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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-02-26
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like co-host so I promote him all right like there we go can you hear me hold on I gotta turn up the uh sound on my thing okay I got you all the way up and see how that sounds okay did that fix it can you hear me now brilliant brilliant okay good having no end of technical difficulties around here it's very exciting Perfect all right all right hey you guys got your lights on behind you the the lights are on they finally made it that I'm still short two boxes from Maui that haven't made it yet but the the box with the lights made it which of course is the most important one so uh it's great to see you I went my light because my just knocked it over that's right you've got a more got a more mystical look now that's right we'll just hang out here in the dark as long as it doesn't set anything on the fire I I figured that was going to happen at some point sooner or later we're still we're still getting established for everybody who doesn't know I've been moving this past week to Seattle and so I'm sort of like half established and and uh I have some things but not other things so half of my office Studio here is like boxes set up propping things up and very susceptible to dogs talking them down particularly because this is like a it's a it's an Old Fisherman's Cottage it's how it was marketed which really means it's like just a rustic Shack in this industrial area but it's very it's very quaint it's very cute but it's um there's nowhere to put the dogs there's not like a bedroom it's just kind of a studio space so uh they they now slowly participate in all things that I do so it just makes it very exciting how's Sacramento not bad we've got cats crawling all over the place I cleared them out of the room so I should have some peace for a while see that's you you can banish your animals in ways that I can't so you got it awesome all right well I don't see any I have a couple of questions submitted I literally about 30 seconds ago got an email from our web guy um saying that the question tool that I talked about in the last q a is um it's now live but it's not published on the site so people can't access it without knowing the specific link so I will test it a little bit and make sure that it's all good to go and then I'll um I'll give you the link uh and we'll we'll make it obvious how to find it on the website uh if it works so that'll be exciting that'll be basically the new way to submit questions for all of these q and A's and uh perhaps aggregated with the podcast too where people can like if you're familiar with read it up and down voting you can you can collectively determine which questions are most interesting so we can answer those and also crowdsource whether they've been answered before and so you can say oh that was in the Q a from January 26th or whatever so uh there's good potential for that we're just trying to get it all online so so but it was really I haven't even had a chance to play with it yet because he just emailed me so yeah all right well we want to look at the at the cues or any other any other small talk uh no no not a small block yeah all right all right sounds good uh this person's saying what do you think of the idea of explaining to girls in their mid-teens the ego trap Theory I have two teenage granddaughters one of them is a high achiever and and has setbacks the other is overshadowed by her sister in terms of sociability and School Achievements and at times holds back do you think it would give them insight into themselves yeah I'll let you get started on that and I'll try to fix my studio yeah um I have a few I have a few comments about this and that is that um changing uh that would be that would be in principle a high concept coming down and changing somebody's Behavior substantially um particularly when we're talking about high concept changing Behavior we're we're trying to then theorize that we may have to be able to do this across a variety of challenges that come up that that uh drives that person into the ego trap so it's unlikely that they would ever remember utilize uh or make use of this so the the truth of the matter is is that that um this is the failure by the way of uh mindset so ah it's here somewhere okay the uh mindset is uh downstairs at your house I've seen it down there yeah I think you're right I was just seeing it got it uh the other day I was staring at it the um mindset I can't remember what her name is Carol something Carol dweck whack okay the uh so Carol dweck's Theory uh that you had the growth mindset or a fixed mindset that that would a growth mindset would be a person not in the ego trap a fixed mindset would be a person in the ego trap and by saying things like wow you're outstanding at this uh Carol dweck conceptualizes that as ooh that's a fixed mindset whereas if you tell a kid hey you're getting better at that that's a quote growth mindset so you can see why she um why she came up with those names that was a good you know that was sort of her description and she believed that that's what it was okay that was the mistake but it was so yeah fixed versus growth mindset is a really a beautiful description of the of the process that you're watching uh I if you're in a fixed mindset you're not doing anything to challenge and grow that if you're in a growth mindset you are so she described it that she didn't understand the Dynamics she has no understanding but don't ever okay uh she actually she actually uh in in a in a sort of an irritated fashion at one of her later chapters she says this is just all about ego and this and that the other and I'm I'm like chuckling it's like oh yeah it is about ego but you need to understand what that is okay and what that is folks that is the the esteem meter okay now we're starting to talk about the actual dynamics of achievement and what stops achievement okay so the uh so the the fix versus growth mindset is a description if you translate her work and it's a nice little thing for you to read if you're a parent or something uh it's the only thing that I that I'm aware of that's out there that's so clearly putting its putting its uh thumb right on this Dynamic uh until Jen and Maya's book comes out and then it'll be very clear uh it'll all be embedded in a larger evolutionary explanation of all motivation and achievement the uh but what what fix versus growth mindset is is just the realization that there are these two different states of the organism uh but then direct then further fumbles the ball because she doesn't understand that these are not things that you can now teach at the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset Etc or that their personality characteristics or anything else these are these are all situation specific so your your daughter if you've got one of them that is in an ego trap then we have to coach her specifically out of that ego trial we don't teach somebody to get out of the ego trap not in high school okay maybe when they're 35 years old and they're very smart okay then you got a shot at actually teaching the principle of the ego trap and they may be able to take that principle and find themselves at a later date in an ego trap that they didn't see coming and then utilize what they understand about how to get out of the ego trap but that will probably not be the case okay that's going to be an unusual individual that's going to be able to take that concept and wield it around okay now if you are it doesn't hurt to explain it but it's uh but probably at that age we're just talking about essentially you recognizing I.E fixed versus growth mindset and so it's a simple matter of um using what we do the anti-ego Trap processes which are in fact the promotion of growth mindset which is get the bar down okay uh we we get the expectations down we state that the expectations need to be uh need to be lower and that we have no worry about the impact of any blood failure and that all we really care about is to find out to we're looking for the little