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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-01-31
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foreign looks like we've got a couple people here oh [Music] I got my my laptop's giving me all kinds of craziness all right all right if people can hear us go ahead and let us know in the chat so we can see or yes yes we can hear oh fabulous all right okay awesome it's working that's a miracle yeah I know yeah it's with little difficulty only only a small amount of expected difficulty okay so first time live hi Beth it feels like a miracle yay snowing oh my goodness yes it is no it's snowing dandelion seeds sorry about that it's really nice it's like not too hot it's like very very just perfect human temperature out here so got it um why is Doug in short sleeves and I'm in Long uh I was cool I have stronger AC in my room so I think I have been chillier but I'll probably warm up now that I'm outside but it's cool it's freezy yeah yeah I'm just inherently a little tougher [Laughter] I wouldn't survive we're in Alaska where much less build my own yurt out of the middle of it for God's sake there's a really thin sweater too yeah I did people yeah just uh before we when we could just we could just chat we don't have to do a q a we could just gossip um I I have gone through many phases through openness in my life and one of them was a tiny house phase and I I built a tiny house of I mean it's being generous to call it a tiny house it was a shed it was a glorified shed a wooden box um in my grandma on my grandmother's property a few years ago all by myself with some YouTube tutorials and uh Home Depot delivery so in Alaska in Alaska without central heat or an air yeah although I didn't make it living in the that thing past October it was like late October and I was like yeah I think I need I need to find some actual heating so um but yeah and I tried to build a tiny house in Colorado but that didn't work very well that's a whole other story so too high to High Country it was very high very windy very windy so this is Wendy to me yeah you know if you have to just think a little bit about shaping your golf shot yeah it's too much wind that that Alpine Valley I was in in Colorado that that's like it's like the highest occupied Alpine Valley in the world I think it's like 8 000 feet or something crazy and um the wind there was it was like the kind of wind that made the the women on the American Prairie go insane and and kill their family yeah yeah it was really really intense okay so I I don't see where we have official questions here okay okay all right we've got oh this is a long question um okay so Kara says I have a question about being a secret agent uh I understand what Dr Lyle said I work with low income uneducated Elders who never had much to eat when they're growing up to gain their trust I have to make small talk so usually the conversation uh goes something like Elder says how old are you I say I'm 45 Elder says I'm 72 and have diabetes many people around here have it I have to take good care of myself and watch what I eat at this point I don't know how to answer back do I still act like a secret agent knowing what I know I just can't get my past myself and I feel guilty as hell do I say oh yes eat healthy then move on it seems like I'm lying to them not telling the truth I know they are not soliciting health information for me how would you handle this situation yeah this is a I mean she's working where is this low income and mostly uneducated elders um yeah you're not going to have any impact uh on their dietary choices seedingly unlikely uh if you wanted to you could take one one the the tiniest of drive-by shootings to tell them that something that they might want to eat uh that uh it would actually be a perfectly good thing for them that would include like potatoes with butter on them that's probably better than what it is that they're eating in other words you you uh and they might say oh no they say I can't have potatoes because I have diabetes you say no no actually you can um so or something else pasta rice um we're trying to give them in 15 seconds the idea that they can eat some wet starches we don't call them starches we call them potatoes or rice and beans okay uh if they if they give you any cross-examination about that we say well those are traditional foods okay the uh those uh All Peoples have eaten rice and beans those are traditional foods around the world okay that's it you're done you're not telling them any any more than that um and the the odds that you will cause any of those individuals to ever have any rice and beans is less than five percent but at least you said it okay the um but no you're uh there's no let me put this in context for you highly intelligent people that are super motivated that have read three times more books than you've read on the subject or that I've read on the subject get on an airplane cancel their trips to the Bahamas fly to the McDougall program and it's a couple shell out 12 to 15 thousand dollars that that's that's not counting the plane flight okay and then the Uber ride from the airport and there they have for 10 days they have me John McDougall Anthony Lim Jeff Novick and Mary McDougall and and uh at least the great chef Kathy what's her name that takes place and what is our success rate so careful okay well they may not know the success I mean sort of the success rate is not great folks like it's not great no it's uh yeah probably nobody exactly knows we certainly have some successes but I think how do you define success right how do you define success and uh if we looked back three years from now uh and found out what had happened we're gonna find the majority of people have regressed right back to where they started these are extremely bright unbelievably motivated people who've played enormous prices uh in order to do this this isn't a fad for them this is a lifetime you know commitment we're still going to have the majority of them fail so uh we like to call it not failing they're preparing for Success the next time they take a run at this three years from now so yeah just go ahead and be a secret agent there's no no reason for you to uh uh to be feeling that that there there is the person that you could have saved if only you took the 20 minutes and really given it your best shot um that's uh that's a waste of your time and energy uh if if anybody has any little spark of intelligence uh and any particular method to try to get themselves more information then for for goodness sakes be willing to tell them to watch a movie called Forks Over Knives okay that that let let that movie do you're educating for you that movie can do a way better job than you could do with six months of preparation so uh that's another thing that you could do but basically keep this in mind that if you know the right direction for yourself that's the most important thing that you ever figured out for yourself so uh the second most important thing is don't don't try to tell the world that's that's that's going to give you some