myers-Briggs test I I reliably test as an ENFP and when I look at the description of that um I share a lot of things in common with how an ENFP is described just like when I look at a description of a Leo which I also am I see a lot of myself in in the Leo description like oh yeah I'm a very I'm a classic Leo but we have all of this confirmation bias that goes along with this so we we are wired to to resonate with the things that we like to believe about ourselves that we see in some kind of description like this and actually later in my astrology career when I was doing a lot of astrology con Consulting even sort of after I didn't really believe in it anymore I still found a very useful personality tool because you you describe someone to them you're like oh well you're a Leo with Aquarius rising and you know mercury in Virgo and so that means that you're you're very outgoing and you care about service to the world and you communicate very precisely and and they come back at you with information that confirms or denies those things that you were telling them are true about themselves so they're like oh well it's very true about wanting to be of service to the world but I don't think I communicate that precisely it it opens up a way for people to um actually articulate aspects of their personality that they might not otherwise have language for or not really be in touch with and so I found it really useful way to just kind of get people into that self-reflective space and I think love languages are exactly the same so if you if you were in a relationship and you were using Love Languages as a heuristic to try to communicate to your partner um about what it is that that you like to receive and what is easy for you to give and what comes naturally and what's more difficult for you it's just a it's an entry into that conversation it's not the sum total of that conversation so I I would not throw Love Languages out completely um because it is speaking to something that is true the fact that you you feel warm and fuzzy when you receive gifts and your partner doesn't really care and doesn't really mean much to receive a gift but spending time with them choosing to spend your time with them does make them feel really warm and fuzzy that's all really useful information and if if a little book like that helps you have that conversation I am totally all for it I just wouldn't I don't want people to think that again they have been programmed by buy their jeans or anything else to oh well I'm a words of affirmation kind of person and so that's just who I am and if you're not giving me words of affirmation then this is never going to work it's it's a tool to have a conversation nothing more really than that um Kate just to clarify with Kate I'm talking about astrology because as a human with a crazy past and a lot of openness in my personality I've been very open with this group that I used to believe in astrology to be very clear I do not believe in astrology anymore um I'm talking about it again as a heuristic and also to give some insight into my into my past and the kind of relationship that I had with it I am not sitting here trying to give you guys astrological advice if that was how that was being taken that is um was definitely not my intent okay let's see what else do we have here Regina's asking any truth to people needing five hugs a day um same thing so yeah some people uh really don't care about hugs some people would be disturbed by getting five hugs a day I think think of this in terms of like um you know I have these two dogs so a lot of you guys know my two dogs or no no of them and one of them is a very uh affection loving likes a lot of touch kind of like likes to be smothered a little bit she just she's she's very touchy uh you try to approach my other dog with that amount of physical interaction and he he freaks out he really just does not want to be like he uh can't tolerate having his belly rubbed he doesn't want you touching his head very much he's much more sort of standoffish um and that's just how they are so so one dog loves a lot of physical affection five hugs a day is not enough hugs for that dog um in Motown it's like no don't hug me I don't want to be hugged and humans are exactly the same so some humans need five hugs a day if you're one of those humans and that's what you need to feel good and secure and happy in your relationship then using something like the Love Languages book and saying hey I'm I'm a physical touch kind of person and so receiving a lot of physical touch is really important to me um it's great it's a great tool but I don't think we could say that humans in general need five hugs a day or two hugs a day or 17 hugs a day or anything like that so um to to put that kind of physical touch on somebody who doesn't want it uh would be experienced as oppressive and this actually this opens up a whole can of worms as far as nature nurture goes so when when Robert Plowman talks about the nature of nurture this is one of the things that he's talking about this is why you can't you you can't say that children grow up in the same family with the same circumstances because they don't because their personality is actually engendering different types of behavior from the parents just like dogs some children are much more physically affectionate than other children some children are constantly coming up and giving hugs and the parents are going to respond with more sort of physical touch with those children than the more prickly children and these are just genetic differences that those kids already have but they they solicit different types of behavior from the parents and so those different types of behavior even in very small subtle ways that's part of what the geneticists call the the non-shared environment that contributes to how those kids turn out so it's a very kind of complicated thing but the the fact that one kid likes a lot of physical touch in one kid does