bit of excitement that comes by putting in some good effort and then seeing whether we get frustrated and then and then the little moment where we grow because we get a little bit better because we put effort in and got help okay so that's what we do when we see kids or anybody else when I see uh an adult that's in the ego trap uh I don't necessarily explain the ego trap to them not if they're not really sharp okay if they're really sharp I will actually explain the ego trap and then we will actually go into their specific manifestation of it and then we will go from there but very often if I don't think that they've really got the chops to follow that argument then what I'm going to do is I'm going to listen I'm going to diagnose that they are in the ego trap and then we are going to go directly to the solution so people have heard me talk about storage targets storage targets is the solution to the ego trap about being too perfectionistic with your diet and getting overwhelmed and intimidated by that process okay so the uh we don't necessarily have to know the whole theory in order to implement it so anyway um I wanted to say something else about this and that is that throughout the history of psychology and Psychotherapy and Psychotherapy outcome research they have found over and over again something that is frustrated um a frustrated investigators uh in in all of Behavioral mod science Etc and that is that the Avenues of change are narrow the changes are narrow they are they do not transfer to wider principles so we can we can take an introvert and make them more competent at at you know go you know shaking the hand of some girl and asking a couple of nice questions we can make them more confident to do that but we cannot make them more comfortable generally socially that you cannot do you cannot transfer the training away from a very very narrow thing that you are educating the person to do uh you can't then teach social skills that's a joke that has been a total failure for the last 50 years you can't teach assertiveness okay you can't take somebody that's at the 90th percentile agreeable and is a doormat and then turn them into somebody that's the 50th percentile that actually can defend themselves with their boss now you can't do that which you can do without one specific individual is plot exactly what they're going to say in a specific conversation with said boss so that they can get that particular time off because it's their sister's wedding that you can do okay but you will not they will not then be able to do that two months later with the next thing it's very unlikely even with the same boss okay maybe given enough time they may eventually get a tiny little bit of ability to transfer that not much so this is a thing that Jen and I talk about uh we we were we're frustrated with the question we understand people's frustration they say I'm just so anxious and I'm conscientious and drives me greater what can I do to change it nothing you're not going to change you all what you can do is you can change your specific circumstances that may be causing a great deal of anxiety for you specifically that we do that's the Potted Plant Theory okay and one day Jen's potted plant Theory should go on the Mount Rushmore of human psychology because that that is completely ignored by by the last hundred years of psychology and Psychotherapy by every single uh uh domain and style genre okay except this this is like no you are what you are you're not going to change that you need to move yourself to a different set of psychological circumstances it's not just ignored it's it's rejected and meets with hostility from from the sort of Gatekeepers I mean the fact that the the notion of um you know just moving away from relationships that are not serving you or from quitting in a job that you hate in a oppressive boss these are like very much at odds with the conventional wisdom of you need to set better boundaries and you know you need to you need to stand up for yourself and you need to uh you know there's there's some sort of harm coming to you with your self-isolation because you're an introvert like all of these things that people hear in a typical uh clinical experience like that that is the sort of Mo and and so it's it's not just ignoring this way of thinking about things but it's actively hostile to it um and and uh clinicians get in trouble for making these kinds of recommendations so yeah it's really it's really quite an amazing rejection of reality yeah glad to say that you know I'm so out of touch with my colleagues that I don't even know yeah yeah well you haven't I've spent quite a bit of time in the last 20 years in conventional therapy you know talking about my issues and trying to heal my trauma and so I've come I've come real face to face with it and have seen how this operates the one thing I would say about the ego trap in in talking to adolescents about it if they're if they're fairly intelligent and and I think this works for everybody across the board is that rather than explaining it in high concept you can tell the anecdote of the of the caveman who's out on a hunt so this is a story that both of us have told many times that illustrates I think people can really recognize themselves whether it's that story or it's the story about the the young kid playing the piano or there's there's a couple of different anecdotes that people can search around for and find um that we tell often uh and I I think there's something humbling in being really caught in the throes of the ego trap and hearing that little anecdote and recognizing yourself and realizing oh I'm not that special like I didn't I didn't invent this procrastination technique it's actually like baked into human nature and there's something really sort of that puts you in your place with that which helps get you out of the ego trap Itself by realizing that you're you're not that fancy you're just ready in a very basic little ancestral algorithm that you know emerged to protect our status yes fabulous yeah all right yeah so sort of dovetailing on that the other question we have sitting here is is from Marcy is self-awareness just a form of intelligence or disagreeableness also factor into that yeah I think that's mostly it's that's mostly IQ talking it's mostly IQ and and not not so much disagreeableness that you're caught up in just sheer narcissism and that you have enough enough self-awareness to kind of evaluate your behavior and how it's affecting other people I think mostly that's what you're getting to with that question is you know how how are your choices having consequences on your relationships and creating your reality in the world um and I think that that is a more difficult Prospect for a super uh super disagreeable person it's a it's a more difficult Prospect for a super unstable person um but I think the most important thing there is probably just intelligence and and what we often will call this kind of quality of psychological mindedness this kind of um just uh an interest in self-reflection and and kind of you know how how does my like what is my behavior an example of this is very kind of social science thinking like this it's there's nothing um unique about your particular experience you're trying to situated in a whole typology of behavior and decision making and I think some people just have that tendency more than others I have always had it since I was a little kid I think Doug has too I think most of the people watching this probably do um and so if you if you have that it's um IQ is is necessary but not sufficient I think for having good self-awareness yeah yeah absolutely yes yeah the system the system doesn't need to be overly self-aware it wasn't necessarily engineered for it um I have sometimes asked people questions uh in therapy about why it is that they were thinking about what why it is that they were doing what they were doing and it was obvious to me why they were doing what they were doing and it wasn't to them it was just it's just astounding to me that that is even possible okay uh and at times they recognized it as a possibility but