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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-03-11
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foreign hello hey can you hear me yeah okay all right I think we're actually Behavior barely got here on time typical [Laughter] super super typical all right we've only got 10 folks in here so let's give it a minute before we get started that's because we're we don't want to be too relentlessly on schedule that would be terrible all right um okay so this is gonna be our first q a where we can actually use the question tool on the website that we have so um we definitely I have it sorted um just just so people know I think a lot of people don't necessarily they haven't played around and figured out that you can um sort the questions yourselves so you can uh if you click where it's green and it says order by uh it'll give you a little pop-up and then you can you can sort it by new you can sort of buy a number of votes you can sort it by which ones are answered um you know that's that's all up to you so it's not the the default list uh is not necessarily what you're stuck with so um so sorting it by votes we have we have several that have gotten a lot of votes um our top question has 14 votes so we'll definitely go with that um and there are some others that uh have also been uploaded that are that are interesting so we'll get to that and then we'll see what comes up live and we'll try to kind of go back and forth a little bit I've got all kinds of I continue to have really exciting technical problems this week so including Zoom forcing me to upgrade to a new version of Zoom that I don't know as well and why would they move things why would they they get everybody all covered conditioned to a certain version of zoom and then move things around okay so that's the chat let me move that up all right well I guess I can't see any more than that at a time so Doug's in charge of the chat okay all right so uh the first question the one that had the most votes the 14 votes is uh how do people know if they have distortions um and then the the longer version of the question says that you know we in a previous episode of a q a um we had mentioned or I had mentioned that meditation can help people high in conscientiousness or neuroticism control for their distortions I don't know if I meant that if I said that that was I was misspeaking a little it's not that it helps you it helps you just become sort of more aware of uh you know what in a lot of meditation circles we call the monkey mind so sort of you can have this you can develop this Discerning position where you can kind of watch yourself spin out on things if you're high in neuroticism or or if you're really prone to that kind of um you know really uh cycling thinking around a problem it can be just be helpful to watch yourself do that meditation is a very good tool um so my question is how do people find out or know if they have distortions this is something that they can figure out for themselves or would they need a consult with someone like us to find out what they are then the second part of the question people may have been voting on this too I've noticed that when people ask about books on the Big Five personality by Daniel nettle is never mentioned I was just curious why we don't recommend this book I don't know that book I haven't read that book so I haven't recommended it because I'm not familiar with it not because I'm opposed to it so I don't know about Doug but uh so we can we can just jump in what uh what do you think about this um um let's see I think the the first the first order of business is to understand the nature of distortion so the it's going to turn out that it's not a question of whether or not you have distortions it you you have a great a great deal of distortion so it it's um let me explain what it is that you have and then we're going to figure out what where Distortion goes from there your your nervous system's job is to uh in principle let's talk about in principle um what what is you would like in principle you would like to be omniscient about everything that is uh of any value to you so you'd like to know uh if you if if there wasn't any way to possibly stop it that you would be dying of prostate cancer not you gen that would be me at at 97 okay so if I knew that that were true I could arrange a tremendous amount of my life uh uh in other words more accurately about how it even if I wasn't omniscient if that's all that I knew that would be incredibly useful so I could arrange my financial affairs I could I could essentially amortize out all different kinds of problems in other words I I would look at putting solar panels on my roof because I know I was going to be alive that long all kinds of uh things would change if I knew something okay that I don't now know so I have no idea when I'm going to die I have no idea it could be today or it could be literally in theory it could be as much as 50 years from now so I I that that's an enormous variance of possibility and so because I might die today I have life insurance for people that I care about okay so whether the beneficiaries on the other hand uh I'm not really thinking I'm likely to live to 111 so I don't have any of this uh long-term insurance for you know that I'm going to be bedridden for 15 years Etc I'm not worried about that so I don't think that's very likely so the point is is that the uh my estimation of how long I'm going to live and how this goes down is undoubtedly distorted so therefore I don't have a precise estimation on that I have a floating one that I actually sample from uh in my mind's eye what what's one of one thing that I think could be and then what's another thing that I think it could be and so I'm bouncing around running computations on those things uh in order to estimate the uh the costs and benefits associated with being aware of the worst case scenario I.E it just so happens that I've got a life insurance uh payment due sitting on my desk that I have to make a decision on and I'm probably gonna up it for one more year for various incendiary reasons okay so as Jen knows I have a number of incompetent you have a clan you have an extended clan that depends on you some of them are four-legged some of them are two-legged so the point is point is is that uh you're you're making guesses so now so the question is you're making guesses about all kinds of things the um and your so your your job as an animal is to use your five senses uh you have actually three tools that will help inform you about your situation vis-a-vis reality uh those three tools are are number one your five senses or if you're some other animal and you can pick up electromagnetic radiation like some birds can or magnetism to help guide your flight then you have six okay but Deepak Chopra doesn't have another sense that can tell him you know some things about the forces in the universe um so the point is is that you've got your five senses and then you have your uh innate neural circuits that you were born with uh created by evolution in order to help you make sense of the data that the five senses bring in so the five senses are just bringing in you know patterns light glancing off objects your your innate uh knowledge base can recognize the fact that uh some things move and then they move as a whole and therefore I know that it's an animal and I can estimate its size and I can estimate its size relative to me etc etc there's all kinds of knowledge that you didn't learn that you all actually already knew in other words it's part of the existing Hardware that comes it's knowledge