personal emotional brain damage okay all right just cause you a lot of stress she adds that uh by the way she has plant-based teaching credentials from from Dr Bernard and Ann Campbell's organization and it's her birthday today so let's make sure a happy birthday happy birthday very good Aquarius in the house one of my it's one of my best friend's birthdays today too um she says thank you I don't have any friends anymore since I switched over to Whole Foods right now well maybe this year we get one and that's how it goes that's pretty much how it goes okay um all right so Dan says I think he's he's next here I've heard that exercise is like a natural antidepressant I'd like to hear more about the effect of cardio and mental health and well-being is there a different effect between moderate and vigorous cardio I don't I I most of the time when you when you see effects for anything with respect to exercise uh it's gonna turn out that that moderate gets almost all of the uh uh gets almost all of the good that ever gets done and and there are non-trivial effects of more excessive exercise in terms of injury so more is not necessarily better at all in terms of the antidepressant effects I I have a feeling that that what you're seeing is is that you're seeing some um a lack of ability for people at this moment in time to actually do an analysis of the of the causal effects there so I I think that one of the problems is is that um that probably mood regulating mechanisms are are handicapped if you are sedentary that's different than saying that exercise is an antidepressant it's uh it's that doing nothing uh physically uh is potentially disturbing to mood regulating mechanisms so in other words you have an exercise deficiency uh whereas so I think that that that is a that's one aspect of this um I think it's a non-trivial aspect to it by the way so the um and in fact that may be the entire effect uh in undoubtedly in some people the uh that would be like saying sleeping more as great beneficial effects for your mental functioning it's like now is sleeping deficiency has harm for your mental functioning okay so that's how a lot of things work yeah like vitamin C vitamin D right zinc you know all these things that are sort of you know have these these great improvements for health outcomes it's only because most people have this deficiency going into it into these studies and so once they come up to Baseline there's actually no advantage in going to higher and higher levels they've just not been getting what they should be getting so I don't remember I was just trying to find the um um uh Dr Greger at nutritionfacts.org has has a video of course there's always a video where he looks at the looks at the literature about sort of exercise being as powerful an intervention for depression as antidepressants which is which means nothing because antidepressants are not antidepressants are not effective right so the uh so but but the mechanism may also be that people are just not getting any exercise at all at all so yeah I don't I can't remember how it all how the studies right I've heard that quoted and I I knew in immediately the [ __ ] meter went up in my head because uh the the antidepressants quote Effectiveness studies are bogus yeah so uh well I believe that uh you you could have some ancillary benefits uh I think that possibly I mean uh one issue I'm not sure could just be essentially essentially just uh you know the cardiovascular function sure that that people are not very sharp mentally they feel a little bit tired they feel a little bit sluggish uh they are they're not getting that good of perfusion uh through all of the little capillary beds all over your brain and so uh you could feel a little out of it because you have not done something that would be the equivalent of sleeping fully okay so uh your your nervous system was designed to function under certain conditions those conditions included moderate regular daily exercise so if we subtract that out of the equation I'm not surprised if we we have some degree of uh compromise and if we put it in the equation I'm not surprised that it would improve uh only behind the the eradication of the deficiency so that's what I think this story is uh so but if you're depressed about some big thing that went down in your life uh and and your your go going through breaking up or business failure or a demotion at work or a promotion that you didn't get I doubt very seriously whether exercise is going to do anything about that those are those are information processing cost benefit analytic derivatives that are causing those feelings they are not some um biochemical process in your brain that is that is artificially depressing you all other things being equal now I don't know might so that there can be some potential self-esteem boost that comes from doing uh the exercise that that is uh that that is helpful for people it certainly I think it's true for me if I ever work out which is like never all I ever do is go play well you go you go perfect your shot I work on my shot it's more than most people do that's right the point is is that once in a while I'll actually do something physically vigorous there's a feeling of accomplishment yes there's a little feeling of accomplishment but uh it it it's not it's not gonna enough to to get over the girl that just dumped me for an hour all right so it definitely can give you a nice little temporary lift for sure yes I think there is but I think a lot of that is just the sort of yeah it's the self-esteem that comes from sort of doing a difficult thing yes and and proving to yourself that you just push through your self-imposed limits and yeah you did it so yeah all right that's good yeah good good hikes are always good for that um okay so this is I wonder what the details here my husband and I have never successfully argued I think maybe that means they only unsuccessfully argue until recently I did not realize his pattern of lying lying line and then exploding with a tirade of absurd accusations was a pattern of a personality disorder is there any way to break this pattern yeah um let's see pattern line lying that well I mean I don't think that we actually have enough specifics uh you know in order to help you here the um somebody is is lying because they uh the the deception is a an important tool in order to try to um essentially deal with trades that we feel like we are powerless to to to deal with straightforwardly and so uh a lot of times very nice people do a lot of lying a lot of times really nasty people do a lot of lying okay and the problem is you can't they're not all floating under the same Banner the uh the process is to get more out of an exchange than than the other person would be willing to pay okay that's that's the point of it the um so remember so if there's a bunch of lying going on it's because in in that of his he's thinking that that EFT were to trade straight up with you about the truth you would consider it unfair and then then and then he wouldn't be able to continue uh to to to trade in a way that has you at a disadvantage of