couldn't actually uh validate it in other words the the source code didn't even recognize it now that's not common so usually the source code recognizes the motivational connection but uh and of course anybody listening to this with a vast knowledge of psychology would say well Doug how do you know that you're just not saying send Freudian crap of a different color but it has no more to do with their motivation than what Freud thought had to do with their motivation and the answer is because I've been so right it's been so validated thousands of times and it's and it's in an entire conciliate Matrix of the nature of human motivation that's why okay so the um so yeah and I'm not talking about every little Nuance of every little person's uh uh experience I'm just I can remember experiences where a few that struck me that it was clear and obvious why there saying what they were doing and they were remarkably obtuse and so that is uh and that isn't necessarily having anything to do with security I'm actually thinking about a young medical doctor at this time that I talked to 15 years ago and there was in an incident that took place it was obvious why he was doing what he was doing to me uh but it wouldn't have been obvious to everybody but it was obvious to me and it wasn't obvious to him and it was actually an interesting hypothesis so that is psychological mindedness and some of that as Jen is suggesting that a lot of that's just going to be genes so you you could be pretty darn psychologically minded and probably be moderately above average intelligence and you might have quite a lot more self-awareness than somebody that's super smart that works at Silicon Valley and is halfway you know as works okay so the uh that that clearly uh IQ is going to be a very important variable in that equation without a doubt all right all right this person is saying I don't know if this is the same person from earlier it's their Anonymous attendee do we have a suggestion for somebody who is interested in seeing someone to talk through issues relationship issues with accounts such a such as a counselor when someone with EP background is not readily available since we're both so busy I don't want to get stuck in some of the conventional therapy traps thanks um no [Laughter] um actually uh we have a we have a friend that that works on the true north website uh his name is Dr Richard Seidel yeah Rick Seidel is uh a pretty fine clinical psychologist he's got 30 years experience in the field he's knowledgeable in EP and um and so that that that's a place to to go to it's true northhealth.com or I think that's what it is it's it's uh Health promoting yeah it's the help promoting.com whatever the heck it is I can't remember if it's dot org or.com but yeah whatever it is yeah you find that and Rick Seidel is there and you can book a time with Rick and he's another person of our scam we take no responsibility for anything stupid he says now with our schedules sometimes people get intimidated by the fact that it looks like we're booked into 2027 but really both of our calendars only open 30 days at a time so we tend to book a couple of weeks out ahead and so if you look and you don't see anything available for months it's not that we're booked for months we're just booked for the next month um and so you just kind of have to check back on a rolling basis as those days get opened um uh as we as we get closer to them people will also cancel um I I am not able to run a very efficient waiting list I don't know if you are I try but it's like impossible because something will open up and somebody will jump on it before I can reserve it and give it to someone else so it's really just kind of um uh I I just want people who are unfamiliar who are trying to book with us and they're intimidated by the system it's it's not as bad as it looks at first glance yes yeah yeah yeah you can always write to me and I might be soft oh right to me and uh and it it so it makes a difference in other words it makes a big difference to me if you write to me and if it's something that feels like an emergency like this important decisions that need to be made in the next week or two then I will get you in if it's something they can definitely wait that it's gonna need to wait but that's just FYI everybody that that is something that you can do yeah that's that's true for me too I mean if you really are dealing with time pressure like you know you've got to make a decision on uh you know a job offer or moving to a different country or there's something like really time sensitive and you're not seeing an appointment for three or four weeks then yeah just send us an email let's not squawk that's what we're here for yeah yeah all right let's see what else we got all right um that is all we have in those official questions but I do have uh lots of different we had several people uh a couple of different people um in the last week or two ask us this is sort of related to what we've already talked about but we should just explicitly knock it out in this conversation too whether there's any validity to IFS or internal family systems therapy and if they should give that any thought or what we think about that so that I had like three questions about that in the last couple of weeks um I don't even know what that is now when I was in training in the 1980s they had what was known as systems theory so I'm sure that that's what this is this is just some iteration of systems theory and this uh uh the the Grand Master of systems Psychotherapy was a guy by the name of mnuchin and so uh this is so I and this is the concept of the family is this you know interweaving parts and there's an identified patient and all the sort of The Lost Child it's all yes ifs is a little different it's sort of like the split parts of the self in response to traumatic events or to going through you know if you're if your parents ignored you they're sort of I don't remember all of the details I was I was enchanted with it for a while but there's like Exiles and protectors and uh uh there's uh firefighters so it's like all this and this is a way to like have a conversation with your internal critic and get them to be less critical of you and all of this kind of integrating all of the components of the self so that's that's the basic idea as I recall it from my my dalliance right here's the fundamental problem with all of that thinking okay so this is where everybody's got it wrong okay starting with Sigmund Freud all the way down all the way to this the uh and this includes cognitive therapy so there's a uh everybody got lost I mean there's many reasons why everybody got lost it's amazing that they remain lost no the problem uh I I can remember reading the discount Itself by Nathaniel Brandon uh in the early 1970s or I didn't read it then I read it 10 years later the uh goes back to Wilhelm Reich who was uh who was an early accordion on the notion of character armor and people were pressing emotions Etc this is the the root of Gestalt therapy literally the notion of Crystal therapy was to figure out through the 2-2 chair technique or death bed exercise or whatever it is to reclaim disowned parts of the self of which you are unaware that are doing self-sabotage and self-limiting things okay this is all total BS okay let me explain the problem the problem is a competitive problem between you and the village it's not it's not a competitive problem between you and you okay the one manifestation of interesting Dynamics is going to be some self-deceptive processes that go on with the ego trap and also with the seeking of so-called Enlightenment okay and also with the Notions of that I've been traumatized that's something that we can sell ourselves as well as sell the village so there are processes by which there are some interesting self-defeating very clever adaptive evolutionarily scripted excuses for our lack of competitive capabilities okay so those are true and Jen and I will delineate those in great detail uh in in the in the book that we're writing now that's super important but at the end of the day that aside the real problem folks