Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-03-25
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


oh there you are what's that that's good everybody Doug gets extra extra gold stars today because it is freakishly early Maui time like we're very impressed yeah you got the little fireplace it's actually producing some the dogs probably will wind up back in front of it because it's a very nice little spot for puppies so um yeah it's super super cozy cool all right all right so one of the uh I am like going back and forth between different computers and like it doesn't travel very well so I'm trying to bring up the question form for us so but we can see we can just say hi in the Q a and sure see see if there's anything going on in the chat here so pretty quiet can you guys hear us looks like there's some there's some signs of life okay so let me just I want to order this in the right way so we were answering the ones that get the most votes so we're following our own rules okay so we okay so we answered that one last week we talked about the the one that has the most number of votes which is how do people know if they have Distortion so we covered that if people are interested in that they can watch last week's this one looks like the next top voted one is what's the best environment for this potted plant is the question um and she says can you give any advice on what the best environment would be for someone who's high in conscientiousness high in neuroticism high in agreeableness and high in introversion to live a life that is not unbearably stressful for them thank you and then somebody responds that hits nerves so we've got more than one so high C high neuroticism high agreeable High introversion it's a tough combo yeah I mean the first uh let's say let me uh get that again so high agreeable High conscientious yeah high high in high neuroticism instability uh High introversion yeah working in the library yeah that's really what that is uh library is going to be low uh Library type environment so not a lot of high tension not a lot of stakes on the line for any mistakes um obviously it's a perfect place for conscientiousness a little details getting things right and uh that and let me think about and not not a lot of room for being exploited uh so that that's sort of that that's sort of a concept is where I would go anywhere where you're where we could be working under people that that where there's not a lot of pressure on some kind of business output so we don't have a regional manager who's trying to make you know the West Coast manager so so that there's not that people aren't pushing to get their numbers up uh and therefore they need you to work extra hours late Etc and that there's always these high tense deadlines that you don't want to be in a startup company that's a bad place for you yeah you don't even want to be in a place where where anybody you want to work for public storage once again we're celebrating Public Storage yeah yeah I actually that really describes the the storage unit that I rent in Anchorage it sounds like that guy yeah he kind of he lives in an apartment up above the units um and I would describe him if I if I were to type him I would I would maybe not so high in agreeableness he's a little disagreeable um but uh but you know he has to deal with the public more than you know because he's got to have some disagreeableness he's gotta he's got to kind of lay down the law sometimes with people who are exploiting him so um yeah I think you just you take each of those qualities individually and you sort of we're trying to optimize and then they make a little Venn diagram you know he's sort of like and they're not you know some of these are more costly than others depending on how these particular distortions are gonna play out in your life experience so I mean yeah that's an amazing concept do you understand that this that this actually what what is not done in the world uh you know they have I forget what that thing was called in the old days there's a there's a occupational inventory uh that everybody uses and for the life of me I've been so far away from academic psychology you know I had to memorize it for a test once I forgot what it is it's not Myers-Briggs it's some you know something else and uh but what they didn't do was they didn't Big Five it it's just an inventory of what do you like okay so it says you like flowers and you like people then you're floors okay so that they just did it that way but actually this is like the what's your parachute model you know the kind of yeah yeah there's a there's actually a famous inventory yeah I know what you're talking about I think I was I was forced to take it at some point but I don't remember either what it's called but think about this it's probably you know it's not aware of the big five uh right so when you start thinking about your Venn diagram concept it's just a nested computer model so that that when you start thinking okay well um if the introversion and the agreeableness are super important issues then yeah wait them yeah and then then what do we have what's left okay so the uh if someone could eyeball those demands this is fascinating what comes up here that's why we love questions it makes us think about things we never thought of before this is a I'm now seeing literally an entire new Niche industry or software program for psychology and for the world because the truth is is that the existing quote uh career interest inventories are are not informed by either EP or certainly not by personality theory and so you can see immediately how useful this would be to just simply uh first having an eyeball estimate and then ultimately data that would drive the the estimates of what types of jobs have what kinds of idealized scores Etc and then you would just you just follow down a list so interestingly enough somebody like myself uh who's a little bit bossy no yeah and uh essentially I I always like to talk one-on-one with people about things that matter so that's why is is uh as a high school student or a college student you know I never went to a party and then picked up on a girl never happened the reason is too introverted uh and too noisy and the only the only thing that would be worthwhile for me is a one-on-one quiet conversation where people are interested in talking about something uh intellectually uh challenging I.E well something important and interesting and so the and then what does that look like and then then obviously um I I have uh naturally a fair amount of confidence uh in my opinion so in other words telling other people what to do uh really makes a lot of sense which is actually kind of why I do psychology the way I do so I was is not going to use psychology the way it's done which is that people sitting there looking wise and looking nice like they're a nice person and then drawing people out that's a different personality uh that is drawn to this my personality was much much more like a I would have been very comfortable in being a one-on-one coach of some of almost anything that just happened that it was uh you just you just need an environment where you command slain properly got it got it got it man spread and mansplain it's like that's it I had several more minutes of this I'm I'm very sorry let me let me defer to your your Authority all