not knowing what's going on uh when you Corner him about this uh and then he explodes of what you're finally seeing is the frustration of the anger where he feels like he's been operating under a trade that has been unfair and all he's tried to do is even It Out by being deceptive okay and which means that we're we're not uh we're not at the at the place where he feels uh comfortable enough to negotiate with you straight up there's uh one or two reasons for that you're you're difficult to negotiate with and therefore his his best move as far as he can tell is to be deceptive or he's inherently problematic personality wise he does like to play honest yet he likes to try to Chisel in ways that are deceptive to to try to get a better deal for himself um so that's the analysis of quote this pattern okay is there anything to break the pattern um probably the most obvious thing would be to um you know there are areas about which you're disagreeing there are domains money cheating you know uh uh what he's spending money on wine and cigarettes behind behind your back he's doing whatever it is there are conflicts of interest domains you know what they are you know what the inherent conflicts are and you know that you guys have bunkered yourself into your silos and your negotiating positions and so he's maneuvering around as your negotiating position by being deceptive is what's happening so uh what their uh the solution to the pattern is to have the the courage and patience to go crystal clear to try to understand why he thinks what he is doing is fair and for you to to try to keep questioning them so that you can feed back to him uh his logic as to why he thinks it's fair and then you could share with him why you think you know where it is that you disagree and then you can openly negotiate a compromise if you can if you can okay if you can't guess what you've got a the irresistible Force meets the immovable object and we have a conflict of interest that's not going anywhere so we're going to get this recurrent pattern and it will never leave so the the solution to the pattern uh is to find out whether or not we have a conflict that we can actually negotiate and resolve and then live with it rather than living with the deception and the fighting does that make sense in a chronic conflict I think that you know this is sort of um my my uh if some people have heard me talk about John gottman before so gottman is the sort of the pioneer of the Seattle love lab he's this you know he's sort of well well documented and pop psychology um for he's the he's the guy who's famous for being able to observe and a couple arguing and predict with with 95 certainty if that couple's gonna get divorced in the future or not so he's really kind of looking at the symptom more than the cause so we shouldn't give him too much credit for his his all-knowing powers um but he does have a couple of good insights and a couple of good techniques that I I like a lot you know he's he's he's got you know he's 37 on target with his recommendations even though he's got some stuff that I definitely would disagree with and I know you would too but one of the observations he makes about couples is that there's um you know everybody has conflicts in their sort of resolvable conflicts and unresolvable conflicts and every couple is going to have some set of unresolvable conflicts that they sort of recurringly uh get into it over and it doesn't mean that you like resolving you're never going to resolve the conflict but you can come to this detaunt around it where you both acknowledge that it is not resolvable and there really is no compromise other than both of you sort of acknowledging this is not really resolvable because you're both your personality uh attributes have essentially prevented it's it's um like he's a major extrovert and wants to go out all the time and you're an introvert and you never want to go out that's not really resolvable in the sense that either of you is going to change who it is that you are and what you prefer and how how you prefer to design your social life um but you can come to an agreement with sort of Good Will and honesty in this Crystal Clear process that we're talking about where you just kind of agree to disagree on it and say hey we're different people we have different preferences and ever we have all this other overlap in our lives and and everything else is great so we're just going to kind of live with this um and so this is whatever it is that you're sort of recurringly having this argument about you need to identify first if it is a resolvable situation that you can come come to some compromise and resolve and if it's unresolvable and you're getting this personality driven Dynamic that is really kind of unpleasant and crappy to deal with then you have to deal with that on its own terms I think beautiful yeah yeah a partner that's right right on we got it we gotta borrow from the pop psychologist sometimes you know they're not all wrong it's not a pop psychologist he's not he's he's dude yeah um and he's uh you know he has some tools that we use all the time I mean he doesn't call them by the same names but um I really like uh you know Chris our version of crystal clear he would call sort of the the relationship State of the Union or uh you know the sort of structured conversation for both of you to come in lay down your arms you know and like let's just kind of figure out where we're at with everything yeah I call that playing against the house yeah in other words the uh the house is like the house in Vegas and the the uh it's gonna take its it's gonna take its rake and our best way is to try to the two of us play against the house the house is our evolutionary design that wants to get the upper hand and get more out of the exchange we're in inherently designed with with a chip in there that wants that that feels like we're getting a little bit chiseled and therefore we want to Chisel back and there's going to be deception and anger or going to be tactics that people are going to use in relationships in order to try to uh chisel their way to a little bit better advantage that is a that's a threat in all relationships and so we want to try to as best we can play against the house and that means the two of us collaborate and share our cards so that we can figure out of the cards that we have how can we optimally make the best hand against it right that's that's the that's it's the two of you against the problem not not you you are the problem yeah so and that's a very important distinction to make and a lot of these kind of that recurring conflictual Dynamic that you're describing almost always takes the second form where it's you are the problem you know I am innocent I am being wronged and you are the reason that I like this is all screwed up and if that's characterizing the conflict you're in trouble um that's that's one of that's what he's gottman's gonna call some of the horsemen are showing up sort of the criticism and defensiveness and contempt and all of that nasty very good so excellent we can we can get into that another time