not that did not emerge from the family environment whether it was a physically affectionate home or not those children experience different types of physical affection based on the cues that they were giving those parents um okay so we have a question of how long does it take to wind up food addiction 10 days 20 days one day at a time how long did it take for you um this is uh again I feel like every question sort of has a caveat of there's there's individual differences of course and it depends of course um it depends how far how far down the road you are with this thing it depends kind of how susceptible you are in general um it depends how how much time has passed since you were not in an addictive process with food so as I've talked about with food before you know when we talk about food addiction you're only addicted to food that is um unnaturally concentrated by definition so no nobody has uh food addiction or an addiction to anything that existed in the Stone Age you you really can't become addicted to carrots or to steamed potatoes or to raw kale it just doesn't happen so the more you artificially concentrate a substance the more likely it is to start to start to mess with your dopamine receptors in ways that will initiate a process that looks like addiction so food that has been hyper processed hyper dehydrated has become hyper palatable As you move up the scale of processing you're more likely to have an addictive relationship with that food so um you know instead of a potato you take it you dehydrate it you you grind it up into a paste and you turn it into a Lay's potato chip you would never become addicted to a potato or a steamed potato that lives in your fridge but a a salty oily dehydrated hyper processed potato chip you can totally become addicted to or have sort of a an addictive relationship to it and this this process is going to hold true for anything so anything that is is not really a stone age substance whether it's alcohol or nicotine inner caffeine or cocaine or heroin all of these things as you move up the Continuum of things that have addictive properties it's those addictive properties are coming from the fact that we are not adapted to the signals of pleasure that are generated by ingesting those substances because it wasn't part of our ancestral history we've monkeyed with it we've we've our our modern Technologies of being able to extract these things um have have made it more uh more available more accessible more hyper pleasurable for us to indulge in them um so if you're if you're having a food addiction process what kind of food are you addicted to are you addicted to food that's sort of like one notch up the food addiction scale or are you eating real processed garbage with both hands so it's it's sort of equivalent I mean it's a rough comparison but there's you know it's easier to get off of caffeine than it is to get off of alcohol so like those are both kind of addictive substances but one of them has a tight grip on your on your brain chemistry than the other one I say that as someone who's managed to get off off of alcohol but not caffeine but I I have I have special problems with caffeine so you depending on what sort of food you're eating how much of it how how immersed you are in that dose dependency um how long it's been since you've had a a normal relationship with healthy unprocessed food if you've ever had that relationship with healthy unprocessed food all of those things would matter so I would I would say if I was going to give you a general answer it would be you know uh you're you're probably 80 percent free of the the worst Of The Addictive process within uh a little more than a week probably 10 days 10 days you're like 80 out it's not a linear thing so you're not you're not one percent more free of it every day you're sort of just like alcohol or anything else they're good days they're bad days their days with really the major Cravings there are days that seem really easy but if you've never been you know a lot of people kind of come into this pleasure trap world who have never been completely free of of processed foods so even when they've been eating a really healthy diet they still have a little bit of coconut ice cream or they have a little bit of potato chips or they just there's a little you know once a week they'll go out and have a veggie burger or something and I would say as long as you've got that kind of little drip of processed hyper stimulating food in your in your Universe you don't actually know you don't know what the process is you don't know how long it's going to take you to get free of that immediate withdrawal where your nervous system is just screaming and throwing a giant fit because you took its goodies away you've got to get out of that immediate withdrawal to start to have a fighting chance against it and and for most people that's going to be within one to two weeks uh to to sort of like feel like oh man okay like it's not like super normal food doesn't still sound like a good idea but I'm not I'm not actively fighting the craving in the same way that I was on day one through seven and so I will find this even you know if I've been traveling and I've gotten into some junky vegan food for me it's it's about um my average is about five days it's like around day five I start to feel like okay I actually have some control of the situation here I'm not white knuckling it anymore so I can still walk past uh you know Doug's favorite example is always a Cinnabon so it's not like on day six I walk past a Cinnabon and it doesn't smell good and I don't want the Cinnabon of course I do even though cinnamon rolls are not really my jam that's an example um but it's not exerting the same kind of intense grip on my nervous system I'm not fighting an all-out war against that craving like I am the first week so I hope that makes some sense uh and helps helps answer that um yeah this question about the prefrontal cortex and and