is the competitive problems that we have between us and the village Psychotherapy has forever been looking at problems inside you they've been looking at the problem the reason you feel bad is things inside of you now the reason you feel bad is because of your competitive standing with respect between you and your competitors with respect to targets that you have in the village okay you know nothing helps the struggling self-defeating uh uh depressed and anxious businessman like a sales report that shows that things are going well it's like well he just he leaves his therapist's office that he's been on the couch in misery and thinking about his his all of his terrible issues with his short of expectations that his father had and all this kind of stuff and then he goes home and he's just about suicidal and he boots up the computer and it turns out his new offering is selling like crazy and it's all good okay this is how it is it's about this is where uh I I'm not actually sure all the reasons why it's actually an interesting speculation historically to try to figure out how it is that this got lost but once you see it from this angle it's pretty obvious the problem is I got a competitive problem I need more money you know more attractive made possibilities or better ones you know better I I want you know better friends that aren't backstabbing free freeloading flakes like that's what I need man just give me some decent friends some exciting mates you know interesting work that feels sustainable and legitimate because I'm earning a scheme in the village by doing something legitimate I'm getting paid for it that's it okay and it's like well why is that problematic well it's problematic because you got competition and you're not designed by nature to be that happy if you aren't doing getting what you perceive to be a pretty damn good deal on all of those three domains and so as soon as you have a domain that your nervous system is basically like a it's like a business consultant it basically comes into your business and says Nah I think we're underperforming here no I think we can do better on the market you know one of my favorite companies not that you and I will Chad and I have talked about this we're not going to wreck our Opportunity by discussing this company one of our favorite companies is public storage foreign they just put up a little box and read it out to all of us flakes that aren't willing to get rid of our crap and people just keep getting wealthier and wealthier and buying more and more crap and so they build more and more little boxes and it's amazing to like watch how little effort these people put in at the corporate level to like growing the company they just sit back and they're just like yep well I made more money this quarter let me tell you I just I've always watching them I'm trying to learn about them so it turns out this really fancy Management Group um I didn't know about this I would have avoided anything that sounded like this gen but there's a thing in the world called activist investors that sounds terrible it does sound political thing sounds very bad not that's not what it is it's very sophisticated investors that control large amounts of money but look at companies and they analyze them carefully to see if they're significantly underperforming um and when they are they go in and buy a bunch of stock and then they get seats on the board of directors and they start changing it because they say this is way undervalued and it turned out that just happened to Public Storage oh interesting yeah this is what I'm talking about your nervous system is like a Management Consultant yeah these people looked at public storage and said you guys have the number one name brand of an industry that can't help Miss and you guys have been lazy as hell for the last 10 years while you've let your competition you've gone from 25 percent of market share down to 15 when you totally have the dominant position what have you guys been smoking and the answer is anything we want anything we want they've monetized human nature it's like porn it's like they really don't have to work that hard to make money and they're they're just content with the status quo they're not particularly driven so yeah they've been entertaining to watch that's that's what's happened and it turns out that this activist group bought a huge stake in them and said party's over we're coming in we're putting a whole bunch of new management people you guys are lazy oh isn't that too bad it's really sad it's like these have been our this is like our spirit animal These Guys these guys have had high paycheck vice presidents here they've just been sitting on a 10-year position breaking it in on a business that can't miss but what just happened was a Management Consultant came in and said no the stockholder should not be that happy because you are underperforming and that is exactly what your nervous system does your nervous system looks around at your competitive situation and says you know what you could do better in The Mating department or you could do better in the Friendship department or you could do better in the Commerce Department it tells you you could do better and it generates feelings of unhappiness okay that's what it does so your unhappiness doesn't have to do with some Haywire Dynamics between you and your ancient father who's no longer with us about something that happened when you were 14. it's got nothing to do with that this has to do with your competitive state of the art updated current evaluation of your competitive standing with respect to the three major domains of human value where we trade with other people in order to get Survival and reproductive values from them that is your this is the we don't care about what happened in public storage 15 years ago we care about the current quarter and the current marketing Dynamic and the current competitive standing now these guys couldn't care less about 2005. they're looking at 2021 and saying you guys are underperforming okay we are stockholders and we are not happy that's how it works so yeah this is the departure so whatever that integrated family system whatever the hell that thing was that's just another lost doomed uh hypothesis that has to do with it you've got buried greatness and that the the end to your internal pain is just integrating the uh unconscious psychodynamics of this or that or the other no no the Improvement will happen when your life improves with respect to your exchanges that you are making with the hours of your life and the people that you're making them with that's what's going to improve it all right a well-deserved rant for three different questions on the topic like the you know when we talk about personality and and the fact that personality you can you can have facets of your personality that have conflicts of interest with each other you know so you you can have um like in my case it's very common with a lot of clients that my I have this like lifelong tension between my conscientiousness and my openness the two basically never want me to do the same thing they have very different agendas for what I'm going to do with my time and energy and so I do have these sort of conflicting parts of myself and I think people everybody does and and people have this intuition that there's kind of this Committee of people living in their brain that's that's sitting around a board board table and can't agree with each other and so that's part of the Resonance of something like an ifs approach is like let's talk to all of these little disintegrated pieces of yourself and get them all on the same page um but it's not it's not the proper theoretical Matrix for thinking about those different parts those different parts are are totally different little pieces of your brain and different neural circuits that are never going to be integrated because they were never meant to be integrated there is no you there is no holistic you that that is is uh comprehensively served by some integrated model of behavior across all of these different facets of yourself these are independent neural circuits