but you guys if you're interested in his stuff he has you know books on Amazon and everything that are that are useful to to a point we're more useful yeah um all right what else do we have this is interesting so this person is saying she's a grown woman with young young adult children a spouse in a career why do I care that my family two parents and two siblings do not acknowledge my achievements I've lost over 100 pounds become an athlete regain my health I've changed my life my family members are usually supportive but I can't get a positive peep out of them and I it hurts my feelings why do I care so much well let's look about this it's interesting that that's true and the we have to understand that uh first of all it's not your family you have individual relationships with individual people and so maybe your mother maybe your father maybe your brother or your sister those those relationships are all uh independent you know processes and so now we have to look at those processes and see what is the nature of the esteemed signaling that's going on between you and each of those individuals and the um and so it's quite possible that we are that we're in a the same kind of chiseling Dynamic that we just talked about that that there could be esteem conflicts between you and those individuals and that they have there could be a reason why they chiseled you before any of this that they were feeling esteem deficient or that they were being undervalued by you uh you could feel like you were being undervaluated by them you you feel that deficiency and it and it's hard on you then you go out and you solve some of the problems with great effort and and conscientiousness in order to improve your general esteem cachet in the world whether it's career or weight loss Etc uh and then you lay that down in front of them and you say well let's have my 25 increase of esteem signaling from you and the truth is is that you are already in a bad esteem Dynamic and that just made it worse okay so the um so the way to think about this is is that um that that esteem is a these are in Cycles so Jen and I have spent uh We've now known each other for about five years I don't know that we've ever been in anything other than a virtuous cycle okay I think occasionally I'll make an off-color sexist comment and it'll we'll watch her we'll watch her hit the reverse for a second and bite me only when it's really bad my tolerance is pretty high but uh but the truth of the matter is is that we we uh those are like those are like uh uh oh I don't know those are those are conditioned reflexes from your ears in the ivy league like oh you can't say that but the point is oh no there's actually deeper truth there's like grievances against the patriarch okay which which are ancestral and in my genes intergenerational trauma right that's what it is so but the point is is that in in 10 seconds it shifts back to a virtuous cycle so so we've spent it's been virtuous cycle virtuous cycle virtual cycle now there's uh I can think of other relationships in my existence which are not so smooth but they don't just sit in a virtuous cycle there's that you can feel a competitive Dynamic and you can feel that if you win they feel like they're losing and then they send that same signal back a lot of relationships it's it's that's why it's like uniquely beneficial for both of us yeah it's a really good Dynamic it's like rare to find friends or or work Partners or romantic Partners sometimes family and and often families yes yeah so the uh there's nothing that in principle makes them more obligated to have that virtuous Dynamic with you it's not any more likely than it is with anybody else it's all comes down to personality traits and so so yeah we sort of have this expectation that we we are owed more from our family members in terms of that esteem feedback um than they are necessarily capable of giving so yeah yeah so particularly if you're improving your life and sort of you know uh hitting on some little competitive right yeah crap but I would say in answer to this question that uh individual by individual in the scheme that you're looking at you need to think about anything that they're signaling to you or trying to brag you or leverage to you about something that they're that they're feeling like they're deserving of more esteem than you've been signaling to them uh you may have been just as chintzy with them as they have been with you sure and so as a result you've been in an inherently conflicted Dynamic that is not a virtual Dynamic it may not be a vicious cycle but it can be essentially a we don't have a word for that where it's a it's essentially neither virtuous nor vicious it's essentially oscillating okay but it's momentarily virtuous and then it's then it winds up being vicious and it goes back and forth in other words it's not super comfortable and it's not super warm and it's not super supportive there's always this underlying sort of competitive tension and um and so as a result of that one of the things that you can do is you can take inventory on like the way I would do it if I was counseling you so I'd say well we can run an experiment let's take the person of the group of four that we like the best person that we you know if if the other three you know got lost on the river which is the one that would be the most valuable but UV the happiest survive okay all right so the point is all right let's take that one and let's try to figure out where what is it they're proud of and that they are that they are essentially trying to signal to us how valuable they are because of this or that achievement and then let's run an experiment and and essentially consider how we're going to give them positive feedback right on top of that particular concept okay just we'll put our thumb right on the scale right there and uh so it could be with my sister it's like you know Margie I I just wanted to tell you I've never really explained to you how how proud and happy I am that you're such a [ __ ] I was gonna say where are you going with this because I can see Margie getting very suspicious if you started I'm so proud of her she'd be like what do you want right right as soon as I said that she'd be all delightful I'm a [ __ ] yeah I am a [ __ ] yes that's right I'm so I'm so glad you're acknowledging that okay so the uh she's pretty tough dug out all the sweetness and that and that that distribution yeah so anyway oh it is something like that and so the and and see what happens because it turns out that they they may be a a amazingly willing to start reciprocating and move that into a virtuous cycle with you yeah so you may be able to discover some you may be able to harvest some esteem if we don't get so so stingy with our own fertilizer okay so that's one thing that you could do if it turns out that that sort of tactic doesn't work then our attitude is hey you know once you've done what it is that would be reasonable that you could do to remedy the situation which would be to look for legitimate ways to signal to them that you esteem them so that we can see if we can move this thing into a virtuous cycle if you do that for a year with some imagination and some good will and you get nothing but crap back then at some point it's like well maybe they're not worth the investment okay so we you have to you have to uh and back off your investment and use the concept of the disagreeable distance and so that if they're that annoying status a stingy family then they can be one-third of the Annoying status sinji family that they are right now so to the point where it is that it's less less disturbing so that's how that's how I would look at that problem any other thoughts on that or is reasonable yeah no it reminds me there's this sort of this truism in the New Age World which I spend so much time you know but sometimes you have tourisms in the New Age world that really resonate deeply because they have overlap with us sort of and one of them is you know what what it is that you are wanting to receive from other people you must be willing to give to them so so often if we're if we're feeling we're sort of in this scarcity mode around yeah you're not giving me any positive feedback for everything I've accomplished because you're feeling so that scarcity and that sort of you get very possessive around whatever little bit you have you're less likely to give it back and initiate this virtuous feedback cycle that we're talking about where if you were just to give a little bit that makes them feel safer and letting go of a little bit of theirs and then you get this this wheel rolling yes where suddenly you're both like feeling really good and you it's like oh this is a safe enough relationship where we can both complement the other person and and you know root for them without feeling like we're giving up something that is protecting our own safety and our own status in our turn and I've always found that to be so true like every time this is one of the uh the things that happens um you know we've talked in other other episodes and other Q A's about how alcohol is sort of this this has greased the wheels of human civilization um and allowed uh conflicts of interest to be resolved in ways that they might not have otherwise been so easy to resolve and one of the things anyone who's ever had a few with somebody that you were you had some tension with some Frenemy um if you have a few and you kind of get to the Zone it's like I don't know know why I act like this with you because I just think you're great and they're like I think you are great and everybody's sort of like oh I feel so relieved now I can I can let go of all of this withholding scarcity driven I didn't want to tell you how proud I am of you um and it just opens that whole energy up so so I'm not saying you have to drink to get there you certainly don't but you can mimic that process by by taking the risk of of you know giving giving a little bit of status to get more status from them um I think that is often often the case with these sorts of things yeah you can just sniff the Stone Age hierarchical Dynamics and these things whereas if I if I give if I give a competitor a compliment and they either hear it or the world hears about it then it costs me right because now now I've exposed myself there's one less compliment they have one more compliment in their stack than I do yeah and I gave it to them okay the truth is is that there you can just imagine a bunch of you know a bunch of senior directors or a bunch of Vice Presidents around the table with the CEO and nobody wants to give anybody else an inch of credit they can't afford it okay and so it makes them less relevant and important to the the whole Enterprise but what you what you can't believe and this is Village politics is that the the smartest move you ever make is to uh is the person who's probably aiming the most directly at coming after your status uh if they have any entire at all the first chance you get you that they earned some Kudos you give it to them and you give it to them openly and relaxed in a relaxed and honest fashion you just change their Dynamic with you forever okay suddenly they realize whoa you're more benefit than you are cost your cost is a threat but you're more benefit because you are actually willing to handicap yourself and give me some credit that it was actually due that's an unbelievably effective political move it's very interesting that in the natural history of our species that that is a that is a dangerous move in other words people are freaking stingy as hell and she's finding out that her own family is stingy as hell and it's a frustrating process yeah to watch that happen but if you yourself will take a deep breath and when you're getting chiseled if you you'll you'll you'll think hard and then go exactly the opposite direction uh this is the uh this is so inexpensive to do this but it's the great illusion it feels like it's very expensive that we cannot uh give that person but it comes back to you threefold yeah it's it's one of the oldest lessons if we went around the world and looked at religious and philosophical traditions we would find the golden rule we would find extraordinary pros and poetry about this and how tricky and difficult it is to do it yeah so uh keep in mind that status is the cheapest and yet most valuable thing that you will ever play with okay so it's cheap because it doesn't really cost you anything but it's the most valuable thing that you can figure out how to leverage in any difficult situation that you're in uh and usually it has to do with uh your uh signaling any humility that you can muster in yourself and legitimately complimenting honestly complimenting anybody that that deserves it that you may not be wanting to compliment those are that is the dynamic to reach for and if you do that there's a better life behind it a variant of this if you're in a situation I've been in this many times where I'm working with someone I hate and we can we can get into this like this becomes sort of just this you know really this Jedi move to kind of change the Dynamics of a workplace where if you're working with somebody that you really dislike it's usually because there's a shitty competitive Dynamic right um almost always and and so I I knew at that at the the the the incident I'm thinking of in this particular work relationship there's no way with a straight face I could have told this person I couldn't have complimented her to her face it was just there was too much tension it was too competitively fraught but I could do the variant which is to say nice things behind her back so I could say nice things about her to other people at work um and say gosh you know we just had this event and I was just so impressed by how so and so put you know did all the leg work on this and I just I really I had no idea she was so good at that you know I just really it will get back to her like the nature of Gossip is such that and it's almost more valuable well if it's if she thinks you know I clearly I had no motivation to say nice there was no immediate status back to me so it must have been true otherwise I wouldn't have been saying it and so then she she will warm up to me in return so that's sort of a departure from the original question we're just getting more into this uh this total topic but I I have found that to be a very uh a useful strategy if you're in that agreeable position and you just can't you're not a good enough actress to pull it off face to face yeah yeah actually uh with this individual remember if you've got four family members um you can you can two of them are Allied you can flatter Mabel to yeah to uh to to you know Irene yeah so you can tell Irene you know thing is about Mabel is blah blah that I like so much and uh this is a that that's the same it's the same move but I mean you've got the opportunity there if you want to play with these Concepts okay there's there's so much in this I just keep thinking of other facets of this question a lot like if you're interested in the steam there's a lot in this question the other there's another thing that occurs to me which is that I've been in a situation where I I just have sort of Scotch-Irish you know I hands off like I'm not gonna go I'm not gonna intervene in somebody's life like if I notice somebody lost 100 pounds I'm probably not gonna say anything like even a family member you know even if I'm sort of thinking like hey good job on them like they look great you know I'm very unlikely just in as a personality to say anything about that because it's sort of like yeah my business is my business your business is your business like if we get in a conversation about it and we're gonna talk about it and you ask me have you noticed I've lost weight I'm gonna say something but I'm very just as a personality sort of close to the best with that sort of stuff so you might just be running into that too it's not that they are not proud of you and not thinking really good things and and would in principle want to give you that feedback they're just kind of stiff upper lip kind of you know tough characters and so just having a recognition of Personality differences yeah always part of the discussion so good all right so we can see if anything brings us back to this but uh let's see uh Enoki wants to know oh this is interesting can you discuss how to beat your genes on the rosy retrospection theory that we have a tendency to forget pain and see our history through rose-colored glasses sometimes I blame this for why I keep getting pulled into the pleasure trap well you're getting pulled into pleasure trap because of a pleasure trap not necessarily because of Rosy retrospection like it's just that it's just the nature of the pleasure trap remember the pleasure trap is is uh telling you legitimately including memories of it or telling you that you made the right evolutionary decision right really good evolutionary so uh pleasure trap is a uh is is inherently deeply deceptive and so it's not a deception that you were designed to ever detect uh and so quite frankly without modern science um you would have never figured out the pleasure trap around you know A1 steak sauce on hamburger and cheese you would have never figured out a cheeseburger never I I don't think the uh yeah you you had to have a Colin Campbell or Dean ornish come along and say this is a problem okay and let's look at the data you never would have figured that out you never would have figured out a french fry was a problem so uh the plot the the I don't know maybe some digestive stuff a few people but the truth the truth of the matter is is that you're you weren't going to figure that one out and so your uh your Stone Age brain is cataloging memories as you touch the pleasure trap as long as you don't engulf the entire two pound box disease candy and feel sick [Laughter] one of the great truths is that Doug has way more of a sweet tooth than I do a box of seeds the point is is that yeah that's not a what what's going on there is that your memory system and your sensation uh mechanisms are telling you the evolutionary truth you've just learned that it's a lot right so it's not not an easy thing to learn yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's not Rosy it's just inaccurate but but it's that the accuracy is distorted yes so but yeah I think the the main main context you hear that sort of theory uh is with the childbirth you know women women who have a kid and they swear up and down I'm never doing that again you know that was the worst experience of my life um uh you know you're getting a vasectomy right now sort of conversation and then a year later you know they're ready to have another kid because all they remember are sort of the the joy and the pain kind of Fades into the background but we could say sort of the same things going on I mean in the grand calculus of what you know what is the best thing to do for your Gene survival having another child is it it weighs out against the cost benefit of the of the pain yeah so you're gonna not the the pain is less relevant to remember in the moment it's more relevant but as you as you move on and you run that CD the CB uh evolves with your genetic reproduction and what the kids like yeah that probably is true yeah it probably depends actually that's probably very true that you're CV on a second kid will depend more on that first year of having that that baby in your household and how miserable your life is and what's happening with your relationship and the pain of childbirth yeah yeah you weren't designed to run a CB on that anyway right you're kind of kind of beyond your your cognitive control yeah yeah all right birth control is such a beautiful thing you got it what else we got uh Michelle is saying I have an eye condition which causes me chronic pain when I look at screens making my job very painful I live in chronic pain I've dreamed of working a modest non-tech job in a beautiful area area much like Maui I'm highly anxious and conscientious how do I leave the Bay Area and my job without feeling like I'm throwing away my opportunities and meeting and the chance to meet other intellectual people yeah that's a that's a valid concern um there's too many things in there yeah there's too much tea in her cup Okay so we've got we've got an eye condition uh that means that that we may need to be doing something where we're not staring at screens right yeah you may need uh they need to be uh text she just says it's a tech job she's looking at computer screens all day so but in chronic permanent constant pain um like this is a what other whatever abilities capability Etc do does the person have and there's no um uh yeah I don't even know what to say to that in other words the the truth of the matter is is we wouldn't know what all of your potential options are we don't know what your entire Financial circumstances are you know it makes a big difference if you've got parents with a lot of money and you're an only child uh uh whereas if you're if you're out there fighting the world with you know your one little knife uh uh uh in your hand and and no support on all sides uh all these things are are are are issues that are involved are all part of the larger CB which impacts the amount of Freedom that you have so uh and that you know Etc in terms of what what's your uh education in other words what credentials do you have what other places can you can you use your resume or your education or your natural abilities you know uh would you be a person that would be comfortable selling used cars you know what I mean uh you don't have to I can't give you the answer to that because there isn't an imprinciple answer other than to uh to uh essentially try to do a a comprehensive in inventory of your options and to realize that the the only it isn't the only optimal solution to suffer in the Bay Area at the highest dollar per hour in in order to get as much money as possible so that we can retire and be safe okay that isn't the only that that is not the optimal path to life satisfaction for actually most individuals well particularly at the price of chronic pain right that's what I'm saying I mean it's bad enough if you're yeah it's sort of you're you're trading your life for that sort of grind you know and that's one thing but yeah if there's chronic pain involved that's a that's a that's a big thing to power through behind that conscientiousness action right yeah so um yeah a lot of other places to live than in Silicon Valley yeah yeah and a lot of other things to do remember the overwhelming majority of the United States doesn't live in Silicon Valley right doesn't do Tech work and increasingly with the Silicon Valley less and less of the the sort of intellectual core is in the Bay area so I mean there's there's been think peace after think peace in the last six months or so about how everybody's fleeing um now that people can work remotely so that that piece of feeling like you're you're going to miss the human connection and the IQ that's in the Bay Area like there is a lot of IQ in the Bay Area but increasingly that IQ is accessible virtually I mean that's that's why we're in Maui I mean we we that that was a trade that we were willing to make was for the the life enjoyment even though we're leaving the Bay Area leaving Sacramento that all the sort of access to ambient IQ all kinds of places to go okay and we we've we've thought about a bunch of different places yeah all over the place yeah so the uh you know and we're all going back to our own foxholes yes sir Foxhole Retreat yeah I was actually thinking about that but I have to make sure I visit you a bunch because this has been so incredibly productive you know I mean and um and it it uh it's two we we've solved so many little problems just by being in close proximity and in a bunch of the uh non-planned conversation has has enabled that so right right yeah yeah anyway that's a nice side yeah all right here we go lots lots of IQ in Seattle um all right there was another I feel like there was something I missed here okay I think the next question is this follow-up on the on the rose-colored retrospection what about the reverse the the sort of exaggerated bad like it's worse you remember it worse than what it actually was um so how do you know what it is true okay all right this sounds like somebody that's been reading like Kahneman and or or or whatever this is the uh the uh the the notion here is as follows that you're not going to be able to study modern cutting-edge Theory and Neuroscience listen to an interesting idea and then come in top down with some idea and emboss it on top of the extraordinarily complex cost benefit analytics that your mind does naturally that's not not going to be possible so AKA CB Gunner CV CV gonna c b my good friend my good friend Dylan that's his line like whenever he's sort of baffled by some things like CB gun a CV because like you can't argue with that yeah yeah your your mind's uh subtlety in cost benefit analysis is is staggering and so uh it was interesting my mother talked to her a couple three days ago and I said I was in Hawaii you know she's like oh yes you know right and then she says uh yeah I I loved it oh it's like you know when my mother was here she did not love Hawaii she did not but my mother is so inherently agreeable and naturally optimistic that she you know I wasn't going to say well no that's not true actually let's consult the record I got some receipts here yeah that's right no the the truth is is that yeah the CB is going to see me so you're you're uh you could I suppose with enough uh enough repeated exposure to the same mistake you could you can that's what wisdom is you you can that's where you wisdom usually comes from is finding out that your that your CV system keeps making the same error right and it keeps getting tricked by the same process and you finally get smarter right um which is why Larry our dear friend Larry Larry I was uh what I was uh trying to find a wife to have kids back in the day and I was struggling in the dating Arena as as a person does uh Larry said uh he said you know oh God this is Larry it's not me when he gets this look on his face I just like just batten down the hatches Larry said women are are reasonable until they're 35. words uh the point was during the the years of your Peak Youth and Beauty you are testing your power you know what I'm saying and you're not you're going to in principle you're going to be it's not going to be easy for women to necessarily be willing to do some of the down trading for stability and conscientiousness and financial achievement right that uh that some males will then rise and so in other words they will that they will rise relative to their competitors uh yeah I would say that they're the yeah the willingness also just comes from the fact that they have not yet so you're probably heading this direction anyway but their CB has not evolved to the point of valuing those things properly because they haven't met enough people they haven't had enough experience because they haven't built enough correlations with yeah Jimmy's hot but he's flaky and it's not a good quality relationship and so maybe I shouldn't make my mating decisions based on physical attractiveness alone and you're also not designed uh to to be Computing net worth and income not really it's just general social competence and whether or not you've got enough food on you that you look like you're surviving in other words you're that the uh and slowly but surely you know some percentage of females start to become more clever about that and it matters more so in other words I would say that the the on average the average female at age 40 yeah is more concerned with a man's Financial circumstances than what she was when she was 25. yes but but I I think a lot of that is is not you know I get I I just worry about this being like too there's too much calculated kind of the female is you know looking at networks I'm not saying it's a correlate yeah it's a his financial stability is a correlate of a lot of personality characteristics that she's come to increasingly value at that point uh yeah yeah whatever this is stability you know General competence right yeah yeah yes all kinds of things and and uh also has been under the situation probably a few times where quite it was too good to be true right sure and so