emotional control and brain chemistry I actually I saw this last week or whenever you at last asked that question and it's tabled for Doug because Doug is the clinical psychologist in the house who uh knows more about all that kind of stuff and can speak to it more meaningfully than I do I am totally just a I'm I'm a amateur at that literature and I could wave my arms and say some things but I think he he actually is a little more up on that so I didn't miss it the first time it's just on the big list for Doug um okay clinically special considerations in counseling for postpartum depression um no so we we have talked about this before on the podcast I think um and it was actually an interesting question that Doug and I work through thinking about it and so the there there is no greater likelihood of having postpartum than there is for any other kind of depression so the literature the sort of like um conventional wisdom is that this is completely a chemical process and that it just sort of happens you know for some women unexpectedly who were otherwise not susceptible to depression at all and that may be the case rarely that that may like there may be an overwhelming hormonal Cascade that happens um in in some cases but when we really dug into the literature we found that that assumption was not true um and the the generally women who are having postpartum depression are uh women who are likely to have um depressive responses to Changing Life circumstances in general so a lot of that is coming behind their levels of emotional instability um their their other personality characteristics just just like all all of the kind of nature of nurture literature teaches us so the the clinical considerations would not be any different than for any other um any other depressive episode there's sort of like the stepping back and looking at your competitive circumstances in life and uh trying to figure out where those esteem Dynamics have changed and and what inferences you're making about your competitive standing and why that might be generating bad feelings your your system is trying to move you in a different direction that would ultimately uh make you more competitive that that is the process that initiates those feelings of depression and there's nothing in principle that is different about that for postpartum than there is for um for any other depressive episode generally speaking certainly I'm sure there are Exceptions there are always exceptions to everything but uh the the assumption that this is uh completely chemical hormonal process was not borne out when we actually looked at the meta studies on it okay all right so we see anything else uh okay just progress on coveted vaccines alter the prediction on the timeline for being enmeshed in the pandemic um as described in Apollo's Arrow yeah this is interesting so um I was talking a couple of weeks ago about Nicholas christakis's new book Apollo's Arrow where he um you know he if you guys missed that he's this really amazing um multi-faceted multi-trained guy he's he's a public health expert he's a sociologist he's a medical doctor um and he's at Yale and he's looking at sort of social processes and the history of pandemics uh in post-agricultural Civilization and he wrote this book about kovid and sort of what we're in for um and his prediction is that we're in the acute phase until we have a vaccine and or herd immunity depending on how that goes so the fact that we have bumped that up essentially a year we've bumped up his timeline and everybody's estimate of of what that timeline optimistically might look like everybody was sort of assuming yeah at best case scenario we're looking at a vaccine maybe with 30 efficacy by the end of next year that was kind of like the best case scenario um so if it is true that these vaccines are as effective as they look like they are and they can be widely available and they have this effect and of course that changes um that whole trajectory so we're out of the acute period earlier uh we're in that recovery period that he describes for a shorter amount of time for earlier so instead of life going back to normal in the Roaring 20s of 2024 um which was his prediction which made a lot of sense to me according to that sort of timeline then we're looking more at like a 2022 kind of kind of timeline um I think there is a little bit of a risk of uh you know missing missing the lesson that's sort of like oh well you know it was bad but we got the vaccine the vaccine happened really fast and so we've we figured this out you know life has uh science has caught up with the problem of pandemics and civilization and we don't really have that much to fear because oh yeah it's gonna be life's gonna be rough for a year or so um so that would be my new concern is that you know we would sort of have excessive hubris coming out of this whole experience because it was not nearly as bad as it might have been as bad as it is it's um it could have been so much worse easily easily there's no reason that it couldn't have been so much worse such a higher death rate um you know different targeting younger people instead of older people all kinds of different directions that could have gone so uh you know humans have a a tendency toward arrogance and hubris and forgetfulness and um that sort of process would unfortunately I think accelerate the those characteristics in the species I guess that's a you know if you're going to pick your problem that's maybe uh an improvement on the alternative scenario I don't I don't know it's a philosophical question okay let's see what else we got here um what is the Evo psych explanation for why male-dominated societies prevented females from owning property of voting working and generally obtaining resources and why do some men today resent feminism so much uh that's interesting um I think it's it's mostly uh it's might is right so I I don't think there's any uh anything more really complex than that