matters please tell us how it is cool back the camera [Laughter] so anyway yeah yeah come to me what that inventory is before this is over uh maybe but but yeah they're they're behind yeah yeah interesting yeah but you know even without the formalized inventory you you just look at yourself you know and sort of you you have a sense of which of those things you kind of are more costly to you than other things like is it is it more important to Value the introversion I.E a library or is it more important to to Value the agreeableness because you really don't want to have to interact with people and set boundaries and tell them no because that's really really difficult which you might have to do in the library or you might have to do it in one role you know front desk at the library but not if you're back in the research position or you're you know volunteering to to restock the stacks or whatever it is so it's really just kind of about having that sensitivity to your own personal nuances yeah I would say in general one of the most important things uh unless you're an extroverted moderate at least moderately disagreeable highly ambitious um sales person uh it's probably a very good idea in this life to be to be trying to figure out whether your boss is agreeable yeah that's like the very basic concept for anybody so if you've got two jobs that you're looking at possibly or you've got time to find a second job and you're fairly liquid in the marketplace and the job that's being offered you can sniff but the boss is actually quite disagreeable uh Etc like we we have high demands around here I'm not going to sign up okay uh we like people to you know we have a good friendly working place you know people help each other out around here and we you'll expect everybody to pitch in when we need to that's reasonable so we're looking for uh the personality of that individual and you can pick up a lot in 60 seconds sometimes less and if you're paying attention and certainly a job interview you can pick up a tremendous amount all you need to be thinking is agreeable this is disagreeable where does this person stand okay and so uh if they're being careful and deferential not to be stepping on your opinions or if they're cross-examining you about your opinions on a bunch of things uh look out and so just and actually just their General demeanor is is huge so yeah don't be walking into a situation where the boss is disagreeable which incidentally um is a lot of bosses a lot of bosses are disagreeable because they are inherently ambitious because they feel under rewarded in life behind their disagreeability and so they've climbed dominance hierarchies so you're like well what the hell am I supposed to do about that answer if you're not in a position of power then you have to work on you have to take your whatever lucky there is but if you are in some kind of a position of power then this is exactly where we want to be particularly careful uh we want to be so select uh individuals uh more than you would select companies and situations in other words that that situation who you work for now it can change but it might not so you can easily like that person's those that person's position they've been in that position for a while and they're probably going to be in that position for a while as far as you could tell then you're looking at five years of your life and that individual's personality winds up being the most important feature of that landscape so keep that in mind that's a very important thing to be focused on yeah yeah it's a total truism I see somebody posting it in the chat here I've always known this to be true and experienced it myself that people don't quit jobs they quit bosses they quit managers you know it's really very commonly the situation I would say as an agreeable myself you know there's there's a little bit of that you know agreeable like to free ride on disagreeables because disagreeables tend to be effective they tend to be more effective than agreeables um and so I've been in a situation many times where I was attracted to the job with the disagreeable boss because it was very effective you know things were getting done it was an exciting place and I felt like I can be part of something important here and I didn't translate that to the interpersonal Dynamics it you know took me some some learning experience to figure out that that was a cost that I was not willing to pay but that's this is where the intersection between high conscientiousness high agreeableness becomes problematic because if you're working for a super agreeable boss who's not particularly conscientious nothing's ever going to get done it's going to bother your conscientiousness so um it's really it's very hard to know at the outset what you're dealing with so this is why we're just always you know pay attention to your situation pay attention to your environment and don't be afraid to make changes as needed we had some complaints that the audio was and even I moved my mic further away so hopefully that helped um yeah yeah okay we've got we've got I've got stuff in the Q a stuff in the chat pre-existing questions so I'm just going to jump all over the place so there's no uh there's no way to to game the system because it's arbitrary because I'm I'm just a tyrant who's doing it my ways um is sort of related to this this question of Personality inventories and and fitting in in work settings and everything we've gotten a couple of questions that is asking here in the chat too um if if either of us have watched the HBO documentary Persona I don't know if you've seen it yet you and I talked about it briefly I watched it and I'm was obsessed with it um the the subtitle is the Dark Truth behind personality tests so um it's uh the rest of his question before I'll tell you about it he says it features the Myers-Briggs test it's history its Origins and its excessive usage and interviewing and hiring people I did it once I thought it was entertaining but almost pointless I think it's vague I would never hire someone based on their standards it's corporate usage is remarkable I did however find the five area ocean tests you have on the esteem Dynamics site found it to be very helpful in understanding minority weaknesses this has been useful in establishing actions to moderate these imbalances so I would say so you have you seen the documentary Doug you haven't seen it right yeah I would say it's fair to characterize this documentary for folks who have not seen it as really setting up a false equivalency between the Myers-Briggs and the big five so it spends like a lot of energy debunking the Myers-Briggs rightfully so so the Myers-Briggs is as we have detailed in other other chats and other discussions um you know we don't have a lot of sort of scientific respect for the Myers-Briggs as a personality instrument it's really just more entertainment it's not entirely off base because it is you know speaking to some truths of human nature and it's it's encompassing some big five qualities but it's really oversimplifying things and it's not getting to the heart of what personality is really about so what this documentary does is it is it gets you all worked up about how unscientific the Myers-Briggs is how um it's it's it's creators or horrible racists uh one of them wrote a book a fiction book that's um you know