that are trying to drive very different uses of your of your life force and they may never agree so you can you can kind of take this higher View and and allow them to have that conversation and weigh those CVS in different ways and that's part of what we try to do when we talk to people um but the the ifs approach is not not a very good way to do that I have a very chirpy dog over here he's he's he's suffering some personality disintegration that's actually even even one step more sweeping that that wonderful but one step is even even more bizarre and that is that all all of your values are in conflict with each other right right so literally everything you do comes at the expense of something else so your brain is constantly at war in fact if you were to think about this you um you could think about um I think a lot of the consternation that comes up with with many people seeking therapy has to do around anxiety and the uh the way to think about this hold on one second of course whatever I can't get it paid for the time I want you to think about think about a a line segment and uh what we want to call this thing is we want to call this I can a Continuum of values so on one side of a line segment we have utter catastrophe your death you know being castrated by a gunshot or by Lorena Bobbitt [Laughter] it's something terrible happens okay that's on this side of the equation and on the other side of the equation is the most promising exciting thing that you can imagine okay so what we have is a Continuum of values and in the middle we have neutrality so whatever the stimulus that's in the middle that stimulus is like oh I don't know this like what do I really care okay I don't really care now if I'm at a desert island I see that it's pretty exciting okay because it's like oh well what's that must be somebody else here somebody must have made that there are contexts for which that stimulus would be extremely important but in the context of today if I throw that in the garbage I'm never going to miss it okay so therefore on a Continuum of values with respect to everything that's in my known environment that I sit in right now which doesn't include just this room it includes my entire understanding of my entire life circumstances that little bowl is here in the middle it's it's essentially of no value okay as we move out to each side what we're going to find as we move this direction towards disaster we're going to get anxiety as we move this direction towards you know the greatest smoke and romance thing that could ever happen to me that is we're going to get increasingly excited okay and so what it's no surprise that a tremendous amount of the experiences that people have have to do with anxiety like that's all this thing is this thing's just a anxiety versus excitement processor okay and so an awful lot of days and interactions in your life are kind of in the middle like Joe down the three cubicles down that likes to drink much coffee all day we don't really care about him okay unless your son uh a gal that is sweet on him and you know wants to pull him away from his wife and you know have an affair whatever then he's all exciting to you okay the point is is that you're a whole bunch of your life is dealing with processes that are not particularly important and that they don't cause much of emotional upheaval but we see as soon as we start to move into something that's threatening we're going to start to get some anxiety as we as soon as we move over here we're going to start to get some excitement and so the uh but it's no surprise that that there's what a lot of in the world that seek Psychotherapy and has been actually a force in the development of theory around Psychotherapy are people that happen to be hyper anxious a bunch of essentially you know hyper conscientious I.E and inherently unstable people they're having a lot of turbulence okay and the psychotherapists and theorists of the world and sat back in the they haven't understood it they thought ha why the hell are you having why are you feeling so it's you must have been insecure in your Early Childhood you must have been a rut was it a forceps delivery I mean that's a standard freaking question in conventional Psychotherapy it's like wow we really need to know you know that if you had a tough opening bell if you don't no wonder okay so this is that they have not understood Behavior genetics obviously and so they don't understand that a tremendous amount of the turbulence where a great many people are struggling with all their anxieties over here this is actually anxiety is situation normal for the organism okay it just so happens some people are going to have more of it than others for various reasons and a huge variable in the most dominant variable in there is not the situations that are involved it's actually the individ it's the personality okay the situations are obviously can be dominant in the drop of a hat if a bomb goes out in the middle of the street I'm anxiously extremely anxious obviously but the point is is that most people's existence doesn't have huge threats spontaneously jumping out at them from Alleyways so if they're experiencing good considerable amount of anxious turbulence in their existence and conflict it's genetic okay and what can we do about that well we can train change your circumstances to get them as benign as we can possibly make it that's what we can do but we're not going to go back and integrate the personality in some fancy way to reduce that process that's not going to happen okay another little these derivatives of the general rant it's just well when we get started on the state of contemporary psychology this always happens that's there are a few things that we can do to wind you up more than ask a question along those lines I think I think where those are going to get upvoted on our new question tool the thing is where I'm talking I can see your face and you're smiling and nodding it's like but just keep encouraging me I'm here for the rants like everybody else is you really want to get me ranting you have to ask slightly different questions yeah that's right media you have to ask about wokeism uh Genie is just asking what is our psychology called just evolutionary psychology is the sort of umbrella term for what we're talking about that's a different approach than conventional psychology um but it's it's intersex with this other uh discipline known as behavioral genetics which is the sort of Science of your your your personality and everything about who you are being really genetic in origin rather than being learned from your childhood patterns or disturbances in your birth process with forceps or anything else or um you're being being an unwanted pregnancy and so your mother was in a bad mood throughout the whole time and all these all these different things so all right uh Jesse is asking do we see any particular personality type who decides that our type of counseling would be helpful to them I would say high IQ I mean I think we see all across the personality spectrum and and talk to people all the time who we talk to a lot of high conscientious people again because of the what you're talking about with with anxiety um and sort of sort of high conscientious people are just a little more uh tightly wound in that way having you know running into that friction in their environment more frequently um uh but they're also I think there's selection bias just in high conscientious people seeking out therapy at all trying to solve their problems rather than just relax into them um so yeah I I don't think there's any kind of universal type at all that seeks us out or benefits from us apart from intelligent obviously yeah it's the people that are not uh heavily invested in whining and trying to figure out how to to how to duck the competitive problems and suck down uh resources and being padded on the head for just surviving uh if you are locked into that then this this you take one sniff of us and it then you have no interest in us okay so no we're we're about actually uh looking carefully at opportunities that are being lost and so we're