I think it's sort of we're bigger we're stronger uh we've got more testosterone we've got we make the decisions so you little ladies you stay in your place I don't think there's a big philosophy behind that in ancestral history I think it's really just sort of we're bigger and stronger and we take what we want and we do what we want we're more disagreeable on average um you get this combination of physical strength disagreeableness and a very I mean it really gets kind of brushed under the rug a lot of times when we talk about ancestral history and Dynamics between males and females we we have this sort of romantic notion of female Choice Driving mating Dynamics and and that's all very nice but I think that that is a pretty small piece of what's actually going on practically speaking most of the time which is men physically and sexually taking what they want and getting away with it as much as they can you know a lot of rape a lot of kidnapping a lot of a lot of you know BS going on and so to the degree that there is kind of a conspiracy to keep females in their place it's just to maintain the the spoils like this is this is the best kind of situation and so we're gonna we're gonna preserve that as much as we can get it um and so I think that that is the same thing that is driving contemporary resentment of feminism is it's a it's a competitive bid against entrenched structures of power and dominance um I think most political questions kind of just come down to that it's there's there's rarely anything more interesting and complex going on than who's the king of the mountain who's the strongest who's who's the biggest who gets the who gets the most girls and the most gold bars looks like there's a kind of conversation going on here that is not question if your genetic code is the main determinant of your thoughts personality Etc does this imply everyone is in their correct status position relationship in that in that one time um enoki's saying yes essentially uh Sam Harris determinism Free Will Etc so yeah this is kind of a little of column a little of column B definitely you you can find yourself in a situation um with a lot of environmental Distortion that is not reflective of your innate capacity and and the sort of status that you should have relative to that capacity and and who you are as a person so of course you know if you're a you're a child born into really really really really shitty difficult circumstances you're gonna have to fight your way out of that a little harder than a child born to privilege with the same capacity the same abilities um the same drives the same ambition all of that so there there is you you can at any particular slice and time based on external things that are beyond your control you may find yourself pushed into circumstances that are not reflective of where you should be based on who you are and so we can talk about that I think this came up actually when we were um recently there was a question of you know does does income uh your lifelong income reflect IQ or is there a relationship between those two things and in general there is so in general bell curve y speaking population wide there is a strong correlation between uh what political scientists or economists would call human capital of a particular Community or a particular country um and this the sort of Economic Development and the success of that of that country or that Community um because it's conscientiousness it's IQ all of those things are sort of rising to their level over time um in General on average middle of the bell curve there's all kinds of noise at the Tails and a lot of that is being driven by environmental contingent circumstantial crap that's going on in individual lives at any given time and that can be you know oh you happen to be in a country that is at War you happen to be in a family with uh you know parents who are addicts you happen to stumble into addiction yourself like so many different things can derail people from their potential and from their um you know where where we would predict if we had a perfect little genotype of who they are um that they would land in life but over time over the course of people's lives and speaking very generally on average people do more or less kind of wind up where we would predict that they would okay um Bali bali's saying that's the his nickname he's asking the questions okay um Jerry is saying Dr Lyle mentions that those that succeed against the pleasure trap typically have high conscientiousness or high levels of motivation are there ways to actively increase one's motivation yeah so I think of conscientiousness and motivation um being kind of a a teeter-totter so if you if you're looking at the pleasure trap and you're you're trying to get out of it whether it's food or alcohol or cigarettes or coffee or anything if you are naturally a hyper conscientious nutcase it's going to come just more naturally to you it's going to be easier for you to get the rules of the game to read a book like The China Study or to watch Forks Over Knives or to go to the McDougall program or anything else and be like okay got it these are the rules this is what I need to do I'm just gonna stick to the rules and life will be successful from this point on out so if you've got extremely high conscientiousness 99th percentile for the population kind of conscientiousness it's just going to be an easier process us for you if you are more average the the further down you move toward average conscientiousness and I would say that people there's nobody who is a member of this community there's nobody who has watched a lecture on the pleasure trap um or or even really given a second thought to trying to do something about their their weights or an addictive process that they're in unless they're at least average conscientiousness truly low conscientious people I will run into people who who believe that they are low conscientious all the time um low conscientious