all about a southern family that's terrified of possibly how having one drop of of African-American blood in their lineage and so this drives them to commit group Suicide like there's there's a lot of Scare Tactics in this documentary so you sort of get all all set up to be very dismissive of personality testing in general and then it launches into the kind of the second part of the documentary which is like so now that we know that personality tests are full of crap look at how they're being applied in corporate settings and how they're destroying lives because this Corporation is administering personality tests to employees and it's not it's it's it's ruling them out and not offering them jobs and then they have these terrible life outcomes because they're not qualifying by the arbitrary standard of the personality test but the corporations and the companies are not generally using Myers-Briggs tests to do this you're using big five tests to do this and so the documentary never really makes that leap it sort of set you up to be very judgmental toward Myers-Briggs and then because of that you're going to be very judgmental toward the use of personality testing in any kind of work setting or as an instrument to decide or to determine who might be best suited for a job or not so it's really um really tricky in that way and it got me all riled up obviously so um but uh yeah there's a lot of scare mongering about you know personality testing is um systematically biased it's racist it's um you know ruling people out of positions that they would otherwise be qualified for it's being used to mine information that is illegal to ask in an interview like um you know about disabilities and mental health issues and that all of this is a huge problem and deserves Federal attention so that's the the sort of book report on it um I uh yeah I I don't know what else to add there I guess the question was not so much about that I just wanted to mention that I found this was really interesting if people want are interested in personality testing and all of these debates they can watch the stock there was another there was an interview with the CEO of a new company I believe called higher view who is making this even more uh sort of post-apocalyptic where they're adding in facial recognition data so you know the question in the in the person or in the test in the pre-employment test is something like you know how did you feel about your last how did how were you how were you able to get along with your last boss something like that so they're asking the question but then it's also doing you know it's it's analyzing your facial expressions to sort of cross-validate the truth of your statement and of course the documentary was all super worked up about that and one of the experts compared facial recognition analysis to phrenology so yeah anyway any thoughts on all of that Doug yeah a lot of thoughts are going through my mind and that is following and that is that uh the the the nature of life is bad of attempting to put energy uh behind the movements that will statistically increase the likelihood of surviving reflection uh that the derivative of that is in economics uh without government intervention just we're going to set that aside because government intervention is extremely useful for optimizing uh optimizing situations relative to an entire group of people I.E you have to deal with free writer issues uh like someone who makes their widget with a cheat but they pollute the river when they do it so they're wrecking a bunch of stuff in the environment while they are doing a obviously a useful transformation of goods into something uh that people are willing to pay for so you can't just use profit margins uh alone uh to to essentially figure out how to run an economy yeah that's why government eventually was there however government and invention starts being used for some other things that are ludicrous like for example trying to set up rules where people that are stopping people from attempting to try to optimize their use of their labor okay the entire point of an economy uh what the word means I don't know we'd have to go back to the Greek or the Latin or whatever it means but it's going to mean efficiency day is essentially what we're talking about and we're talking about the efficiency of transforming atoms and putting atoms in a pattern that are are useful for human life and either their enjoyment or their survival reproductive success and those two things are tightly correlated although they're not exactly correlated um so but the economy and you know it's what's useful for people what people like has actually been typically what was useful for survival reproductive success now it goes beyond that so me listening to some great music doesn't improve my survival reproductive success but it does indeed enhance my life experience um you can imagine the government basically saying well who we're going to allow to sing and not allow to sing uh and who we're going to allow to to repeat word music or not allowed to do music depending upon what their race Creed color we have got to have it all equivalent and everything else you'd be like well that's absurd okay so the uh we can come back to that I have a contemporary pop culture reference for that but let's come back to it yeah so um so I think the the from my standpoint all in any psychological testing uh would be completely legitimate in the marketplace the uh and you that would make sense to me in other words I want to know how open a person is I want to have conscientious they are and people might say oh well that's terrible it's going to be screw over people who have a lot of talent that score poorly fine let the market figure it out that's the entire point you know I think I ranted with you on a hot block that about um that people haven't seen yet about women in pay and things like that it's like no we don't need the government to tell us to to pay women more all you have to do is to uh in the marketplace if somebody is prejudiced against women's ability they will then underemploy the female okay and someone else if women are only making 90 cents on the dollar uh relatively exactly the same capability than an entrepreneur will simply bid women away and have all an all women environment in their workplace and their costs will be 90 percent of the idiot that doesn't employ women you see and now with that 10 uh margin of difference in their employee uh costs with exactly the same output they will drive that other individual out of business you see so you see the logic I mean Jen knows Logic on business trying to explain this to a mythical audience and the point is is that then someone else is going to pay the women 91 cents on the dollar and then somebody else is 92 everybody will be trying to get all female staffs right up to the point where they are paid exactly what they're worth relative to any other labor Alternatives and so the free market figures this out the government doesn't need to do it and so that's going to go with you know the notion that personality testing or this idiot who read this documentary um doesn't understand obviously anything about free market dynamics and it is completely and utterly legitimate and in fact what's happening is because the government intervention in these areas that that all the free market