about the uh about situations that is that data hits goes from the sensory system uh and then into your brain it activates neural circuits that tells you about the nature of your relationship between you and the environment you don't have to learn as a little child when you step out of the door uh of your front door in Minnesota you don't have to learn that it's quote cold okay you have the nervous system that tells you it's freaking freezing cold before you even know the word for it okay and so you are aware that you want to go back inside where it's warm so that's a that's any acknowledge and it's extremely important uh knowledge because it's a knowledge about what we're going to call values so values are are the nature of a relationship between you and the environment where that that nature has some kind of statistical association with your likelihood of survival reproduction so if it's something is of absolutely no value to you uh then it had it it is a feature of reality that has no relationship between you and the survival your survival and reproduction so a great many things that are of no value to you you literally have a sensory system that can't pick them up so there's types of wavelengths of radiation that are going through you right now that have no influence whatsoever on your ability to survive or reproduce and therefore you don't have a sensory system that can pick them up because they're literally not important okay you can pick up the uh the section of the electromagnetic spectrum that that comes from the Sun and you will feel it as heat and it's useful okay so and if there's too much of it uh then it's a certain level it starts to be deleterious to your survival we call that being too hot and if it's if you're cooler and it quote feels good then that's because it's increasing your likelihood of survival so your uh now so now I it is a long uh explanation but the point is is that we can't speak intelligently about the question unless we actually understand what it is that we're we're attempting to figure out so you you have so now I've covered two of the three sources of uh of the system that enable you to evaluate or understand the nature of your situation vis-a-vis reality so the third one is your memory system so your memory system uh is the the memory of sensory events and so uh so as a result you've got events inside of your you've cataloged data that is relevant to your ability to survive or reproduce that includes for example remembering the name of George Bernard Shaw in a quote why because it was a very intelligent pithy quote and therefore it has some utility to you to show off with the girls later or the boys or or your professor or something else or it had a lesson in it that was actually possibly useful to Aid your decision making in the future so the quote that I love from him is uh if you're gonna tell people the truth make them laugh or they'll kill you okay that that is an extremely intelligent insight into human nature that's our guiding principle the new podcast we recorded last night by the way [Laughter] which is why that's undoubtedly why I'm thinking of it right now so the the the the subtlety and intelligence of the the memory system is stunning and it has the ability to file uh information and your experiences and to slot them so that it they will be called up when sensory data reminds you or as similar as correlation coefficients with the what happened to you either good or bad uh in the past so now we see what you are you're an animal that is faced with the fact that you are or you're going to have incomplete information about your uh situation relative to reality for all I know there's some lady around the block here who would be really into me and I'd be really into her and we'll never meet why because I don't know that she's there and she doesn't know that I'm here this is like a tragedy by the way just as I'm thinking of it is take take one of your many uh cats out for a walk around the block you know go go uh go we I've I've committed to not using the phrase fish where the fish are anymore because it's so it's so you know anti-vegan um I think with AJ it's like pick pick uh you know carrots in the garden or you know we're trying to come up with a substitute flowers or the flowers are but yeah take your cats for a walk maybe you know if she's if she's your soul mate she's a cat person so she'll she'll be walking her cast too ah the point is is that your uh you are always guessing and so you are always under distortion so your for example your um first of all as a human being your your uh your genetic code is only so good it actually distorts sensory data in order to make it more valuable for you so it it so for example some of the edges that you will see in a room are actually being superimposed uh with the way that your eye and your optic nerve and your optic area of the brain is constructed in order to make sure that you see edges okay uh that just happens to be a way that the nervous system is constructed so the nervous system is not designed to actually be absolutely accurate it's absolutely it's designed to be adaptive which is a different thing so colors for example are not some true representation of real colors in the universe they are actually they're actually creations of your nervous system in order to superintose pose contrasts on different chemical elements uh in order to make uh you more uh to make certain things more Salient so your red and green for example are extremely close to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum but they look very different because in evolution when those very slight differences in chemistry of plants um from the difference between green to Red those were important signals for human beings to change their decision making and so as a result those have been uh those different uh chemicals or the colors uh or the the electromagnetic radiation that's going to bounce off of those those things are going to be that's super important so your nervous system makes it Super Hyper you've got all known you've seen what this is like when you can have a a for example a a charcoal drawn graph or something or or a picture and then somebody comes along and they colorize it and then oh well now I can see the rabbit and now I can see the tree and now I can see the Easter eggs where you couldn't really see them when it was all in charcoal so by using Color to contrast uh objects you suddenly your nervous system becomes massively more efficient okay and so in that same way that's one of the reasons you evolved color vision other animals didn't do that it's not because there's real colors there it's because it's a it's a a way for the nervous system to actually be more effective and and reduce your Distortion about your inferences about what it is that you're looking at because now you can see that things are not all all part of one object actually there's three objects there because there's been a chemical difference between those two and now you can pick it up because you've got color vision so all right it's about time to try to circle around this person's core question the issue is is that your nervous system uh and also briefly before we get to this and that is your memory system is absolutely going to cause you to have distortions so if you if you are driving along and you speed along at 88 miles an hour all the time and you've never had an auto accident and you've rarely seen one then the uh then the point is is that you're thinking oh this is perfectly safe okay now it turns out this is a very interesting Distortion and it's one that that pisses me off in a major way which is that