here to discover opportunities that you have to be more effective in either changing your environmental circumstances in some way or making you personally more competitive with greater knowledge and skill with respect to the competitive domains that you're facing that's what we're here to do we're out here to improve your life not just you know uh suck your insurance money while we we stir around stories of your childhood and why why your life is such a miserable failure now we're not interested in that at all so people that are that have inherent investment in that for reasons that we will detail in our book at length that those individuals are not gonna this doesn't that sound warm and fuzzy this sounds like a bunch of work [Laughter] I mean we will talk Doug and I will talk uh sometimes that this is this is more like uh you know going back to sort of gender stereotypes this is like the advice your dad would give you instead of the you know sit down and have a cup of tea with Mom kind of counseling that you would get you know mom just wants to talk about your feelings and that must be really hard honey and you know but you know that that's that's the kind of problem solver and bringing in this kind of Fix-It energy so we both do that I I am a little more mom-like in the sense that I I will be a little the The Landing the landing's a little less rough with me as far as say I I've I've often referred to my father was famous for this phrase handle it so he would you know if any of us ever complained about anything that we were having trouble with then this was sort of a later in adolescence thing he would just get this sort of disgusted look and be like yeah I handle it just kind of suck it up handle it make it work fix it it's like it's like what's the big deal what's what's your meowing gonna do about it so um Doug has a little more of that I get there eventually but I take a more scenic route yeah yeah we had a question from a couple of weeks ago um there are people referring in the Q a to how their question wasn't answered last week that they asked you guys we have a backlog that goes months like we're we're getting like some of these questions were asked you know last summer that we haven't gotten to so we just kind of meander around and we get to things in whatever order we get to them we try to sort of answer a variety in all of these q and A's but there's no there's no policy and there's no real logic to how we do it so there's no way to cut the line um but the new system with the with the up voting and the sort of collective wisdom we'll see how that works um and if we don't like it we'll get rid of it basically is how that will happen um but this one was interesting this one was uh why are some individuals highly camera shy and typically end up looking awkward and uncomfortable in nearly every photo both my older brother and I are very camera shy and he's actually quite handsome while our younger brother is photogenic and super comfortable being photographed this has plagued us since childhood so I'm very curious um I mean you go ahead yeah I mean I think mostly that just it has to do with sort of the the general agreeableness Dimension and a little bit of narcissism being more comfortable in front of the camera and posing and having your photo taken and all of those things I think the the hyper agreeable people are going to have a harder time um you know sort of being being frozen in time with that moment and being judged on their merits and are going to be a little more awkward in that whole process that's the that's the main thing that occurs to me there I know also some people just are um uh with with photos a lot of people will become more comfortable with iterations so it's sort of in a and it's exposure therapy problem I I want gold stars for that pun that was that was the pun of the night um so if you just have have enough experience kind of posing you get over that awkwardness after some amount of time so that you'll see like early photos of people who have become very famous they're very very awkward and they've just become much more comfortable in front of the camera and don't don't have that kind of process anymore but I think the general difference that you're going to see just across the bell curve of the personality Moe's knocking over my studio again is rooted mostly mostly in the agreeableness disagreeableness slash narcissistic Dimension Allen was always really comfortable with part of the camera love to pose yeah uh Alan is very disagreeable for those of you who have not heard us talk about him before he's like about as disagreeable as as the tests can measure disagreeableness so yeah that everybody that's my friend since uh we were eight years old so I've now actually put up with this guy for more than half a century so we know what we're talking yeah even an eight years old perfectly comfortable with yeah no problem yep no you got it yeah yeah I think especially when you see it in kids that that is uh that direct personality attribute is just revealed by that process I mean that was sort of the the cockier kids are just gonna be like well yes take my photo and the Shire more sort of you know agreeable kids who don't want to cause conflict don't want to make a spectacle of themselves are more retiring and I know the person who asked this question I know that she is hyper agreeable yes yes all right what else are you interesting um so we have this caddy competitiveness among two close girlfriends with 25-year difference in age um what what to do if the if uh circuit flooding doesn't work why do we compete in every single domain right being choosing to be writer happy does not work in the Heat of the Moment I expect my older friend to be wiser so yeah it's agreeable yeah yeah fundamentally not knowing more details here um so but yeah I think if you're if you're running into sort of that General Relentless caddy competitiveness that's a chronic feature of a friendship just like any other relationship it's going to be that equilibrium of behavior is rooted in an equilibrium of personalities and so yeah somebody in that equation is disagreeable doesn't ever feel that life is fair always wants to Chisel away a little bit more um but yeah we don't know we don't know the details I think this person this was one of the people who was saying that they had asked questions that weren't answered which I'm not sure which questions those were we have lots of questions about competitiveness so yeah one one other interesting little process though and that is how the person judges your value to them in terms of alignment okay so people align their lives and little Napoleonic columns that's how Napoleon did war you didn't go sideways even this way okay and so the um and that's kind of how humans are they'll line up in columns and if it turns out that you've got this competitiveness uh with somebody you know this sort of disagreeable engine competitiveness then they're not exactly on your team they're not you're not okay yeah who's that's Mellie right no that's the most stranger danger bark oh okay all right I think my name probably is getting ubereats or something the um anyway so the point is is that like uh I have a I have a friend that has a fair amount of disagreeableness and you know it's Larry who yeah I love the guy uh but he and I it has always been almost like 99 almost never have any competitive friction once in a blue moon uh but I mean it's in in 20 years it's almost non-existent so even though trust me if I go out to a restaurant with them I'm going to be uncomfortable about how he's going to treat the waitress and the tip he's going to leave my God I I have had to go back and give servers a bigger tip after he like sits there and counts out dollar bills like gets out his calculator no no more than 15.000 percent yeah it's better to be 14.9 than 15.1 oh man yeah yeah so plenty disagreeable uh but we're in alignment okay so therefore I don't feel any of those things uh so yeah I think that that's uh but in general exactly I mean the first thing we notice is that if we've it would be almost impossible to have two uh