is doing is weaving its way around and trying to find a way to eliminate people that they don't want to hire that's why they're using these tests and you know what it's hilarious because they're going to continue to use them and don't think the top dogs in this area aren't big Tech who know everything about you when you walk through the door of course of course yeah yeah I mean they're using them the the sort of the the point that the documentary never makes which is just it's just implicit in the whole analysis is that you don't get Target and Starbucks and you know these Microsoft and everybody else I mean they're using them because they work they're using them because they they they're fitting people into the positions where they're better are suited and they have less turnover turnovers hugely costly to these businesses um you know I I first and they've been around a long time so you know this the documentaries treating it sort of like it's this new thing that's happening and um uh you know just has emerged on the scene I remember taking my first I I applied for a job at Kmart when I was um I was volunteering on the Howard Dean campaign before they eventually gave me a job and paid me some money but um this was early 2000 like late 2003 early 2004 it was before he was even really a candidate certainly wasn't the front runner um it was long before the the infamous scream heard around the world so you know being high openness and and just kind of crazy I just rolled into Burlington Vermont you know on the Greyhound bus and showed up at headquarters and I was like hey guys you got any work for me they're like oh yeah sure you can you know stuff these envelopes and and do this this was like the very it was sort of the the get is Ground Zero for social media campaigning so you know the the the um campaign director at the time was Joe trippy who's gone on to great infamy and he was he would sit in his office and drink mountains of Diet Pepsi and and scheme about how Dean was going to win the campaign based on meetups it was all about meetups we were going to leverage meetups and so one of my jobs was to sort of regionally uh get a lot of Meetup Behavior going on but I had to pay yeah I had to live in the meantime I had to I had to buy food I had to find a place to live I I started off in kind of this they had rented we called it affectionately the Flop House where we all slept in sleeping bags and yoga mats in the middle of the floor in like this one big room but um I eventually needed a little pocket money and so I applied for a part-time job at Kmart in Burlington um and that was that early you know 2003 uh big you know what what I recognize now is just a big big five tests trying to figure out if I if I'd be suited for the job job or not so this has been in use in active use for a long long time um JJ rice is saying the documentary we're referring to is called Persona um and uh I don't I don't remember if it's HBO I think it's HBO but it's uh just come out in the last couple of months so but yeah they work uh you know I'm sure Kmart was I don't even know if Kmart's still around or got absorbed into something else but they're they're they've been using them consistently so um and the experts that they talk to that the designers of the tests and the corporate overlords that are interviewed in the documentary are very Unapologetic about that like they they're like hey I mean we're doing people a favor it may not look I think one of them even is quoted as saying it may not seem like a favor at the time to be rejected for a job that you're not suited for but it really is like we don't want you we don't want to put you somewhere where you're not going to thrive and do well we want we want to Silo you into into a better more effective place for you so it's an interesting conversation I I was somewhat sympathetic to the the critique that that you know you have to be careful that they're not capturing information that is otherwise illegal to directly ask for I think there I think there is some room for improvement there um and you know there's there's a ethical debate when you're talking about kind of this you know biometric data that they're bringing into but uh I don't think that means it's we can we can rule it out out of hand there's some place for it so yeah well a big thing they're after is IQ yeah right and conscientiousness yeah yeah IQ and conscientiousness but uh IQ is uh I I think that only big Tech really knows at this point uh it is how important that is is a variable and predictor of outcomes of a job you know just basically how how people will perform on jobs and so the uh that that truth is is probably slowly working its way through corporate culture it's also true that in high tech it's a it's a place where the difference between two IQ points actually probably means a lot because there's a a lot of uh they're trying to get an awful lot of money per human whereas if you're if you're a Walmart you're not for for so many of your employees it doesn't make any difference if the person's 40th percentile IQ or 40 seconds this between those two is not a large functional difference but there's a big functional difference between the 97th and the 98 and a half if you're trying to do complicated things and you're that individual is in charge of millions of dollars worth of land labor and capital whereas the Walmart guys just stocking you know you know coffee cups and so it's the uh so at the upper reaches they are absolutely doing everything they can do to basically do IQ testing and occupy or they're just getting around the wall uh but they they're they are extremely aware of how valuable every IQ point is and then they also want to know how conscientious you are so uh but those are yeah big tax got figured out for good Hill yeah yeah yeah yeah there's a there's a whole subplot in the documentary where there's there's a there's a there's a big twist that I don't want to give away for people who are like there's like we kind of can't fully talk about it without talking about the twist but if you haven't watched it I don't want to completely ruin it for you but there is there's a one of the the V plots is that there's this um New York City sort of classroom um where this this entrepreneur works with um uh ex-felons mostly and and sort of other people who are struggling to find jobs and who are who have been out of the market for a really long time who are now going back into it and facing these tests and don't really know how to how to take them um and so he's working with them to effectively gain them to sort of like yeah so don't you know I.E don't always answer honestly um and treat it just like you would an actual interview question so that you know imagine that this question is being asked by an interviewer not not like an anonymous test where you you want to answer honestly but like you would answer honestly in an interview you're gonna what's your weakness oh I'm just too detail-oriented I just work too hard you know it's gonna do these kind of the ways that people misrepresent themselves consistently in an actual face-to-face interview the tests make it much harder to do that they're asking the same question from all of these different angles they're trying to catch you in reversals they're priming you all sorts of tricky things I took another one when I