people are not agonizing over what they look like or how healthy they are or whether they're going to get cancer or have a heart attack they don't care they are like hyper indulgent they are my dog Mellie they are just like hey give me the good stuff life is short YOLO live it up let's enjoy ourselves so those people are not in this community anyway so if you're here and you're asking these kinds of questions we know that you're at least average which means that you're more conscientious than half of the population out there and so if you're closer to average and even up to you know 90th percentile you're you're quite conscientious but you're not hyper conscientious you it's going to be it's going to be progressively harder um for you the more sort of average conscientiousness you are so the the motivation is this Dynamic process where like how bad is it how bad is the alternative what is what is the cost how is the cost benefit process being affected by your inference of where you're going to wind up given a continuation of your current behavior so you know we will we will watch at True North people who are in big trouble you know with their health and they come and they spend thousands of dollars to be there for some number of weeks and they have really good outcomes but as soon as they start you know they finish fasting and they start refeeding you'll see them over at the little store that's right across the street from True Northbound how does like this happens all the time you see this all the time this is a testimony to the power of the pleasure trap and and so maybe those people you know they're at a point in their life where yeah it's bad they've got some kind of bad inferences on on what their current behavior is going to get them in the long term but maybe it's just not quite bad enough yet so they're like yeah you know I'm Gonna Keep kind of enjoying myself until and unless I get an even worse diagnosis so somebody who's in their 40s who goes to the doctor and the doctor's like you know pretty worried about your blood pressure you're looking pre-diabetic you got some signs of you know erectile dysfunction early heart disease process like you know you really got to get your [ __ ] together that person if that person is working with 70th percentile conscientiousness that set of bad news from that doctor is probably not enough to generate the sort of motivation to compensate for that lower conscientiousness but in 10 years after after their first heart attack it might be if if they if they're right at that point where the inflection changes where suddenly the the cost of continuing to do the indulgent behavior is higher than the you know the the benefit of uh the pleasure that is achieved from those behaviors and you've got this looming diagnosis that they're really in trouble that little pivot point is going to exist for every individual and you can't really predict it ahead of time and of course for some people it never really it never sets in you know my father was one of those people he was dead at 60 from we're not sure exactly what sort of cardiovascular event um actually did the deed it was either a heart attack or a stroke but you know lifelong smoker dealing with throat cancer had the trait continued to smoke uh continuing to eat absolute crap food with both hands um continued to continue to drink so this was a guy who was you know hemmed in on all sides by the pleasure trap had all kinds of reasons you know um personal reasons professional reasons health reasons his motivation should have been incredibly High um to get his act together and to to change his behavior and he was not super low in conscientiousness the guy had you know he's an award-winning journalist he had hustled really hard to find some success in life um but the pleasure trap was too powerful for him uh you know coming in from drugs alcohol cigarettes food um everything so you cannot predict where that point between motivation and conscientiousness really is where it's going to shift to change someone's behavior all you can do is take it one individual case at a time and worry about your own particular situation and what particular blocks you have that are standing in the way like where why is your motivation not sufficiently high to take the sort of action that you would need to take so the I mean the second part of that question you know what um can you increase your motivation you can definitely like stay in touch with the with the reasons that you want to change your behavior so some people will say that this is your your why you know and for me with my biggest battle with pleasure trap which was alcohol uh one of my biggest tools and I will tell clients this all the time if they're struggling with alcohol or to some degree with food was that I made myself little videos when I was hungover so I would I would wake up hungover is all hell hating myself like I cannot believe I just did that again I cannot believe how badly I am messing this up and I would make myself a little a little Vlog and like hey get your act together this is this is the reason that you need to change your behaviors because remember how you feel today remember how this feels remember the shame the self-loathing the physical sickness everything that accompanies the the this is where it goes for you when you engage in this behavior and there were many many times in early recovery when I was you know sort of on the the precipice of a relapse where I would go back and watch those videos and I'd be like Whoa man I look like [ __ ] like that is really like that's I was able to kind of get back in touch with what it felt like to have that that moment where you're like enough because again we are very forgetful we have this really amazing ability to only remember good things and only like get get away from all the all the bad reasons that we wanted to do this really difficult process of getting out of out of the pleasure trap which I mean let's