essentially friendly uh agreeable people that were actually friends so that they were uh in other words two two agreeable friendly people could be locked in competition with each other okay let's uh let's uh you know they're both nice people uh and and one of them was the the prettiest girl in the secretary pool and now the new one comes and she's a little prettier well this is going to be a tough situation okay this could be a tough situation it might not be but it could be because there could be inherent competitive problems there that could make a friendship that are difficult but let's suppose that a friendship is has developed uh but there is a friendship so I forget where I was going with this it's those two people are going to have almost no competitive friction at all so it's just not going to be endemic to that so if there's competitive friction all it takes is one disagreeable okay you you can be pretty agreeable yourself that if you're in a relationship with somebody that's disagreeable you'll find yourself getting hit over the head dragged into competitive processes and it's just uncomfortable and difficult so if that's what your situation is get the disagreeable distance and see if your life improves yeah cut that person down from once a week to every other week or you know from twice a week to every other whatever in other words reduce the dose of that person and see whether or not your existence improves that's how you check yeah and stop expecting them to know better I mean that that sort of implication and the question I expect my older friend to be wiser that's a that's a huge mistake that we make when you know it's like uh uh we we anticipate that someone is we have this egocentric bias that if they're educated in the same way that we are and they they've gone up the learning curve just like we have that they're going to adjust their behavior in the same way that that we would and people just don't this is why we're always recommending the um how I found freedom in an unfree World by Harry Brown that's sort of the Bible for uh recognizing that people really uh you're you're not entitled to any certain behavior from anybody and nobody's entitled to any particular kind of behavior from you all you can do is uh evaluate in real terms what you're getting in the Dynamics of the relationship as it is she's following up in the chat saying we're both disagreeable what do we do then we don't want to reduce the dose oh too bad then you guys just suffer yeah that's uh yeah that sounds like you're I uh it's a it's some sort of disagreeable Vortex you know race race to the bottom of the swamp it's like where you're just gonna this is like if you were a romantic relationship with two disagreeable people it's never going to you're just chiseling and chiseling and chiseling and nobody ever feels it's fair and everybody always feels that they're owed something more than they're getting and it's like you just never get to enjoy your experience in your life so um that's yeah we're always recommending we have this paradoxical recommendation for disagreeable people which is to find more agreeable people to mate with and be friends with and work with but at the same time we advise agreeable people not to get paired up with disagreeable people because they're gonna get chiseled so it's sort of a it's it's a little bit paradoxical but in your case you you can't expect her to be any different um you you know you're disagreeable and so this what you what you see is what you get with this relationship this is Groundhog Day over and over and over again that the sort of micro experiences inherent to your Dynamic are the stuff of that relationship and they will continue to be forever it's incredibly stable because the personality itself is incredibly stable so it's not to say that somebody can't go through some kind of life-altering experience that shifts their perspective in some profound way these things can occasionally happen um usually behind some massive tragedy so we're not going to wish for that to happen to either of you but for the most part it's sort of it's just very stable and it sounds pretty unpleasant so yeah it is what it is she's tough enough yeah handle it there we go [Laughter] yeah yeah who's prettier who's healthier who's smarter yeah I I mean that just sounds bad that just sounds like an unpleasant experience and so it's it's up to you to get realistic about that cost benefit analysis on that friendship and you know what are you what are you getting out of this relationship why are you there what are you trying to prove what's you know it's like this it just doesn't sound like it's beneficial to anybody they only got a hundred thousand hours right are the hours with that individual the best use of that hour that you can come up with yeah that's that's sometimes uh we we don't want to make the investment of going through a process of finding somebody else that would be better okay uh and that goes with a job it goes with a romance okay so same kind of problems that we have we're running a CB on that uh I would say that that uh well just in principle the the the the only thing that Psychotherapy can do the only thing that it is is the removal of distortion and uh it is likely to be although it isn't guaranteed it is likely to be a distortion that the best use of your time and energy is having repeated competitive conflicts over pretty or smarter and whatever else it is with some other individual that that that would be unlikely that that would be the best life experience uh within a reasonable cost benefit domain so if you lived on a desert island and that was the only person you'd be like thank God they're here they're the only insurance policy I've got and if they're a competitive [ __ ] and it's a pain in the asset a lot of our conversations she's still an awful lot better than nothing okay but if we start uh start thinking differently about what value she brings to the table as Jen says and then what what is the cost of replacement okay what kind of investment do we need to make and what would be reasonably expect and uh if it turns out that you know it's unlikely that's the best investment of your time but it might be you know I don't know what your competitive standing and your options are and so that that is an unknown but it sounds uh I I'd rather have no friend than that friend quite frankly yeah I think this is something I hear this a lot with with um women in adult friendships with other women too I think there's this I I just had this conversation with some clients in the last week that there's this kind of um you don't have this expectation that this friendship is sort of likely to run its course just like most romances will so it's sort of you don't you don't have that built-in expectation so you when you when the when the thing starts to deteriorate as far as this cost-benefit analysis I think we can be a little slow to recognize that that is the case and this maybe is true for all friendship but definitely Between Women this is very true and so you just you're kind of like yeah but we have this great history together and we had all these fun times and we were really it was like things were great we've known each other for 20 years but you're slowly starting to get this data that you know the sexual experience that I'm having is not that not that great like I'm not enjoying these hours with this person um every interaction we have feels kind of sharp and competitive and gross and I'm not enjoying this time but especially you know for for agreeable people this isn't your situation for the questioner but for agreeable people it can take quite a while to come to terms with that and then especially if you're if you're a woman over you know 35 kind of out of college not having a lot of other friendship opportunities you're like God am I going to do any better like if this person really knows me they've been in there for so long they've been there through all of these things in my life all these processes um and so it can be can be really intimidating to just think about walking away from that friendship but a lot of