was working I applied as a an admissions counselor at a for-profit college in Alaska a very evil for-profit college for which I have I have no um warmth or affection whatsoever and uh the admissions jobs the admission counselor jobs were the highest paid they worked on commission they were kind of the highest status within the company and the the guy hauls me and the president of the campus brings me in for an interview um and he tells me well you know yeah we go we when we gave you the test and we just we don't think you'd be very well suited for that position but we think you'd be a great what we call a Student Success officer an SS officer by the way so I was the Student Success officer which was sort of the um the the guidance counselor the guidance counselor just struggling students and and trying like the whole business model is uh all around retention and making sure that these students don't drop out and they keep paying money into the system and they stick around long enough to take on more of the proprietary student loan debt that these guys are happy to lend them at very high interest rates so um and so it was really interesting like he was picking up on IQ conscientiousness but he but the test was able to tell that I didn't have the sort of like um ability to sell people these like I wasn't I wasn't gonna maybe because I didn't believe I actually did not believe in the mission at all but it was able to come through where I have other kind of superficial characteristics that seem like I would have made a fine admissions Admissions Office not disagree able enough not pushy enough probably that's what it was you're a Salesman you've got to have some serious disagreeable in there yeah so so that their test was fine-tuned enough and I remember I mean I like this guy his name was Larry you know very similar to the other Larry we know actually very similar um and uh he and I would have many sort of very Frank conversations in his office about about the company and about all kinds of things um he knew I was going to quit long before I quit and he was he was pretty sharp guy um had a really interesting history and he I told him at some point well you know I I gained that test and he's like you can't game our test and I said no no no I I gained it and he's like no this test can't be games and I was like what who do you think you are you know God and but they they know more than we know so yeah very interesting yeah yeah yeah all right let's let's see what else we have here we've got all kinds of random stuff Michelle well Ed was also asking if we I think we addressed this in another fairly recent q a do we have any comments or suggestions on how to establish or combat low conscientiousness yeah as as you you yourself as an individual I guess is what he's suggesting yes yeah yeah in his own Personality yeah establish or combat mm-hmm or to habits that he could establish to combat low conscientious well no let me explain in principle uh what where he's going and it's important that it's actually he asks a very important question and that is you know what can you do to move yourself around on any of these things and the answer is nothing there's nothing these are genetically fixed now what you can do is so you can't quote make yourself a little bit more conscientious what you can do is if there's something that your local judges is costing them some something highly specific so trying to move your you know get some habits to improve your conscientiousness is asking for this much and you don't get that much okay uh getting yourself to get your electric bill paid on time so it doesn't get canceled that's asking for this much so you can ask for this much and by putting some energy in uh and to set up some system to improve the performance in that one little very narrow specific area that you can do okay so that's how it is that we do things we don't do things uh trying to how can I up my extra version by 20 I had an interesting question by uh a really fine uh young person yesterday on a phone consult saying how can I um you know uh he's sort of running a new company and he's like how can I essentially not be so self-questioning about where is that we're going because I I feel like I would you know sort of pull back and I don't just go for broke and I don't have that you know tremendous confidence that he knows a lot of other uh the Mark I can't Zuckerberg and you know Steve Jobs and people like that have and I explained uh that what you're seeing in a lot of that high confidence is disagreeable so the disagreeable person believes that the world does not appreciate their greatness and their value and therefore they're highly motivated to take the fight to the world okay it's it's like a miscalibrated prize fighter who wants to get into the to the ring with the champ and is is ABS wants to bring the fight okay so that's and yet we see these the the most spectacular and awesome victories of the world come from exactly people like that that the rest of the world undervalued and then it turned out through their essentially quiet you know their their arrogance they believed they did have those chops and it turned out it just so happens they were right or that fortune smiled upon them or some combination of both that what people will do and parents will talk to me about this from time to time is that I want my kid to have that sort of bold you know that's what I want and it's your your misunderstanding that that the the nervous system the amount of confidence that a person feels is a derivative of two things really how disagreeable they are and what their personal life experience has been so if you have a very sweet person who's really nice and doesn't feel like the world is not treating them fairly but they have done something a thousand times uh they have done you know simple tax forms for a thousand people they have a lot of confidence that they could do it that confidence won't be out in any other area of life particularly but anything that where they have personal experience indicates that they can do it they they have a confidence meter inside their system that is altered with experience just like anybody else does the um but as you move the line over and become more and more and more and more disagreeable you're going to find people being incredibly arrogant uh as what it is that they believe they deserve and they're very assertive this young man doesn't have that he's agreeable he's very talented capable young man but he's agreeable and he knows he doesn't exude that arrogance to his team and he's like and I I shouldn't hesitate you know and I'd like well sorry you don't really have a choice uh the arrogance that you are that you're attempting to sort of emulate and hope to come to you is is actually this is how uh disagreeable humans burn up the money of the widows and orphans funds of all their best friends and they pull it all into two million dollars and then they say they're going to take over the world and Silicon Valley and the rest of the world but particularly Silicon Valley is littered with the Corpses uh people's widows and orphans funds uh that people bet the house on some uh you know this arrogance and so I said you don't have that arrogance that's because you've got you're a better calibrated human being that has reasonable humility and you're anxious and