people tailgate and uh people tailgate like crazy because they have so bad they don't understand what a dangerous situation they are in and they don't understand it because they've never been in a freeway level accident go ahead Jeff well there's that level of distortion I think a lot of Tailgaters have been in accidents they have cause accidents as a result of their tailgating but they have disagreeableness Distortion which gives them sort of a outsized dose of road rage and so they actually are not able to properly respond to the experience that led them in this causal process to encounter more danger because they have such personality Distortion or you know just excess testosterone or whatever it is so I think a lot of those people do find themselves in accidents just doesn't change their behavior not not in the long term right uh I've actually I I had a I was really pissed off at some person that was tailgating me I don't know 20 years ago and I was really pissed off and I for some reason I couldn't tell what who it was and then sudden then then I don't know maybe it was at night or something and then it turned out I saw it was a very pleasant looking woman that's like I recognized that she wasn't being consciously deliberately pissy she was just completely obtuse and I I had this reaction of you know I kind of wanted to run her off the road and tell her you're incredibly stupid here you have no idea what kind of risks that you're running and that that is common and that's why it's a significant reason why people have a lot of back injuries and keep chiropractors employed is because they are unaware of how fast the the distance closes when you're doing 70 miles an hour okay and so you have very little time to make any decisions at all and therefore uh you're in trouble with your tailgating so I I put about twice as much space in front of me as the average person which gives me a Fighting Chance in case of a sudden disaster that just enough time to make a decision to save myself yeah go ahead I've noticed that I have this new car which has the adaptive cruise control so if you're on the freeway you know it keeps the follow distance kind of consistent if somebody you know merges in front of you or if the traffic slows down it adapts to it's just a great great safety Tech just great safety feature which I was like okay I'm gonna get a new car I want that but what I've noticed is you can adjust the follow distance so the default is um you know I think like a four second gap between you and the next person which is you know what I tend to I at least do three seconds definitely at highway speeds um but you can adjust it down to a closer follow distance never gets you too close but even when I have it on the closest default follow distance that the all of the the AI that Toyota has brought to bear on this question is able to apply um I constantly have people aggressively coming in front of me and the person next to me because that's a sufficient distance that they're they're irritated they think I'm I'm leaving too much room and so it's just and so then my car Slams on the brakes and pulls me back from that for it's really interesting it's uh it's it's I was thinking of distortion and driving the other day because I was watching several distortions intersect at once where the the neighborhood that I live in the the uh the speed the speed limit is 25 almost everywhere in this area and it's this is a joke nobody's going 25 it's like 45 minimum and if you're going 45 you're still having people tailgating and irritated and I find myself with my agreeableness Distortion being pushed into speeding in this Zone like obviously above 25 but considerably above 25 because I have people that are clearly irritated behind me it's it's single Lane traffic they're trying to push me up the hill and the other day I passed by a cop and I'm like it would just be my luck that I'd be the one to get the ticket because my agreeableness Distortion is like rolling over for this this [ __ ] behind me who doesn't want to do anything resembling the speed limit so these are ways that you know you have dispersion like where are you where are you meeting with frustration repeatedly in your life that it seems like this is fine for everybody else but it's a problem for me like why why am I special you're you're you've got some Distortion in your perception and your personality and your experience all of these things that we're talking about driving is a really great kind of like uh you know playing field for all of those things to be really visible yeah so now what we're going to do you understand that if you now you can understand how this would change potentially if you have two or three accidents and now it turns out that you you now have learned and now your memory system is aiding your ability to recompute what it is that you're really looking at for risk analysis um so any any tragedy is a wake-up call or any major loss about a a vulnerability and your ability to estimate what your real circumstances were okay so the uh so you may you may have uh being in a neighborhood where you just don't even lock the door and then because you're thinking yeah what are the odds and you know that and there's a one percent chance a year that you could that you that they could come into your house and you sort of compute that as effectively zero and then so one day you leave then you come back and your house is going to ransack it's like well now what's going to happen what's going to happen is is that you are now going to recompute that whole issue and you're probably going to get a security system so your your memory system doesn't that that ransacking doesn't happen and then you forget about it an hour later your memory system now is is informing your estimation of the situation that you find yourself in so when you wake up on Thursday morning after it's all been put together in your friendly insurance agent has cut you a check and you bought some new whatever it was uh the point is is that the uh now you but now you've you've got a new estimating system now the truth is is that you're probably now overestimating the likelihood so now we would call that PTSD okay so I I don't even like to call PTSD I call it post-traumatic stress response rather than disorder it's not a disorder okay it's a post-traumatic stress response so now your nervous system is going to overestimate the statistical probability of the tragedy so if you've been assaulted okay or you've been ransacked or something terrible has happened you just got fired okay uh for no pause that you could see you're now overestimating as you go into the next place that something like that is going to happen again that would be reasonable in other words the system the system essentially May underestimate the tragedy and then it's going to overestimate a tragedy and then later on down the road at some period of time it's probably more accurate and you could say well how do you know it's underestimated or overestimated and the answer is I I don't okay but the point is is we can if we longer we live we usually can get a better feel for these space rates uh in other words How likely something is to happen something's churning in your head Jim I just I just all wade into this territory and we've said it before but it's such an important point that you're you're overestimating but not not completely like it's not an unreasonable overestimate it's it's within some sort of boundaries of what your nervous system uh thinks is a similar set of circumstances so um and this is this is personality specific too so some people are going to have sort of a narrower estimate