it is because you just haven't come to terms with the fact that that cost benefit analysis isn't working for you anymore and it just takes a certain amount of evidence just like it doesn't any other relationship and and so you're in the process of accumulating it um this follow-up question is that maybe maybe uh as an older woman she's becoming more status deficient with age um that could be true that could be contributing to a shift in the Dynamics between the two of you but that is what it is and so like how long are you going to keep hanging in there and just watching this happen so you really have to evaluate your your role and your responsibility in this relationship and and you want to blame her and perhaps she does have some blame that you are the person who has the parakeet that can walk out of it yeah the this is a concept around a hundred thousand hours and and that is like I'm in complimenting her non-stop really sounds like a bunch of work now the um the the notion here if you've got got a hundred thousand hours left give or take okay maybe it's two hundred thousand maybe it's fifty thousand who knows but it's limited and you can never get the hours back so if you just had two hours of a mediocre conversation in a restaurant uh with this with this individual and like you walked out of there kind of edgy and a little bit irritated and then recycling what you could have said to defend your uh resume in some area and then trying to compliment her to tone down her competitiveness like really um it's it's not a tragedy when people um essentially make mistakes of time and energy investment in their life and and live a lesser life it's not a tragedy at all it's just kind of how it happens so there there's there's been a lot of uh great athletes that in the NFL that never got to the Super Bowl oh well just never did that was the circumstances okay so life doesn't have to be some magical process of perfection uh in in any in any way and it's not guaranteed and it's not a given all we have is we've got our senses our feelings to tell us you know don't step in the dog manure okay if there's a big ugly looking animal out there or you hear ugly sound don't go into the woods okay and another thing is if I'm having an unpleasant existence in my relationship with somebody for God's sake consider getting the hell out I don't care what it is I don't care if it's a 35-year marriage I don't care if we're on that for I don't care if we're on the eve of our golden wedding anniversary you're still looking at the same limited time okay and so that that's my attitude my attitude is it's not a tragedy to there's nothing Noble about keeping some relationship that's mediocre at all zero as we talked last time I think last week or so I talked about somebody what do I owe my aging father is disagreeable nothing okay so the uh yeah so the idea here is the it's not a tragedy to screw this life up at all okay all we're here to do is to tell you wait a second you know what let's not be intimidated by some algorithms that are hanging over possibly from the Stone Age they basically say we we you know every friendship's valuable and so therefore we got to hold on to it even if it's mediocre and then being possibly influenced by not only egocentric biases that aren't reading uh things accurately about what could or should change with feedback but also Blank Slate crap that you hear from every quarter of of the Universe telling you about how you can change or they can change you can modify this or not forget it it's Groundhog Day relationships have the tone that they have it is a recurrent emergent process of two fixed genetic personalities it will they will come up over and over again okay and so the question is do you want to replay those experiences with a new iteration that's why I love talking to Jan Hawke I feel like one of my favorite Saturday Night Live things was Germans love David Hasselhoff that was such a great bit yeah I love talking to Jen Hawk oh that's never gonna not be that way it's an emergent property it happens every time okay and so in the same way we want to be seeking relationships of those kinds where there's that where we're enjoying the process as much as we can and got you know sometimes it's so so not between Jen and I but sometimes things are relationships are so so some days and some days they're really good but the point is is on balance as we look at the whole process is it on balance good good if it's on balance kind of lousy hey you know the uh Harry Brown says something about this somewhere in this book he said you know basically take yourself seriously and take your life seriously in other words wait a minute what am I doing here why am I allowing unpleasant circumstances to continue and uh and and really think through what what can I do to pull this weed uh because this whole thing is going to be better if that weeds come we've all felt the relief of getting out of something out of a relationship that was actually fundamentally lousy okay and there's no relief like it like God I don't have to do that anymore that's amazing all right yeah uh and you don't you don't have to the disagreeable egocentric bias that you have to make a big break and you have to make a big speech and do this whole kind of thing you don't all you have to do is like start just pulling back a little bit just fade fade a little bit don't answer the phone quite as quickly and and kind of wait for them to get the catch a drift I mean I did that with my most disagreeable uh friend so-called friend who Doug knows well that is sort of there was an initial little like you know a fit was thrown and then everybody recalibrated and I felt great relief being free of that really chiseling relationship so so yeah this is you don't it doesn't have to be a big deal unless you make it a big deal and it's your life and it's your time yeah yeah we have lots of other questions that I think well we're already a little we're already out yeah we had a couple of people asking if we take insurance we do not um no no uh yeah sorry about that um all right we don't I don't think either of us are seeing people in person at this time either um yeah I we did it true north but neither of us is at True North in any meaningful capacity so we're just looking for any other little little quick ones that we can knock out but yeah there's some there's big big stuff but we'll just have to save that thanks sweet things stop that's what we like Jen yeah yeah um the Natasha has a great question about uh heritability um and we can maybe save that for the podcast too we actually there is Natasha a podcast for Doug in particular goes really deep on what heritability is and how to understand it and what that 50 is and how it's calculated with additive genetic factors and the difference between shared and non-shared environment and all of that um so I'm not sure offhand what episode it is but it's within the last six months probably so I would search the beat your genes.org for the the sort of question titles there we're going to index it one of these days Jen well we're sort of with the with the new thingy the new the new question thingy it's getting close to an index it's going to be a searchable index of all of the questions that have sub been submitted through this website not all of the beat your genes questions but we're we're slowly trying to get that wrangled and organized but it's quite an undertaking so cool yeah yeah all right all right well you're looking very spiritual over there yeah I know that the dog knocked down the light again so the the irony is that this whole Space is very it's like all this like I've got the little fireplace thing and I've got all the little lamps and the LED candles and everything but it's not great light for Zoom so um but uh yeah it'd be really good I should get back in the astrology business I mean my crystal ball it was fabulous uh well I I hope all is well in Sacramento say hi to all of your quadrupeds for me I sure will all right all right we'll see you next time all right everyone have a good night bye
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