not let's not be confused getting out of the pleasure trap means that you are going against Instinct that's what people really need to understand is that the pleasure trap is Instinct it's really really really strong Instinct it is it is every single one of your ancestors survived because they had the pleasure trap Instinct and they acted on it very effectively so you inherited that ability to gravitate toward really exciting hyper stimulating substances in food and so this is not something faulty about you this was the reason that your genes have been successful up until this point so for you to turn your back on that is for you to be fighting the strongest impulse that you have in your cells to to do the right thing um and so it's it's not it's not going to be an easy process so the only thing that can really change motivation is apart from some kind of external sanction some sort of like you know you keep doing this you're going to be dead in six months sort of edict from a doctor um or you know people's motivation will organically change if they uh if a family member goes through a really difficult process and they don't want to go through that um if they uh you know they watch some movie star go through some process all kinds of things can kind of hammer on those circuits a little bit but really it's an inside game with your own your own perceptions and your own changing cost benefit analysis based on doing really difficult things that we are not at all wired to do okay let's see what else we've got here yeah pain pain is the ultimate motivator write out your big why yeah these are these are really the only ways to kind of hack that process to the degree that it can be hacked but um yes very very difficult stuff [Music] yeah record yourself reading your Big Y and your big why not um yep that's that was basically what that those videos were for myself so whether you want to make videos whether you want to just Journal it I I found for me the problem was that I I wasn't remembering how bad how costly the behavior really was um because I was suddenly presented with you know going out on a date and I was like well let's share a bottle of wine on a date like what could be so wrong about that so in order to fight that instinct and that compulsion to go toward that very pleasurable substance because I was full of justifications for all of the reasons that it wasn't that bad of an idea the only thing that could be a little check against that was was going back and sort of like re-experiencing how miserable and how how upset with myself and how disgusted my internal audience was with me after I did that and and so in 12 step they call that playing the tape all the way through you know it's like well where does this take us tomorrow morning where do I feel tomorrow morning how what what kind of report card am I going to get from my internal audience if I do this thing um and the making a video for me was a shortcut to uh getting getting that process D distorted very important in early early recovery I love the rant I'm just super ranty today so really like you got 10 more minutes to just you know hashtag triggers like get me get me upset I'm I'm maybe it's PMS I don't know what's going on but yeah I'm I'm ready to rant um I don't see any other let's see what else I have in here so I've got other questions kicking around people recommending Sam Harris I'm a big Sam Harris fan um he's he's a complicated character it's been really interesting to watch him wrestle with his uh his somewhat um distorting loathing of of trump he's he's really um but I think I think Harris brings a lot of very good perspective to these conversations and you know he's a champion of meditation too which I know we we can sometimes um this is one you know people ask one of the most common questions I get is like what what do you and Dr Lyle disagree on one of the things we disagree on is meditation so I have actually really benefited from meditation practices and mindfulness practices in my past um and I continue to use them and I find when I do not use them I am much more likely to get in situations where evolutionary psychology starts to ruin my life it's it's all about making you know the all of the cliches are really accurate you sort of are making friends with your mind you're becoming acquainted with how nor noisy it is up there and how much garbage is getting churned out all the time because you know in one sense our thoughts are not random they're not they're not um being generated from some process in the sky that has nothing to do with what's going on with our life like they they are that is our nervous system is trying to help guide our Behavior into in more competitive directions that is fundamentally what's going on but that project that that process is subject to a lot of distortion so particularly if you've got um a really distorted nervous system really distorted personality if you're not very emotionally stable um if you're very agreeable or very disagreeable like these these sorts of things can introduce a lot of noise into all of the all of the feedback that is coming into your head to try to change your behavior and so becoming more of a um a Discerning audience of of what thoughts are being generated by your mind and which have validity in which maybe do not which are more reflective of the Distortion and less of the reality in front of you I think that's a really essential process for people to go through if they find themselves imprisoned by negative thinking and um and a lot of anxiety and all kinds of different things and so something resembling just a basic meditation practice and for me the way I was trained was that it was it was very basic meditation very basic um mindfulness focusing on the breath kind of meditation so there was no big visualization no big mantras nothing fancy just sitting there coming back to the breath coming back to the breath coming back to the breath um and I really I think