it turns out yeah it's too good to be true and then seven months later you're dumped yeah okay yeah and so the the um so I think all of that winds up being I forget where this came from the uh reverse of rose-colored glasses reverse of Rose Colored Glasses yeah so you have a reverse of Roads called colored glasses there as slowly the CV starts to shift a little bit and we start to get uh rather than a lot more optimistic you get more pessimistic uh in certain domains where there's risk there that wasn't obvious until you had a bunch of experience right experiences the great deed destroy the store so right so you know you can have a a distorted super positive experience in any area of life and if you don't if it's like any experiment you know any any experiment in science gets the the result is more powerful and meaningful the more times you replicate it the more times you repeat it um and then the more data you throw at the problem if you just do it once you're going to get maybe sort of an outlier accidental result and that's the same thing as we go through our lives early in our life we've only had one breakup so we assume every breakup is going to look like that breakup and affect us in the same sort of emotional way so we only have that one correlation if if this if this then this um but as you proceed through life if you have a personality that allows you to accumulate more life experience which not everybody does some people get really shut down they have one bad experience a traumatic experience so just a shitty experience of any kind and they close up and they they don't allow the system to to rewrite with more data the actual reality of life and they sort of live based on that initial Distortion forever and some people will do that in a positive way too so some if you have sort of a a narcissistic kind of you know um high on herself kind of female who uh you know lands a big fish at age 20. she always could things that she always can is really confused by the time that she's 35 that she hasn't I watch this you guys know I'm addicted to reality TV dating shows and there's always these characters who are these women of a certain age who are very narcissistic and they they're basically acting as if they're the the you know the bell of the ball and they have not recalibrated because usually they had some sort of early experience where they were super over rewarded and then they just kind of habituated to that and they haven't adjusted as they go on so all kinds of early experiences can't they they only distort us to the degree that we allow them to by not accumulating additional experience to fine-tune our perception of reality um and so you can you're going to be confused about what the truth is in the past if you have not uh replicated the experiment a number of times throughout just the the days of your life there you go there yeah we we got this synthesized down to the principle which is that anything you ever hear about rose-colored glasses and human beings and their wacky memories and how they this is all BS all all that really matters is is that you're a data acquisition machine and you will be analyzing that data according to the algorithms that are built into you uh not only as a member of the species but also as an individual personality and so the when we run into [Music] um people uh with struggling in a domain all we're looking for is where's the Distortion it's all and we're trying to figure out what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out what crucial systematic experiments can actually get us most cheaply and directly to the heart of any possible Distortion that could be significant that's what you just heard us do with this lady with her family members that are that are unpleasant Distortion number one could be actually you're in a oscillating half-assed vicious cycle because you're being too stingy so what we're going to do that's one possibility that means that we're gonna we're gonna systematically try to figure out how to feed those individuals some positive feedback to shove that cycle back into a virtuous cycle if we can an experiment for a hypothesis we don't know if that hypothesis is true that's right all you can do is test it right so this is how you test it that's how we're going to test it and then if it turns out that as I said if we spend a year picking around several of those and we keep testing that same hypothesis and it turns out we keep getting uh nothing but but you know bee stings as a result then the answer is forget it then we're going to move you know 100 miles further from the Beehive uh psychologically and we're going to reduce those relationships down because they're a source of irritation and negative feedback so we're going to keep we're going to keep diluting their impact on your life experience to the point where they finally are just enough Coalition member because they're family but far enough away that so we know that there that those relationships shift from being in the red emotionally to being in the black that may mean literally one-tenth of the amount of interactions uh uh per year are going to be in the future as we're in the past or maybe a fifth or maybe a third uh or maybe zero okay depending upon just just how how acrimonious the situation is but the principle is where is the Distortion is it is it in the fact that that you are are having a hand in a in a uh in a vicious cycle or is it that they are personality wise incapable of actually establishing a relationship with you that is positive for you hey if that's true no harm no foul but we don't want to LEAP to that conclusion we certainly aren't going to change them in any way all we can do is is eradicate a distortion that they may be having in their own mind about the fact that they have to defend their self-esteem against or their esteem against you by being stingy okay if we fix that and that fixes it great if it doesn't that's fine too either way we're going to improve your life because we're going to de-distort your understanding of your circumstances that's the that's the fundamental principle yeah yep beautiful talk to us long enough it always comes back to Distortion it's really it's that's the heart of the whole the whole thing so yeah all right all the official cues and we had some that were submitted we didn't get to them as always I we're actually we're working on a little widget um that will be on the website soon where the you can see the the big list of all the questions that are submitted and hopefully kind of upvote and downvote them sort of Reddit style yeah um and uh and then we can kind of you know eventually index them and find where they were answered and all of that too so we're working on that it's just taking some time big plans big plans big big technology plans so so yep I think that's that's it fantastic we will see you uh next time on beat your jeans this week and then we'll be back the the following week after that so all right thanks everybody for coming and we will see you next time all right see y'all soon bye
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