you're not so you're not wanting to just follow up your vision with a bunch of everybody else's chips that just means you're more accurate okay and more accurate means more humble that's how so that's how that works so can he change himself no he cannot change himself and uh his nervous system is kicking out the amount of confidence that that the existing evidence indicates that he should be feeling and that's how that works so yeah if you're going to change something about yourself it's problematic you need to get extremely narrow about what it is that you're going after and then we work the cost benefit parameters around that highly specific issue and we try attempt to you know uh uh modify things in a way that you're going to execute more effectively that's how we do it yeah yeah I mean there there are short-term I mean for something like conscientiousness your conscientiousness will get dialed up if it's under pressure you know if the cost is if the cost is higher if you've got a boss breathing down your neck you know if you've if you've always had trouble sticking to a whole food plant-based diet and you get a scary sort of lab result or a diagnosis all of those things will suddenly they will they'll put you in a situ you were recalculating the cost benefit analysis so you can you can mess with those parameters you can sort of you know put sanctions on yourself and you can impose kind of higher costs in some way so uh depending on different personality types people will do things like um you know oh if I if I don't lose 10 pounds in the next three months I have to make a donation to a political political campaign that I hate and they tweet about it you know they make this kind of credible public commitment which essentially raises the cost of defecting on the behavior so that that you know allows them to to dredge up that motivation so there definitely are ways that you can hack it but you can't permanently change your character all you can change is the the sort of the playing field that you're operating in and the rules of that particular playing field at a specific time sometimes what's bothering the person is that there's a cost that's coming from a repetitive solution and they keep getting frustrated by that because they can't just lean over and fix it sometimes however there's a small um there is motivation to do something better and what we can wind up seeing is little Channel factors or little uh informational inputs that can be useful so uh for example people trying to change their diet get healthier Etc and there's sort of too much in the equation and they've got they're bombarded with too many moving parts of the information and so a big thing that Jen and I will do I'm not sure exactly our Jen does this but probably similar and that is that I'm going to get it down to one problem which is wet starches and so yesterday I have a woman you know she she after we got done she put a little starch Target sheet on her refrigerator okay they're like that's what you need to focus on don't have the local conscientiousness that you have getting diffused through 17 different operations that you think that you're supposed to be doing that that's going to be where the transformation is we're going to put our lever right where the most uh support part of the effect is and keep you focused on exactly the one thing that you need to do that actually moves most of the Walk okay so that's that's how we go about attempting to um quote hack uh personality limitations is we get down to the very specific outcome that is most important and we find out what pebble is in our way and we try to work our way around that specific issue rather than anything more global yeah okay yeah um yeah all things equal though you're you're in better you're you're probably you have more potential for happiness with lower conscientiousness all things all things equal then higher conscientiousness so I would also you know people when people ask that question like how that specific question you know I oh I hate that I'm not higher conscientiousness like I wish that how could I be it's like just enjoy the fact that you're not that you're not way off the charts because it's very difficult to live up there very difficult to have that nervous system and to be that sort of um you know on high alert all the time for you know in fact we have sort of a follow-up question which is the flip side of this which is this person is saying if you find a nice calm place to to pot your plant I.E the library what is a good strategy for dialing down the conscientiousness for example what if the library is a mess and it's not your job to clean it so this is this is sort of the cost of walking through life with that higher conscientiousness which would allow you to meet some goals but then is also constantly this this you know this everything is just edgier everything is just harder to accept as is because it needs to be improved it's never good enough yeah yeah I.E get a nice small domain that you can control yeah as much as possible yeah yeah yeah I think in the for that specific question with about you know if it's messy and it's not your job to clean it um it it can be helpful to you know get get a rule communicated that it's not your job to clean it so you're part of what's bothering you is the sort of this inference that nobody's doing it and I it's up to me and so even though it's not not explicitly part of my job description I'm somehow failing by not doing it but if you can get if you can get your boss you know in writing to make it very clear to you that this is your job is to do this and to not do this and so you know that you're sort of within the rules um even though it will be bothering you at some level it feels you you have less pressure I'm feeling like you're in trouble if you don't do it um would be one way to do that and really otherwise it's just making peace with the noise in the world I think is is where you're at with that all right um we had a very just a for a completely different question one of the most popular questions in the in the question um tool is what is the deal with beans so um oh this one actually came through I it looks like I posted it but it's I was just cutting and pasting from somebody else so somebody said I understand that beans are beneficial however I find that I gain weight when I eat beans also Dr McDougall talks about limiting them and says that they are quote not your friend when it comes to weight loss can we hear your views on this subject um yeah and then somebody somebody is following up on that in the in the Q a saying um that they're just a little more calorie dense and so you want to limit them accordingly yeah this is uh people's personal understanding of what it has them gaining weight or losing weight is almost zero uh in other words uh after talking to people for 25 years on these issues and understanding about people people's latest theory about what did or didn't cause them to gain weight is just what happened last week two weeks ago uh what they just thought actually because they eat tacos one night and then the next day they were higher on the scale and they're like well I can't eat beans it's like no you can't eat salt uh and then expect to to have your weight down so no beans aren't gonna cause anybody to gain weight I don't know that McDougall has