and other people are going to be much more sort of freaked out by things that are tangentially related to the incident but I always think of the centipede in Maui you know it's sort of like I was I was bitten by this nasty insect that was living inside the couch at the house um and I'm not nervous about all couches I'm nervous about that couch under those circumstances like I I kind of gave it a wide berth for the rest of the time that I was there I didn't want to nap on it you know I was I always kind of did a quick little inspection I put it up on little lifts so the vacuum could go underneath it like all these kinds of things so but I don't go around like freaked out to sit on all furniture anywhere even in Hawaii you know all Hawaiian furniture sure is not equally sort of risky so people are you're you're just Gathering additional data like how fine-tuned can I make my assessment of the risk analysis of is this thing going to happen to me again under under how exactly precise replicated conditions does it have to be for me to invest some some anxiety into it and that that's a range God that's beautiful that's exactly that's exactly how this works so that and remember behind all of what we're talking about is the the what the mind is attempting to do with with all of its tools with its uh sensory system its memory system and it's in a genetic value system all those three systems are designed by nature to try to give you an accurate picture uh not of reality but actually something much more complex and nuanced and fascinating which is an accurate depiction of your relationship to reality uh with respect to everything in reality of it is a value or threat to you that is actually what your nervous system is designed to do and if you were to ask the question do I have distortions the answer is oh my god do you have distortions you have distortions all over the place you don't have any idea uh you know what those distortions are all you you all you carry with you is the very best estimates that all of those three tools can actually triangulate on and they're pretty good so I don't bump into a table too often amazingly once in a while all because I'm so broad shoulder everybody such excessive masculine traits you just that's barely just like a cartoon character moving things amazing Popeye but better balance the while I actually bang my shoulder into a door jamb and I I don't even know kind of why that happens I think uh uh but but it probably happens five times a year like in The Matrix that's what it is the only explanation whenever it happens I actually think uh uh I remember pausing I think some recent time when that happened I was puzzled and I think maybe I had gotten up and then moved quickly out of a room and I was actually slightly disoriented behind a little bit of orthostatic hypotension or something so I was like a slightly out of kilter and and for some reason I was aiming to the right to the door instead of the lap or into the middle for some reason maybe to save a little time because I was going into the kitchen and I knew I was going to be going to uh a counter on the right side I don't know what it was but some set of circumstances and I brought my shoulder and it wasn't a trivial bump it's like that's pretty amazing that I could make a mistake of that magnitude and so the uh so the point is is that your your nervous system does its very best it's usually outstanding and all kinds of things um but it for for many things that are more complex and chancy it's going to have a lot of mistakes okay and so uh uh so as a result now what's happening in the world by the way today is that um and incidentally the more mistakes you make the more tragedies occur and the greater the losses that you experience so the better your information is about reality the less tragedies you're going to have and also the less time and energy you will waste so you can imagine how how bizarre it would be if you knew exactly what investments to make it would be the most you could literally become extremely wealthy starting with one dollar in the next 24 hours okay you know that's that's if you were accurate enough about the nature of reality you would literally take that dollar and by tomorrow morning you'd have the 50 billion dollars okay you'd be trading every three seconds you know exactly what to trade to that stuff would go up and then it would go down two seconds later and you traded to something else uh that that so if you think about that that's kind of a bizarre concept our concept here is we've got uh you can imagine that any significant decisions of your existence you're gonna want to try to figure out how to reduce your distortions now one of those things so you're going to want to you know marriage part of this romantic Partners major Investments career issues career decisions childhood rearing issues Health decisions these are major uh decision making uh Investments and so therefore those are the ones that we're going to want to reduce our distortions on as much as we can and so one of the distortions is where is my either my personal life experience bizarre and therefore likely unlikely to be underestimating or overestimating tragedy and where uh and also where is my personality bizarre because a bizarre personality is going to be a personality that also sets you up for making uh errors that uh that are less uh but a less bizarre personality uh would would be less likely to make so the personalities that are bizarre that would be highly subject to mistake would be very uh low IQ people so low IQ people uh if you're a low IQ person listening to this I'm not sure what to be done but you aren't a low IQ person because you're not you're not here you're not aside okay child for some strange reason then you know that you're gonna need to simplify their existence and make major decisions for them in order to reduce their likelihood of tragedy okay that would make sense and that's what you do with children the uh because children are effectively low IQ uh in other words they're not very smart when they're five years old oh no not my kid my kid's smarter than me now you're just a grandstanding human that's trying to show off your kids genes your five-year-old is not smart five-year-old would make tragic mistakes uh if left alone you know in the middle of Bangkok whereas you probably wouldn't and now the um so low IQ or low intelligence uh it's uh obviously but we're not worried about that so we're looking at the big five openness if you're highly open you need to understand that you are likely to underestimate tragedy so pay attention people uh related to Jen Hawk when you're about to float down the Yangtze River blindfolded Mekong but yeah whatever it wasn't the Snake River Canyon on a nice group uh with a nice group of people from the Sierra Club okay some Smugglers from Southern China yeah stuff like that don't I don't recommend it oh good times in retrospect though goodness openness distortions yeah nothing else is is dangerous okay so one of my favorite stories was uh Richard Halliburton the the writer Royal wrote the romance writing the 1920s and 30s as a travel writer one of the original travel writers you know is super open to experience dude you know I don't know kiss the princess of Monaco and you know did all kinds of wacky things and then he died sailing a Chinese junk on South China Sea at about age 39. oh well you know you you play roulette with your whole sack of chips long enough and it's gone so the uh when I when I recently read and the Sea will tell on your recommendation I it was amazing like watching this protagonist who finds herself in this relationship with this charismatic sociopath um and you know leads her into Misadventures across the Pacific on this you know barely see worthy vessel and and getting all wrapped up and eventually prosecuted for double homicide um and I'm watching this going I am but for the grace of God go High I mean she and I are very similar personality wise and I certainly was in many situations that had my charismatic sociopath been inclined toward homicide um I could have very well wound up in very similar situations so these are this is the nature of nurture this is this is why we always recommend people um go go read their Robert plummen because the circumstances of your life are not random you're you're getting yourself into certain situations and having certain kinds of events in your life as a result of your personality distortion yeah if you're highly conscientious um then you are overestimating tragedy and the only person that pays the price for this is you so it's all cool and there's really not too much we can do to help you you are um that's fine you're not going to make any big mistakes uh all that's going to happen is that you are you're like a guy that does a fire drill with him and his kids every week okay and it's like well you know that's fine I hope you enjoy the fire drill uh I won't do that but it's you know I can't fault you because quite frankly if I broke out of fire I would be thinking on my feet rather than following a drill so uh that excessive conscientiousness is really not going to hurt you and if you got it um there's really not a whole heck of a lot to be done about it the um if you're low conscientious there's not much to be done about that either the so the openness issue you can use your IQ to just check yourself twice I I knew a man that um basically bankrupted himself and and his family uh his several Brothers all of them went off the cliff together in a major business deal because he did not think through the worst case scenario and uh it was it was actually quite a tragic thing that altered the life landscape of four brothers and it's uh they were all very competent people and yet the the the openness the open one of the four encouraged them all to take what looked like an extremely reasonable risk because it's likely to be very lucrative and they blew the whole thing that it is literally Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and that's what happened and yet it would have been extremely easy to have anticipated that possibility and they should have they should have uh protected themselves against that unbelievable to to see to see four competent people in their 50s uh with a long track record of high intelligent Behavior make a mistake but it's all chalked up to the eye openness okay eye openness is by nature about the very nature of openness itself it is optimistic okay that's effectively what openness is is basically like well I think what's over the next Hill is probably worth worth going and seeing is it's likely to be more interesting than what we have here what's the worst that could happen I might meet my soul mate out walking her cat that's exactly right so that's an issue conscientiousness isn't an issue introversion extroversion really isn't an issue um agreeableness that that's where that's where a big uh a big issue you have to look out for probably the most expensive uh by far the I think the most expensive Distortion is to be highly agreeable the um we can't help you if you are disagreeable you you we will never convince you that that is true you as far as you're concerned you're extremely reasonable but if you are highly agreeable that is the one chance that we have we're mostly stable we can't that's not going to fly but highly agreeable you you can notice that you are distorted when you are consistently in situations uh where you are where you're working harder than everybody else in the environment and you are you're working more you're doing more for less and it's quite a lot and you don't have a lot of time and you're overwhelmed that that is a uh and you don't feel much anger in the world but what you feel is guilt so if guilt sort of dominates your landscape as opposed to anger then you're probably a highly agreeable individual that's being run around blocked by some disagreeable people who are approaching your life and so that that is uh those are the signs to look for and if that's true then you need to uh you know I don't know you need to talk to us yeah because usually remember we can't we can't change your personality but we can take essentially an individualized narrow situation where you're being exploited we can analyze it and make sure that we know that that's true and then we can plot a a set of social interchanges which will change the nature of that negotiated equilibrium and so that that is what it is that we do to try to it's like taking shrapnel out of a womb we we can go and look for the biggest piece of shrapnel we take our tweezers out and we pull that out and sometimes we pull the easiest one first but that's that's what we are attempting to do so I think that's probably the most useful advice we have on Distortion processes does that sound about right to you John yeah we're getting more and more long-winded the the we're getting like one question of one or two questions an episode Distortion is huge though I mean there's a reason I think this had all of the upvotes and we've definitely talked about this on uh you know I just made a note in the question tool that this it's on this episode but we've we've discussed this you know from lots of different angles on lots of different episodes because it's so there is no um this is a this is the task of your lifetime it's sort of discovering the ways in which you're getting reality wrong and how can you sort of work around that in in ways that optimize your happiness that's really all all that we're up to here so there are many many different ways to look at that and think about that which is why it's a sort of an evergreen topic so yeah I don't think there's much more to add at this point we had uh a couple of follow-ups but I think there we've we've more or less addressed to most most of the things that were asked specifically on that so so um I wanted to just to kind of respond to the chat really quickly before we go on to the next thing just with technical stuff so someone was asking about Matt was asking both in the chat in the Q a um how he can stop his late night oatmeal binge sessions is there a physiological urge stemming from our ancestors to cram calories at night in fact we call this the cram circuit and we conditioned cram circuit um and I don't know if that those terms are searchable right now on the question tool if we've if there is an existing question on that but the good news another sort of technical update for everybody is uh just this morning we we've started we've partnered with sort of a an AI driven transcription service that's going to transcribe all of these q and A's and eventually all of the beat your jeans episodes and everything else that we're doing uh to be searchable and ideally eventually with time stamps and everything else so we're finally catching up and getting that done um and we have definitely discussed the condition cram um in great exhaustive detail several times I would look at Chef AJ episode uh she might have some links to that um and otherwise uh just wait wait a little a week or two and we'll have those transcripts up so um just wanted to catch that person up on that and let everybody know that we're heading that direction so we're joining the uh I don't know at least the 20th century at this point I think I have a webinar conditioned cram you do outside of our website I'm Gustavo yeah yeah it's just on the free side of the website I think that that's under the webinars oh anoki is saying yes it's a gustavo's channel there's a huge a specific webinar on it so that's a great yeah I had forgotten that so yeah so that's uh if there's totally a very good you know very very uh intuitive ancestral argument for that and um basically the way to get out of it is like you're going to break any other addiction you gotta White Knuckle your way through until you've quieted the the conditioned response so you know if I if my dogs freak out every time I pick the keys up off the table because they think they're gonna go for gonna go in the car and go for a ride I just I picked the keys up and I walk around the room you know 30 times in the space of two hours and they eventually stop getting all excited because they've broken the link between those two things so that's that's how you get out of any addictive process and it's not supposed to be easy or feel good and your nervous system is going to scream at you but that's the process the reason why that works is because the nervous system is running probabilities on the truth yes exactly yeah the dogs the first five times they're like every bit of evidence we have is that every time she picks up those keys she's going somewhere and we've got a good chance of going with her you add to the core you you confuse their correlation coefficient by you know you you change the percentage of times that that activity leads to the desired outcome and they're they start to make a different inference um and and we can't help but do the same so yeah yeah all right um I wanted I wanted to get to Kiki's question because I think I promised her we would um I would put a try to sneak it into this uh q a today because she had asked me on AJ a couple of days ago um and I wasn't sure really what the state of the literature was so the original question was something about you know what does that are there personality effects that come from birth order is there anything about birth order that you know is correlated with specific personality characteristics more disagreeableness more conscientiousness and so I I I told everybody that as far as I was aware the state of literature was that that's debunked there's no no real finding there um but then Kiki was asking about only children if there's anything sort of uh specific to Doug's giving me the goose egg I don't think you guys can see it but um that was my that was my feeling but I didn't know for sure if that had actually been looked at and addressed so um wanted to throw that to you everything you've ever heard about birth order older sister younger brother older brother younger sister only child it's all 100 [ __ ] okay there you go yeah I did we we had talked briefly about I can't remember if this was AJ or if this was my Virtual Village where we talked about this but the um the you know one thing that did come to mind that would have there's sort of a link between a person's life experience and their in their birth order is um the likelihood that they would have homosexual genes so there's the sort of the the this hypothesis or this observation in in need of a hypothesis in need of a mechanism that with each successive son a woman has his likelihood of being gay is quite a bit higher um so that is I mean I don't know if we would call that a personality link but it's definitely there's a physiological you know environmental connection and we don't know quite what the mechanism is um and there may be others like that that we haven't discovered yet so um yeah right we stand corrected in other words there's no psychological process what there is is there's physiological processes and we actually believe we do know why that is right we believe it we believe that when women give birth to a male there's a high androgenation of the whole uterine area you know uh by that process of giving birth to a male and then that leads to his sort of a defensive uh kind of essentially a a an immune defensive process that takes place so that the next male is in some females will have some of that those androgens blocked and if enough of those androgens are blocked uh in the in the fetal development then that brain will be tipped over into having essentially a hybrid mating search image uh which means it's going to be it will tip itself into having a female submitting search image which is in fact looking uh being attracted to males so that uh but that is a that is straight uh physiology uh it has nothing to do with things no no pun intended yeah so it doesn't have anything to do with a psychological process so all theories of psychological processes that have anything to do with birth order or actually family processes like you know my dad was controlling or my mother was a controlling person therefore I reacted against it and I became like this all of that is totally untrue right for that we do know uh so and that includes any concepts about birth order so it does turn out that the first child on average is one IQ points higher than subsequent children yes suck it Eric that is probably a derivative of the fact that some women are having children in their late 30s and early 40s and therefore will they'll give birth to a Downs child and so probably if you ruled out that outcome uh if you truncated it you know at a non-downs child then probably that that one point Advantage probably goes to zero or goes to an unbelievably small amount it could even be not even not even with Downs or other mutations but just general mutations over time so you know a 23 year old woman having her first child has fewer mutations you know in her DNA than than the 27 or 31 year old females turns out that that's true yeah you're about what I'm getting at is a one point Advantage is a is extremely small sure a huge Lion Share of it could come up with a very severe defect yeah totally totally but you are absolutely correct that if you have a filed at 22 that child is likely to be a better specimen than if you have a child of 32 okay the differences are small but they get bigger so the point is is that if you have a child at age 40 as opposed to a child at age 20 it has about twice as likelihood of being diagnosed as schizophrenic okay so the uh so in other words the early is better and uh that that's why I've given up yeah yeah this isn't just on the on the female it's not just the egg that yeah this is this is you know also if you're a young female who is having a child with an older male you're running the same the same problem so um yeah so I didn't want to completely you know just Embrace misogyny today it's the same thing I don't know if anybody cares but there's a it's an interesting thing to consider and that is your feelings of sexual attractiveness for people depending upon their age in school you when you look at say a woman that's 40 which sorry sorry about that generally what the hell it's going [Laughter] this is that right now I don't even know what you're pondering over there but I'm preemptively offended well it is is that someone at 40 is going to be less likely to be a fashion model than somebody at 25. uh and that's because of the very very tiny variances that the brain can pick up now so it's also interesting that at about 40 years old that's when males start to be measurably less attractive to females so 41 42 43 44 we could start to see those things well let's think about why that would be well why would it be well it would be because the female uh the guy's still alive he can still impregnate a female when he's 60 but the truth of the matter is her brain is calculating the uh probably multiple things number one is less capable of provisioning less athletic and less likely to survive the next five years but it's also true that his DNA isn't as good it's got more errors in it now when he's 60 than when he was 25. so it's interesting to see that part of the Aesthetics and it's interesting also that a highly attractive woman at 40 is more sexually attractive than a less sexual significantly sexually less sexually attractive woman at 25. the male brain looks at that and says okay the 40 year old has a few more mutations from aging but they have less mutations generally from the basic genetic code so therefore I'd rather go for her than the I'd rather have a 40 year old 10 than a 25 year old seven and and you can imagine that there's a cross point where it's about the same where you can put that that man if he had two choices in ambivalence that it's like wow gee you see what I'm talking about Sharon in the chat says cut the feed and I'm I'm thinking of Faking a technological like oh no we lost Doug everyone I'll try to get him back but does anyone have any other questions I'm just trying to talk about deep biology people and if it did anybody takes it personal you take it personal oh well no no completely completely fair so yeah once you start breaking out the numbers you know #triggered yeah yeah um Dory has very patiently had her hand up and normally we don't do the the hand raising and the panelists thing but um I don't know if she has like an urgent question or if that was an accident um but Dory if you I don't I don't think I can um allow you like your mic is off by default so um go ahead and and I don't think you've posted anything in the chat so if you've got an urgent question you can either put it in the chatter ideally over in the Q a so we can get to that so I just wanted to let you know I do see your little hand but we don't normally do that so um Matt is inviting us to Ireland to do a pleasure trap seminar for which I say absolutely you know as soon as we can get there we're there you know anyone in Australia or New Zealand or Ireland or any of these places where we'll we'll go anywhere and talk about anything if we're invited so yeah we're just waiting for borders to open up we're very exciting we're very excited about that we're both um lamenting the amount of time it's been a whole year since we've been to Australia and we both really miss it so yeah um we speaking of borders opening up uh we had a question the next highest voted question was about vaccines um and let me bring it up here it was basically how can you let me make sure I get her actual question correct I think we have time for this yeah we got a few minutes so I work in higher education and I will soon be eligible to get the vaccine I do not want to get the vaccine at least at this time there's a lot of social pressure to get it however I feel that I will be criticized by colleagues family friends if I tell them I declined how can I navigate through this situation without looking like an anti-vaxxer when colleagues friends and family talk about the vaccine they assume I will get it and I hesitate to tell them that I'm thinking of declining at least at this time so this got 10 votes a lot of people are interested in this so uh give it a give it just what's that um you got the vaccine oh just lie to him yeah because they can pound sand the point is is that you know you're under no obligation to tell people the truth for something that private and if they're gonna ask you and it's like you know it's like that's gonna be my age everybody knows I'm 48. a 48 year old broad shoulder 10 no less that's it no not what you were at 35 but pretty good foreign all right yeah you're under no obligation to tell people the truth thank you Pat Sam yeah that well that goes back to the agreeableness conversation you know the sort of you feel that obligation to to out of out of your agreeableness out of your conscientiousness right so exactly yeah yeah I could see you know that question being complicated in uh coming months with vaccine passports with sort of your vaccine status being more or less public knowledge in terms of like where you're allowed to go and if you're allowed to travel or not and so at some point this might become more complex to navigate for folks um but we're not there yet and so I would just take this day by day and and uh you know Doug is Doug is uh I think has the correct approach to that so yeah yeah oh Dory Dory did not have her hand up on purpose so she was it was on on her phone for the first time so okay um all right let's see do we have is there anything else in the chat I think we've covered all that so if we have a minute we could since that was a quick one not a 40 minute question the um our own question tool is a little tough to navigate in real time here the the next highest voted question I think we have to save for another day it's a it's a human sexuality question and I think it's uh it would lead us down quite a path so we'll save that for a date we vote for it you want this question no or no we vote we're in favor we are pro-sexuality I I think that's fair to say all right so let's see this is I have a question or series concerning laziness if I understood you correctly it seems like the ego trap can have a hold on someone for years or even decades on end how can we tell if a person is caught in the ego trap or if they're just lazy is laziness a product of certain personality traits that we can't do much about except tweaking a little bit I guess what would your advice on helping someone get out of the ego trap have on a lazy person as well does it apply okay the the the Hallmarks or the track marks and the snow at the ego trap are a bitterness and a longing and a feel of and actually an anger at the self and sometimes a little suicidal uh uh bolts will go through the mind in other words the person is tortured by what is in fact a lot of uh essentially competing demands from the nervous system one demand wants the person to engage and to achieve and it has it can feel the discrepancy between its current performance in the world and it's and what it and what it could do and what it might reasonably be able to do that difference is painful for that individual and they would like to close that Gap and they would close that Gap but unfortunately uh Fate has has seen to it to cause them to have outside data uh that has percolated either to their all the way to their internal audience or is legitimately sitting outside of of them in the minds of other people that has set up expectations that are higher than what they think that they can achieve that is the ego trap and there's a punishing miserable place to be okay uh it's easy to be put in the ego trap to varying degrees but if a person uh looks like they are a massive underachiever or very lazy over a long period of time it could be the ego trial okay and we could know that by what their what the tone of feeling of their life is on a constant basis lazy is different the amazing is just like that it's just not worth it okay they they can see how if they hustled they could improve their circumstances in certain ways but the CB just doesn't doesn't uh is not enticing okay so I'm lazy about a hell of a lot of things there's a lot of things in my existence that could be a lot better and I scan over them and I run the CB and it's like yeah that would be nice if that were true but it's not worth the trouble and uh I'd rather just sit you know and watch Gilligan's Island right now than to go out in the yard and make it look better that that's lazy if you want to call it that it's lazy from one person's eyes it's reasonable for my eyes and my life looks busy and purposeful and hard working uh with respect to one of my current residents Named Sam I was gonna say if we want you know to understand this difference finding pictures next to the the term in the dictionary you you you have a roommate who exemplifies laziness very sweet we have some young lady out there who is interested in a pretty darn handsome really nice kid who's smart and super in nature and he's just you know he almost got his degree from UC Santa almost to finish and he's so gentle he's incredibly good with young children and he's got a big beard and long hair he looks really cool write to me that's why I got a deal for you Doug wants his extra bedroom in his house doc says sounds like a washed up Jimmy yeah you see how much like a would-be Jimmy yeah exactly but he never quite had never quite had the the you know the the sort of push to be a Jimmy you know he's but he's lovely lovely human very sweet guy yeah but he literally gets a free ride in my life just because he's such a fine human being it's an interesting question with lazy like like you know does Sam free ride because of all of the sweet characteristics that he has you know like what would what would become of someone like that if they didn't you know their environment didn't happen to include somebody who responded so positively to their personality characteristics so yeah it would be more uncomfortable he would yeah definitely be more uncomfortable hustle just a little okay but I can trust you it would be so minimal it would be just enough you're a gaming computer yeah what's within an electric outlet he himself could freeze that would be fine but he would need to have a computer and a gaming outlet that that's how that works oh andoki's making an interesting point she says that we know he's not manipulative you know sort of kind of you know gaming the system because he's so agreeable yeah I think his his personality shines through you know that this is a very pure character okay like you're not being played he's just the CB is just never there and oh incidentally when the CB is there whether it's when when either through enticement it's usually not inducement it's usually my anger so yeah I raise an eyebrow I say you get to this he gets to it eventually yeah yeah it depends upon how urgently I make the request but literally I can get him to drop everything I need if he Etc so yeah but the but it's all running through an unbelievably lazy CB yeah it's a he's a he's a he's a credit to his particular species because he's the pure form he and Sam Sam just to you know illustrate this he he currently is um the steward of a house chicken so he has a a pet chicken that lives in the home and if Sam were just to set up an Instagram for this chicken like the instant branding instant you know you've got a whole I mean he never has to raise a finger after that but it doesn't have the CV to even sort of you know monetize tiny chickens yeah he actually has a market but yeah it's a remarkable lack of action Sharon Sharon's saying maybe he just needs to find his passion no this is the mistake he does he knows his passion his passion is basically care of little animals little animals and and paying attention to Nature and ecology and and sort of what kind of tree is that and what sort of soil does it like and what kind of humidity is it best in he's he's very passionate about these things and he's actually very knowledgeable about Evolution very knowledgeable very smart guy very very sharp yeah last has no natural world landition but that out to behold that idea that maybe he just needs to find his passion it's like that's you're you're stepping into sort of the uh the the psychodynamic industrial complex you know trying to kind of you know sell somebody's solutions to their personality Distortion Like no we're just dealing with a really lazy human who can more or less get away with it because we live live in an advanced uh welfare state democracy where he you know he doesn't really have to hustle too much for a living and he happened to run into Doug of all people who is uh happy to subsidize his existence Sam's a special lazy kid that's so lazy yeah so he is lazy no ego trap there no ego trap the the lack of the you know he didn't finish the degree a lot of people who don't finish degrees undergraduate degrees they get eager traps you know they get close at like I was right before I finished my PhD and I was super ego trapped about it um Sam is just lazy just didn't have the didn't have to get up and go to get it done so yep that's it yeah but we love him he's he's wonderful yeah everybody does everybody does yeah yeah it's like a little Maltese puppy you know what I mean yeah if I put it out on the street it's not too long he'd get claimed he would you know someone someone would make a project of him he just needs to needs to find some benevolent cougar to take him on that is exactly what's needed financially independent benevolent cougars discuss and searches and grabs exactly the right concept it's beautiful a benevolent cougar that's what we need oh man well I think that's uh that that that's a wrap for today I think so thanks thanks everyone for joining us um hopefully we will have this transcript in addition to others available soon and um and we'll we'll be able to catch you in a couple of weeks and do we have any other uh housekeeping or anything like that no yeah good to go all right well oh well there's Hawk blocked so so we have something about that yeah so we have this um I'm I'm doing this new sort of weekly political cultural events and news and perspectives from through the evolutionary lens um so it's sort of a beat your jeans 2.0 and beat your jeans is really sort of clinical issues and this is more we're just talking about politics in general sort of uh you know things related to them so we recorded our first episode yesterday uh talking about cancel culture so that's that's going to be available I'll post it on Saturday publicly but if you want Early Access you can you can get on my patreon page and and get all the Early Access and transcript and outtakes and everything else although plenty of outtakes made it in so uh so that's just a new thing if people are interested so um I know to just burn with uh all kinds of political science thoughts in your head all the time so this is a good place to to bait your spleen a little bit it's great it's it's uh I just found myself sort of uh you know wanting to rant about politics on a regular basis and so now I've uh whoops I just typed the link for you guys but I got it wrong let me fix that I actually can't see what I'm typing because I'm on a monitor with a bunch shows like uh it got it got dented in transit it's a long story.com yeah and patreon is just the sort of membership based site where you can kind of subscribe and you can change your level and come and go as you as you like so um so that's how to access that if you want to hear us ranting about cancel culture and other Politically Incorrect things so yeah awesome uh it's a it's a pleasure just to to let you wind up hear you wind out on that good yeah I got I have a lot of angst you've got a couple of sort of uh um Academia rejects yeah seeing the world from that perspective so so beautiful all right but otherwise we'll we'll see you next week on beat your jeans and a week after that back here and uh you guys know the drills so so sounds good all right thanks everyone ready for coming out today we'll see you next time bye
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