that is a tried and true technique to um give perspective in a chaotic monkey mind that is really really useful for certain kinds of personalities I don't subscribe at all to the idea that it changes your brain um that you're you're gonna have some sort of long-term um you know neurological shift through the use of these techniques I don't believe that that is at all what happens other than the the changes in your brain that happen through any kind of learning process so your brain has changed you you develop new neural connections every time you learn anything anytime you read the newspaper anytime you watch an episode of The Bachelor or anytime I've been I've been indulging my reality TV habit with the new uh the new Bachelorette as you guys know I have a weakness this was a particularly exciting cycle The Bachelorette a lot of drama we could talk about that if you want but so it's that all creates new neural connections it changes the brain so when you see these big exalted headlines meditation changes the brain it's changing it in the sense that you are becoming um a more Discerning more aware audience of your own process but you're not you're not um you're not fundamentally changing your personality there's there's sort of a lot of uh exaggeration and overstating of things that go in there but I do think it is an incredibly helpful process that can benefit a lot of nervous systems maybe not everybody but certainly mine um okay what else do we have okay uh avoid trying to tell what is a chat between you guys and what is the question uh why do my dad uncle and brother brag to me so much about their toughness success abilities Etc when I am not mate material for them they're rehearsing they're just rehearsing they are um as as Doug likes to use the phrase they're wood shedding they're trying they're trying out with a female audience who's kind of a proxy for a potential mate like how does the female brain respond to this sort of brag bragging you know does does this seem to work or not or like does this you know how how well is this received so you are a slightly better focused group than their internal audiences um and they will yeah you will see this kind of behavior all the time men men who are not interested in a female at work um you know will still use her as a focus group for their mating mating display Behavior dudes yeah what are you gonna do um yeah meditation link to being able to pause more between stimulus and response that's totally what it does for me um the the uh metaphor I always use is if you've seen the movie The Matrix when he cut when Neo kind of figures out how it all works and he's able to stop and pause and watch the bullets flying toward him and he sort of like has this moment where you can kind of pick the bullets out of the sky and not be hit by them that is truly what it feels like when I'm in a regular meditation practice I instead of having that hyper reactivity to changing vicissitudes in life I have this little buffer that gets it's like I'm walking around with a little a little bumpers around me where I have a moment to consider my response to something in this very subtle way that does not happen if if I'm not regularly meditating and practicing that ability to not be super reactive to the first thing that comes into my head this is such an important thing for people who are um on the less emotionally stable side too because what what instability is is you are you're reacting to every potential permutation of of a shifting um cost-benefit analysis based on too much information so you're you're running little inferences all the time on oh but oh there's that thing over there and this but that that piece of information is also relevant and so what would I do if I did that and oh but oh that change and oh she just rolled her eyes at me so maybe I need to shift this way it's like you're taking in so much information and it's driving so many um commands from the command center to alter your behavior that you feel this kind of like overwhelming noise in your head and so to be able to develop that ability to kind of like stand back and listen for the loudest voices you know the sort of like instead of getting overwhelmed by the fact that it's just really noisy just to kind of take a moment and be like what's true in there um that's a really just a very valuable technique for people my standard response to men in my life practicing is good for you yes that's not a not a bad one all right what else do we have looks like a lot of just kind of conversational stuff but we're almost at an hour I don't think I have any other questions that would be three-minute questions I have some really big questions [Music] yeah these are all too big everything I've got sort of stashed is is saved or it's or it's Doug specific so um if that's it we can just kind of wrap it up uh so the rant window is closing you guys but it was really great I'm glad you guys are able to come today and um I'm sorry it's just me we will figure out the logistics next week um it won't be Vimeo because Vimeo is just one camera um so we'll have to probably do Zoom again um but uh that's fine should should work anyway um and yeah okay so sounds good you guys um I really appreciate it have a really good day go out there and meditate enjoy enjoy your afternoon um and I definitely do not believe in astrology just to be really clear I know I have this Legacy of my openness and my new ageness and I don't I don't want people holding that against me it got my agreeableness all stirred up um okay people are asking when is the next one we try to do these on the off weeks when I don't do when we um when we don't have a new podcast episode so there will be a new podcast episode this coming Wednesday which means next q a will probably be a week after that so all right happy Happy Thanksgiving for those who are celebrating and I'll talk to all of you guys soon bye
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