any uh issue about that at all I think he makes some comments about that that they they are not your friends sounds familiar yeah yeah but I he may be more concerned with the high protein content than this maybe he was unaware of that or it might be a little stressful for kidneys for example and kidney patients um no beans are 400 calories a pound people they're vastly below the 700 calorie account estimate nation that we have for the average calorie density of the species so every mouthful of beans is dragging down your overall average below what it is that it needs to be so no you can't overeat on them other than if they I don't know there may be those protein issues for example um I don't think that there are I think that I think that could I've never heard that I mean if you were if you were making like pizza crust out of bean flour and and bean based cheese on top of your pizza and you were you know drinking soy milk on like it's possible that you could I mean but I've I've never heard of that otherwise if you're eating it I mean this gets back for me to the question of how how are you preparing them you know how it's it's both the natural diet of the species in the natural preparation techniques of the species so you know I love roasted chickpeas in the airfryer is a snack but that's getting that is pretty far from the the whole intact being as it actually came to you in the natural package your your you're dehydrating it you're adding some tasty spices you're putting some nutritional yeast on it certainly if you're buying it as a snack in the grocery store it's roasted in oil and salt and everything else um so I will I will make it as a snack because it's a pretty virtuous snack it's you know it's not it's not that terrible but I'm aware that it's much higher calorie density than if I were to open a can of chickpeas and eat it with a fork like I'm gonna I'm going to be way less interested in eating raw chickpeas than I am roasted toasted you know cayenne pepper and nutritional yeast garlic powder chickpeas in my air fryer so I guess if I were to just eat those that that you know the overall calorie densities could go up to a problematic level so you always have to think about how are you preparing these things what are you combining them with that is prepared in other high calorie density ways um so you know my it's always you know you've got to have both of those things in mind how would your would your ancestors have recognized the food and would they have been able to prepare it the same way that you're preparing it it's you know they're not they're not making some little balsamic reduction to make it tastier and combining all these flavors and textures and and all together so keep it simple and keep it naturally prepared and you're going to be very very much on the right side of calorie density yeah with beans or anything else yeah yeah I hear anybody talk and smack about beans beans are like the one of the healthiest things you can eat so if you can tolerate them I would not limit them in any way so okay what else do we have here someone was asking this is just an interesting question how do I share controversial ideas online without feeling embarrassed or bad about the inevitable negative feedback I will get I want to publicly share my ideas online but I'm high agreeable this like like she mentions me so how does someone handle this if they're high agreeable um yeah I would I would do a searching moral inventory of of what you're looking to get status Wise from sharing the information online so so you're not sharing it for you know no reason you you are seeking some kind of feedback you're seeking good feedback and you don't want the bad feedback that comes with it and depending on how you're sharing it where you're sharing it uh the context of the audience it's you you basically have to take the bad with the good so um I I think often we uh you know I have written about this elsewhere the sort of when bad news is good news I have a Blog on my website about that about sort of our natural impulse to share news um particularly kind of disturbing news or or unorthodox opinions because it makes us look more valuable to the Coalition but we are doing that very much actively seeking status we just want status from some people um and so nobody's communicating anything online uh in a vacuum of some craving for esteem and value and status so I you know in my in my experience with sort of Shifting my the way that I've publicly communicated about things and I do now um I mean certainly the new podcast that I'm doing this Hawk blocked podcast is very much um I'm letting my freak flag fly after a couple of years of of being afraid of alienating my friends and uh losing a lot of my kind of far left friends and and moving to uh this more kind of General I I don't call myself a Libertarian per se because I'm way more I'm a way bigger believer in a public safety net than most Libertarians are um so I'm I'm just politically homeless I don't really belong anywhere with any party affiliation but I've been very hesitant to communicate honestly about that and about some Trends in American politics that I'm very concerned about because it's there is this kind of like I recognize there's a lot of status to be shared if I you know certain people see it but the the people that I know we're going to see it are probably going to be upset by it so in that never that that never land between the the Coalition you have the Coalition you want you just have to be willing to be exposed and uncomfortable for a while and I don't think you can if you're agreeable that doesn't come overnight and it doesn't come very easily you just have to dip a toe into it and realize that for every person you lose you you gain somebody so you know you if you're sharing authentically and you're speaking your truth online or anywhere else you do attract your tribe eventually it just doesn't happen immediately beautiful right on target Doug doesn't have any problem sharing his thoughts in in the Public Square a little bit in other words and uh but but that's because a lot of the thoughts that I have that would be controversial my position would be misunderstood and so we've heard a lot of people's feelings so I'm not so concerned about um about the negative feedback I'm concerned about the Distortion that they would have about who it is that I am uh interesting actually that that is actually what would bother me so I would otherwise be uh far more open and far more controversial um and and therefore uh a sort of cleaner in terms of an educator uh but but I I'm careful because I know that the things that I would say uh would be misunderstood like for example just little thing that that recently about women in Pay it's like you know you have to be intelligent enough and somewhat facile with the notion of economics and understanding the concept of market dynamics and equilibria in order to understand why there it makes absolutely not a single shred of sense to have a walk or have women have equal pay for equal work or anybody else had equal paper in other words but you need to actually understand enough about how incredibly problematic it is to empower governments uh to start legislating uh these sorts of things the uh you you have to know a lot about economics to know why this is a really bad idea okay uh and yet if I say it quickly and I'm saying it to an audience that doesn't have the IQ or background then we're going to wind up with inferences that I'm some misogynistic bastard you know what I mean and it's like no I'm not not even slightly okay I'm actually looking out or optimizing everybody's freedom and the efficiency of the marketplace and so uh that that's where a deep thinking libertarian sits is they sit knowing that their opinions uh if they're they're stated or are very very likely to be uh uh where their characters are going to be very misunderstood right and the the implications of what is that they're thinking are going to be completely and utterly Mis uh uh miscalibrated by everybody so me watching uh Republicans and Democrats talk about how it is they do things is like quietly incredibly frustrating because they're both like wrong as hell all over the place and um and so you know this is if people want to know how it is that I would think about things not that you would but go read a book called free to choose by Milton Friedman uh Milton Friedman it was a 1976 Nobel Prize winner in economics out of the University of Chicago that book was his statement with his wife uh about the the the the the realization of a young man who grew up in the Great Depression understanding that everybody was was out of work and yet looking at uh he looked at a shovel laying against the wall thinking you know all kinds of things need to be done how come there isn't a person uh with that shovel in their hand doing something productive and that bothered young Milton's uh deeply ordered and Brilliant mind and then he became one of the most brilliant economists in world history and was a very successful advisor to presidents and a hell of a lot of people right now are better off in this world than lived a better life because of Milton Friedman uh and so those ideas uh but those ideas are complicated and they've been debated and fought and and special interests have been incredibly invested in stopping exactly that uh and and sort of stopping pre-market processes but this is why premarket processes are difficult and economics is a complicated subject to get it right and that's why it is that I don't share a lot of my thinking about it because the the inference is about my character for my positions would be grossly misunderstood and that's that's why you got to be careful that's an interesting that's a it's a unique Paradox for something like social media too which you know rewards the sound bite you know you have the quick actually the the um the hawk blocked this week is all about this drift toward certainty this ideological sort of certainty and I know how this is and I'm going to communicate it very clearly which is again this tendency as you know our nature is human animals is that we're very attracted to that we find that very compelling it's a nice cognitive shortcut that lets us know where we stand which is reassuring and gives us meaning and all of these kinds of things that are that are very attractive in human nature but because social media emphasizes the Sound by people are only they're they're inferring that whole background of who you are based on that sound bite so I actually find myself in that situation a lot we're here I'm going to say this thing that you're going to you're going to hear and it sounds like a Fox News talking point but you don't understand how I came to understand this you don't understand that I used to be a card carrying Marxist leftist organizer that I have I have lived in this space that I I am not some um you know ideologue I'm not I'm not coming to this without doing a great deal of personal reflection and research and you know I I've really immersed myself in these questions at a level that it is not at all Apparent from what I'm about to tweet and so there is that can be a very that can keep you stuck like you want to share because you you have this information that's very valuable that you've come by very honestly and um that that is uh potentially of value to the Coalition but you know that it comes with this whole set of assumptions that are incorrect and you you're not able to correct for those things in the context of social media so that's a it's an interesting puzzle unique to our communication moment yes yeah I but yeah I think as you as you dip your toe in and you attract new people to your cause you just get more and more comfortable in a gradual sort of way with that sort of that sort of thing yeah somewhere maybe this is a to wrap it up another sort of this is completely a different a horse of a different color um do genes that make cute children also make attractive adults probably generally yes yes yes just lower mutation loads yeah um more symmetry yeah yeah so that's why it's actually sometimes it's interesting looking at kids early and you can see the attractiveness of their parents very early emerging you know being by age three you can sometimes tell oh that kid's going to be a beauty and the mother's a beauty you can see it and uh and you can see if the if the mom's average or Dad's average you can see how you can see the average features it's amazing this is a darwinian I.E like begets like uh you know wide flat feet he gets wide flat feet and uh big noses to get big noses this didn't come from nowhere believe me if you meet the Fairchild side of my family there there it is so uh yeah that's how that works yeah I mean I think there probably are some very cute children who do not become very cute adults but but children have to be cute to survive you know it's it's sort of it's it's uh cute there's cuteness is more equitably distributed and they have less time for the mutations to set in too so you don't run into too many just you know aesthetically disturbing children um where you run into a fair number of aesthetically disturbing adults after they've been since the pleasure craft that's very true that's very true distortions so yeah if you get the pleasure trap a hell of a lot of human attractiveness will shrink down in terms of uh I think people I mean you have to watch like old newsreels and old movies and like not not even the movie stars but the extras the regular people and the sort of crowd scenes um and it's it it's just it's a very different view of humanity sort of what the Baseline attractiveness across the species is supposed to look like um it's uh yeah and some of that is you know just changing standards of you know nobody like my grandmother until her dying day if she was going to go to the grocery store she had to put her face on you know there was sort of this you know you had you had to kind of get ready to go out into public in a certain you had to look your best um and so we've we've simultaneously lost that but also the the most optimized version of most people is not where it was a generation ago um yeah so and but the kids are probably just as cute all right well that was that was an interesting uh set of questions sure but we'll go ahead and uh and wrap it up I I have a consult coming up so I have to keep it going kind of quick so um but yeah thank you so much for coming out everybody and uh we'll have this posted shortly and we'll see you next time rock and roll fantastic I'll see you enjoy your morning Doug gotcha bye all right bye
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist