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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-04-11
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okay but all technology is actually functioning so yeah believe it it was uh Sam here yo you're yes yes you've got people that use the internet heavily and then when I need to use it it's all Haywire yeah I imagine that they're using it to extremely heavily although isn't it a little late for Sam to be away [Laughter] like it's not vampire hours yeah oh my god well how are you doing got a lot of washingtonians here I'm good it's uh sunny but cold today so that's that's an improvement how's it down there good all is well yeah not as warm as Maui though I bet yeah all right all right well tell me what's up we got going well let's see so we've got let's hit the first uh the most popular questions in the question tool that we have here first because we have a few that have a bunch of votes um and I just want to remind people with this I've gotten a bunch of emails this week where people posted something and then immediately realized it was not Anonymous that their name was attached with it and wanted me to delete it um I cannot all I can do is delete the entire thing um I can't change your name your name is set in the system so anybody watching this who decides that they want to venture into the Q a tool um and I don't think you can change your name either the only way you can change your default display name uh is to set up for a new account which I can do for you if you have big anonymity concerns I'm happy to do that but you have to use a new email address you can't we we have to set up like a whole new account and it holds on to your email address forever so if you have another extra email address and you want to set up a parallel account I can create one obviously it would be if you have a lifetime membership already it's free Doug's like I don't care about anything way better Solutions say a friend of mine wants to know yeah there you go when you ask your question yeah you don't have to claim it I think there's there are various Anonymous concerns and I totally appreciate that and I tried to put it up in the in the little notes that it's not Anonymous that people are getting caught up with that so I've got a bunch of bunch of uh people this week with that so just to disclaimer if you uh if you post anything I'm also hoping that the comments are now unmoderated and will appear immediately I've had to go back in and manually approve them and that's been irritating to people too so that's all the housekeeping I have do you do you have any housekeeping type stuff no no technical concerns okay so the number one most highly voted question we have here it's got 21 votes this is uh how can we mitigate introversion and loneliness especially later in life um so this person says I find that I'm quite happy spending a lot of time alone I enjoy my quiet time I don't feel money to socialize a lot maybe just twice a month or so although I do interact with people all day for work and I can find it quite tiring so introverted human um however I worry that my disinterest in spending time with others is cutting me off in the world and one day I will suffer from loneliness like catching some type of disease and I may regret not having forged more connections I'm still quite Young how can an introvert engineer a life for themselves that protects against loneliness especially later in life and especially single women who do not have children can technology help with this like online communities or does it not have the same impact what should an introvert be doing to ensure that they beat their genes in this way um it's a little bit like worrying about whether or not you're going to get cold when you step outside okay so if you're going to get cold when you step outside then come back in and get a coat okay so if you're introverted now and everything's fine we're not going to like Forge relationships to protect us against some theoretical loneliness that may or may not ever happen Okay so my attitude is just pursue your best existence uh in the present and then if it turns out later that your short x amount of friendship interactions then we go do something about it then okay so yeah there's uh loneliness isn't a disease it's a temporary feedback system it's like being cold or hot or hungry or tired it's like we'll fix it then and so that that's how I look at that that issue yeah yeah just because our lives if you're an introvert your life looks a lot different than in some somebody else is not relevant the only thing that that's relevant is what what is the emotional tone of your resistance and you can pretty well follow your instincts to tell you about how to balance uh the different kinds of inputs we can do that very well there's times when our instincts are problematic instincts are problematic around the pleasure trap instincts are problematic around having unprotected sex and then the consequences of that I think it was uh I think as recently as uh maybe 1970 uh women in South America on average would have six children on average okay so that's having the children that's not the pregnancies you know that's not that's not lost pregnancies and miscarriages and back alley behavior and anything else so that's two-term pregnancies yes yeah so uh so you can imagine what life was like and has been like for a lot of people in in these places where essentially for starting at 16 and going through 52 you've got some four-year-old on your lap uh Etc like it's unbelievable you're just basically a reproduction machine I hope you like it but the problem is you probably didn't like it that much we know that that's true because now they average two children so as soon as they were given access to figure out how to beat their genes they started doing it uh in Mass so yeah so there's certain things that we want to do we want to stay out of a pleasure trap we want to beat our genes with reproduction other than that there's a lot of other little things that we talk about in in our program and and in general strategies for uh for intelligent and happy living but one of the ones we don't have to worry too much about is if you have something that's working for you we don't have to worry about uh the fact that it may not work for you in the future if it doesn't work for you in the future we fix it then foreign there's really even if there were some some advantage to trying to like you know get these insurance policies in the bank by by getting friends you know squared away now for the future there's no guarantee that the Friendship is going to have the same cost benefit uh but you know results when you when you reach the age that you would need that relationship they can change you can change people go through different circumstances people get in relationships where you you hate the person they're dating they they find religion they they find evolutionary psychology they change their diet and you can't talk to them anymore all of these things that affect the the sort of ongoing CB of any kind of friendship um or any kind of relationship work relationship romantic relationship you there's there's no advantage in syncing all of that time and energy in now just for because you're assuming there's going to be this future payoff um that's that's just it's a it's a losing proposition all around and you're sort of you're you're putting pressure on that person and yourself not to change from from what what you are right now and obviously we know your personal Melodies are not meaningfully going to change but I mean I I have gone through many phases of shedding friendships in my life based on what's going on in my life what's going on in theirs um I think that's just a natural progression of friendship that people don't appreciate so wait to see when you get to this point you know what your what you're offering to any friendship and what you're in need of and and what that kind of CB is going to look like in that in that Dynamic sense so and there's no you cannot guarantee or plan for that in any kind of way um and the worst thing the worst way to guarantee or try to plan for it is by having children you're going to be like some guarantee of companionship into your old age like that's a that's a real losing bet that people will often kind of find themselves in that trap and that's uh that's not fair to them and it's not fair to yourself so this is just like Doug is saying something that is a ongoing Dynamic feedback system that you just have to take as it comes there's one that that's really good for you coming up here but the the only other thing I would add this is something that I've talked about before I think in this q a and elsewhere just about I think on this q a fairly recently we talked about just sort of getting more you get more selective as you get older about who qualifies for friendship and for any kind of relationship so you just are better calibrated you're better calibrated to what you're going to put up with than what you need from those relationships and so the person who qualifies for a friendship today is very unlikely to stay the course for the next several decades um as you sort of become more uh just your your standards are going to change so you're going particularly if you're starting off pretty introverted it's very difficult as you as you get um later in your life to find people that are worth the trouble because you're just running a better CD you you have more um data going into those correlations and furry and what what kind of relationship this is going to be and how beneficial it's going to be to you you I go I've met seven guys like Doug before you know I know I know I know how the story ends um and so you're just less likely to invest so you just have to stay present to that process the whole time all good all right so this one this one's a good one for you given your um your previous your your karmic past lives so dear doctors recently I got a job as a manager for a place that provides low income housing I'm a high conscientious nutcase on the far end of the scale the per the people I deal with are low conscientious disagreeable low IQ a lot of times when I speak to them they look the other way as if they're teenagers Define their parents I try to keep my cool but I'm unable to do you have any advice for a high conscientious nutcase who wants to keep the peace and get them to cooperate with me on following the rules any tips on changing their behavior while preventing me from going bananas two-thirds of them are cooperative and don't want to be evicted but a third of the troublemakers drive me crazy and cause all the stress for the other residents I know you know a little something about this Doug used to be a landlord but uh uh I think probably the most important thing to be thinking about uh with respect to things like this is uh and I know this person all uh knows the the details of this but this is a there's several things that are going on though when you're frustrated you're frustrated because you are feeling that you're being boxed into an indirect alternative in other words you need somebody to do something and therefore you're trying to get them to do something in a certain way okay the um and so that's frustrating and so what we want to be in is we a position of power is synonymous with a direct alternative position of power is the notion that hey I'm in charge of what it is that I'm going to do and your powerless to stop me okay now when people get shitty and I've had a lot of shitty people I've had people that uh that would come into interviews with me I interviewed and did probably on the order of five thousand psychological assessments for the criminal courts in Dallas so all day long like we have people come into my office uh and I I would have an hour within a half hour with them and I was going to do a psychological assessment on them for their probation situation and uh so one reason or another they were being referred to me and I would get some people like that mostly people are pretty Cooperative sometimes they'd have an attitude and uh and they wouldn't want to they they'd have this attitude that they're not going to talk to the feds okay and so my attitude would uh this is where this is a beautiful application of crystal clear direct alternative and and therefore not in a total position of power and I would say okay I'm gonna ask you questions and you don't have to answer look at me and that's just fine with me I'm going to ask you and then if you don't answer that's not a problem it's just going to go on the report okay I you know I don't don't really care how this goes anyway uh I can either write a report that's fair rule for to the judge for you or I can write a report that indicates that you are uncooperative doesn't really matter to me I've got it all on the computer already typed up I already have uncooperative and Cooperative reports it's all done it's not difficult for me to write I just hit a button and then I edit it and I put your name in it so uh it doesn't really matter to me I.E position to power [ __ ] I don't really give a damn what you do okay it's just fine by me so that that is the position of power and when you're in that position apparently you'll feel feel irritated uh certainly because the anger is your signal to them that they are treating you unfairly okay so you indicate to them you're treating them fairly listen I treat everybody fairly okay everybody has appropriate opportunity to do this but if you're if you don't this very simple rules here and if you don't follow the rules then I will report this in my report it's not difficult for me to do this I do it every day okay and when I make those reports there are consequences for the people that I make reports on so it's up to you whether or not you want to look me in the eye and cooperate and answer my questions and agree and sign what you need to sign or you don't and if you don't I don't really care doesn't make any difference to me okay that's that's how I would handle it and uh and if they they keep giving you attitude you're like babe say let me have a nice day this gets to a uh a broader kind of uh meta concept that's implied by this question which is if that you know this what the strategy that you're recommending requires a fair dose of disagreeableness as well so um if this person does not have that inherent in their nervous system this is probably not the right job for them so you you like this is this is really not you you cannot manage this problem in the most effective way for your own nervous system if if you if you've got a lot of agreeableness and you're dealing with a lot of low C pushy people who are trying to make life health for you this is about that you know you're starting to look for another job and making a graceful exit from this particular place beautiful Jen yeah I I had thought of that and then I lost it in this and then you come back and catch the what I missed this is uh but the principle that I'm also describing here it can be extremely important for all people that are in situations like those the neighbors threatening to sue you over something okay so what do you need you need to know exactly what the rules are okay once you know what the rules are this is what we call gaming it out so you gain out what you know the inner how that interaction is going to go under every step of the worst case scenario and you put yourself at peace in other words you are prepared for whatever that thing is and at that point what we're doing is we're Crystal clearing people all the way down it's like fine with me if if you do that I'm gonna do this just to let you know and therefore we're not threatening we're informing them there's a difference when you aren't sure what the outcome is going to be and you're not sure that you can afford it or you're not necessarily in a business if you can't get yourself in a position of power then you wind up being a hell of a lot more anxious and a lot more emotionally unstable and then a lot of times you'll make big threats if you're disagreeable or you'll fold your tent and just cry to your mother uh if you're if you're not disagreeable in other words you're in a position of weakness so what I'm always trying to do is I'm trying to establish whether or not you know what my strategy is going to be to solve this conflict uh and what that's what we're talking about is conflicts we're talking about conflicts of interest between us and another person and so those conflicts of interest are going to involve some probably the greater the conflict the more intense the emotion and the more out of control we are because because the outcomes we are very I've seen very smart people wildly emotional about things because they actually don't know what the what the rules of the game are it's extremely important I've seen pretty high level anxiety from high level people and high level Stakes that have actually not consciously they've been cheapening out the thousand dollar consult to a patent attorney that they need okay they're they're in a kissing match with somebody and they're really worried about it but they I tell them well uh I don't know the answer to that question you're it's going to cost you a thousand dollars to get the answer to that question then once you have the answer to that question then we'll talk strategy okay so but this is all but this particular thing is a low-level version of exactly the same thing that happens at any level uh and this also happens in people in romantic relationships where you're in a position of weakness and you're getting pushed around the chessboard by a disagreeable who's not being communicative and will level little threats to you and you don't want to lose them and you don't have a position of power okay and the position of power comes with crystal clear and facing the worst case scenario and finding out gee can I afford to live without this person financially or any other way and if I can then I need to Crystal Clear this thing all the way down and if it turns out that at the end of it they're going to basically threaten me and be shitty and that we don't have any golden process well then I get to look at that and I get to look that in the eye and say well maybe the best thing for me to do is to take a break okay but once again as you say behind this I have enough disagreeable in me to have learned from Vincent billiosi who had enough disagreeable in him quite a lot quite a lot but he basically shows the process uh uh and Crystal Clear naturally comes out of boliosis uh life as a prosecutor and prosecutors don't make statements they ask questions okay and so what about this what if if I do this you know just just to let you know I'm gonna do this what do you what do you choose to do about it okay and essentially it's a prosecutorial process of crystal clear it doesn't have to be hostile but the notion is and then we're we're also in many of these conflicts we are informing them very openly uh what it is that the consequences are going to be as best we can uh because essentially we are moderately relaxed because we are we have direct Alternatives that we can survive direct alternatives are beautiful no they can't stop me from the direct alternative okay and so uh that many EX many experiences in Psychotherapy with people who never dreamed about how much control they had over a situation because they were intimidated by somebody else's anger and they didn't understand just how much power they had in direct Alternatives uh one of my favorite cases was a woman who wanted very much to visit her sister in Las Vegas and she lived you know with a um um that guy was like oh no Lewis won't let me go and it's like uh call the cab pack your suitcase walk outside like oh no he'll never let me what is he going to do when he grabs your suitcase just look down at him look down at his hand you're like oh do you want to keep the suitcase because then I'll just you know just hop in the cab you can get another suitcase in Las Vegas and buy new clothes okay what is he going to do in other words wow she had never thought through the fact that he would actually have to physically restrain her from visiting her sister and if he did that that's a crime yeah yeah that's false imprisonment okay so uh no they don't get to stop you from doing things like that uh they can intimidate you out of it but they can't stop you from doing it so uh and the same thing would be true with this that that [ __ ] in your office that isn't paying their rent on their Section 8 house uh you can inform them that you'll be filing this paperwork yeah Etc and they either I mean they don't have to look you know you can look me in the eye and we could discuss this uh or you can choose not to but this is what's going to happen okay so that that would be uh my attitude direct Alternatives strategy understanding of a CD down through the chain of the worst case scenario these are very important principles for not getting pushed around emotionally and financially in every other way you know conflicts of interest with other people okay yeah cool all right someone is I think this is just a recommendation saying a couple of weeks ago someone asked if there are any good books on personality genetics I'm sure we mentioned blueprint if we had this conversation she said that um or he said I've recently read personality by Daniel Nuttall which I I'm not familiar I don't know if you've read that um says it's an easy yet informative read encapsulating most of the important research and behavioral checks so um I'm I I read these things out loud for people watching the replay who can't see the chat so um I know you can all see it in there now but just want to make sure that people have that resource will add it to the beat your genes um reading list that we have on the website I've also added just for folks who are interested in sort of more contemporary cultural political resources that may not be explicitly surprised may not be explicitly evolutionarily informed but are not incompatible with it I have a resources tab on my website that's genoc.com resources so books videos all kinds of stuff on there so um and I link to the beat your jeans site as well so we're trying to get all the things together in one place just wanted to mention that let me see what else we've got in here um okay a couple other comments okay so let's go to the second most uh the highly rated question that we have this is somebody saying what do we do when we encounter a client with Distortion like being very religious what do you do when you encounter a client with big Distortion like being very religious being allergic to the e word or being deeply invested in some Freudian or bruised banana thinking you try to sidestep their world view avoid references to biology and address their immediate issues when possible when you've had to confront similar issues how have you done it and what has your success rate been like um I mean I I don't I don't sidestep too much I don't know I don't think you sidestep too much we don't get a lot of people who are allergic to the e word reaching out to us the e word of course being Evolution um most people who are going to seek us out and book a direct consult they're coming in more or less friendly to the the framework that's not always the case but usually if that's not the case they're just not familiar with us and it was sort of a recommendation or um the you know the sort of they they yeah usually usually referred by somebody else and in that case you know we just go through the basics and we I've had both things happen I've had people be like holy crap I've never heard this before for this is amazing and then become you know really really interested and read everything and and start to to Really educate themselves and had other people that are just like um yeah okay it doesn't make any sense and I just never hear from them again but I'm not in the business of trying to convince anybody um or walk on eggshells around anybody or uh you know tailor the message to make it more palatable to people because this is just it's just evidence-based consilient evolutionary thinking and so if if that doesn't resonate it doesn't resonate so that's my experience and I suspect Doug is even more sort of of a Dirty Harry straight shooter on that than I am actually because I have 30 years of doing this and I just flirted out a total Lone Wolf I I actually um uh our colleague Rick Seidel about 20 people came up with the concept of the village yeah it's really good as soon as he told me that that's what he was using because he's back in the Bible Belt and so right and so that was useless so you know Rick Rick uh Rick gets credit for this so Rick says okay we all we all you know all ancient humans in a long time ago uh kind of your nature we lived in little Villages and those little Villages there was basically four you know kinds of relationships and there's people that you were interested in from uh romance and there's people that you're interested in friends and they're the people that we traded with and then there was family okay and so uh the the problems of Life are problems of uh of actually trying to get really good relationships I.E so you can you can move around the word competition or you can hit it head on the the very interesting thing I was just talking with Rick yesterday and we were talking about this because it's interesting I haven't read that much of my favorites book on the new CBT I've read just enough of it uh it it's it's smelling like like a a half-assed informed version of the same [ __ ] so we'll find out we'll find out in the next couple hundred Pages whether whether I feel like he's you know uh how how close or far away he is but but the issue is is that that Psychotherapy in general is avoiding the elephant in the living room which is the life is competitive okay you're considering that we need to alter you somehow that you've got distortions no you've got competitive problems okay and uh Rick also said he uh in a conversation we also had 15 or 20 years ago he he made a statement to me uh ricka says CBT guy that was well informed in Floridian therapy uh uh so he he made a statement uh as we were talking about people because Rick was you know super CBT sort of oriented for a long time and the thing that always bothered him and it bothers me and looking at Abrams uh is is a is a very muddy thinking around the concept of distortion okay and when Jen and I use the word distortion we're using it somewhat differently than the CBT people are often using Distortion the uh sometimes it's similar but in other words their thinking is not clear here so let me let me delineate uh uh essentially an important distinction very often in rational emotive therapy and CBT therapy they use the concept that you are irrational I have never seen anybody irrational okay uh uh I uh even the schizophrenics the what they are thinking based on their internal experience about what they believe they are seeing are entirely rational I don't know what you mean by rational I need Aristotle to Define it for us um people's thinking is never irrational it may be mistaken in terms of their estimation of parameters that's what's going on go ahead Jen you got something I wanted to introduce a concept that comes to mind from political science that uh we we use without calling it this so there's this whole Paradigm in political science borrowed from economics called you know rational Choice Theory so that people are these you know utility maximizing means that they're hyper rational and so it came under all this critique because people are not rational same same kind of idea so that there were there were people who responded within political science with this idea of value rationality which is just how we operate like people are rational they're rational in accordance with their values and so we can it's it value rationality is a subjective process which is just self-evidently obviously true but political science had to like have a whole literature and a whole big you know Naval gazing debate about this and there's still people who resist it but that's the essence of what we're talking about is what what these disciplines call Value rationality it is rational you're you're you cannot but act rationally just your rationale might not look the same as somebody else's now so right yeah and of course they as you see I'm hearing them creeping towards value so and then they don't really quite understand where values come from values are emanating from the genetic code okay and so the so you can see that social science is tweaking their way towards the truth in one Creek at a time and cognitive therapy so Abram's book is a major advance in basically sounding the alarm as a major CBT spokesperson Abrams is saying you know he's co-author of Albert Ellis for God's sakes so your he's basically saying Hey guys you're not informed of evolutionary psychology and you're not informed to behave with genetics you're in deep trouble you're freaking lost okay and so and I would tell Abrams guess what one more step you're you're actually you look like a Jules Verne version of a of a tank like you don't you know you're you're you're a century behind in terms of your your in moving in the right direction but this isn't actually how it's going to work or Jules version version of an airplane would be a I don't know a hot air balloon with it with a with a a Rudder on it or something you know what I mean in other words not not understanding oh no no this thing uh is not about your childhood disturbances that caused you to have permanently irrational thinking as a result of experiences you had early in life that's a CBT hybrid mechanism that looks half-assed like Freudian thinking okay no no that isn't where it's at you your your emotional state today is a result of your current up-to-date uh spreadsheet inside your head of all the interrelated values of your life which all of them are related to each other in a massive spreadsheet that is in fact a cost benefit nature tricks that it's all based on a value judgments that that you know at the core are all nothing other than probabilities associated with Gene survival processes so that's actually he doesn't understand quite how the Matrix is put together which is fine I don't not really knocking him at all but the but but Rick's point was 15 20 years ago when you were talking he said I said yeah they're not irrational he says not only are they not irrational he says they are completely rational all of their thinking is completely rational and so when a person is talking to you and they quote sound CBT like oh that's irrational because you the notion you say well I'll never get a job that's irrational it's like No actually that's the person's inference over the fact that they've been spent a year and a half and and they're they're they're they're they're they're speaking there's also a bizarre thing in in CBT and in modern psychology in general and that is if the you say the wrong thing that that's somehow programming your unconscious mind so you have to say it different that's [ __ ] when a person says to you in therapy God I don't think I'll ever get a job that isn't actually what they're thinking that is an emotional expression of a depressed individual who's taken a lot of negative feedback and their parameter estimation is uh their private or estimation is I'm not sure I'm never going to get a job at the level that I think that I ought to be able get a job and I'm frustrated about that because it may be a hell of a long time too long for me to wait and stay so that's actually what they're saying the fact that they said something technically irrational is absurd and useless the cognitive therapists are trained no you tell them oh you think you'll never get a job what if you went down to Starbucks with your CPA from from Dartmouth you think that they would hire you there would you say specifically so it was irrational it was irrational that you said that you never see how you're overly pessimistic and that's your problem okay that's where CBT people are at because that's how they're trained and that's all they know where the truth is is their common sense is telling them that's [ __ ] the person is simply expressing a feeling of being depressed and their inferences are I'm in trouble I'm in competitive difficult circumstances so you don't have a rationality problem you have a competitive problem and the truth is it doesn't matter how religious they are we don't need to have them be quote rational about whether there's a Supreme Being or not it's consistent with what it is that we think we don't need anything of a kind I think it's hilarious I just found out that the lady that started black lives matter to spot a 1.4 million dollar house in Beverly Hills don't even talk to me about this this is like such Classic this is like the apparatchics of the polyp Bureau in the Soviet era having their summer doctors on you know the Black Sea somewhere and disappearing during the sun like it's such classic behavior and it's like of course like I don't I don't begrudge the lady her you know her her drive to accumulate wealth and and purchase this big sprawling it's like a five acre Mansion it's like ridiculous it's this huge huge place um but the hypocrisy of of you know informing the world that you're this Marxist in favor of uh dramatic redistribution at the same time like lady come off of it like this is this is I can't I'm I I become more and more violently allergic to hypocrisy as I get older I don't know maybe it's partly Doug's fault but it's getting to the point where it's like oh give me a break like yeah have some honesty about your process there's one of my favorite Dirty Harry moves I can't remember what it was that it was uh one of them where uh where the gang of useless uh bank robbers that is supposedly for it was like a takeoff on The symbianese Liberation Army um you know it is it was like there were a bunch of basically uh half-assed loser Dropout you know white kids from college or something you decide or just half sociopathic that decided to start robbing banks or something and then as soon as you know for the poor and then as soon as they get their hands on some money they're getting some new clothes great new hairdos and new car it's like yeah okay for the people sure it was so absolutely power corrupts absolutely I'm sorry I interrupted you because you just reminded me of how pissed off I was about that particular news item I was slightly entertained yeah let's bet where was I taught what was I talking oh CBT rationality I can't remember where I was with this but the point is is that that uh oh religious people for example so uh people that is deeply religious I'm going to talk to them about the village okay yeah sure if they find their way to our door to begin with that they you know yeah occasionally they do and I'm going to talk to them about the village and I'm going to talk to them about these competitive issues but in the village and this was the thing I actually wanted to talk to you the other uh the other day I was struggling to get this in my text so I thought no I just want to talk to Jan and I'll just wait till the day and that is that uh The Thing Rick and I were talking about was that the big thing that's missing is uh from even quote the new CBT is the notion of competition oh yeah it's absent the central defining characteristic of our approach to psychobility esteem Dynamics is about the nature of the fact that your the vast majority of human suffering and unnecessary suffering is coming from their approaches strategies and difficulties that they are having in competitive esteem markets that is not actually recognized by modern by modern Clinical Psychology these are competitive problems and instead we're blaming everybody else in the universe we are poo pooing the behavior genetics that is giving clear evidence of where there are some federal problems we are talking about you being irrational and overly overly pessimistic when all CBT was born out of a lot of the the frustrations and and uh and obvious problems with highly neurotic highly conscientious depressogenic anxious people that are going into psychotherapy rather than just saying oh well you're a hyper conscientious depressive anxious yeah okay what we need to do is we need to put you in circumstances that dials that down but otherwise go with God because that's your life okay the Bernie Stein Nets this is your life you're going to be a highly neurotic highly anxious individual for the rest of your life and we can do little bits to mitigate it but it's not irrational it's the fact that you are going to vastly overestimate the worst case scenario on all kinds of [ __ ] today you die there's no stopping that modern uh I mean therapy doesn't want to admit that and Rick actually made a point the other day about about the new CBT and people that are going to be thinking that direction they are going to have difficulties crossing over and understanding what we're saying because they don't want to give up the status that says you can't fix them oh that's a really good point yeah fascinating point because he's more Rick is a lot closer he's closer he works in a Psychiatry Department of a major hospital system he's used all of our colleagues that I have left behind uh that's a good point I I don't have any problems saying oh you're a nut sorry there's here's what we could do for you and that's all we can do okay and uh I recognize the behavior genetics constrains greatly people's life experience uh and that is the way it's going to be my mother is a happy-go-lucky you know Alzheimer's person who wakes up every day with a joy on her face and and when I say oh I'm gonna make you a cup of coffee she goes oh boy thank you so much that lady loves coffee more than I do which is really saying something yeah you can't stop that woman from having that experience okay and so you can't stop the the the anxious nut case for being an anxious in that case all you can do is put them and help them put them in the most benign circumstances possible so Psychotherapy is not about fixing that Psychotherapy is about the process of D distorting them about parameter misestimations that's going to be the result of us running little experiments and also keeping you keeping people unnecessarily out of the ego trap a great a great important part of the diagnostic process is we tell them about the village we tell them about the competitive issues we also tell them sometimes people are afraid to do their best because they'd be embarrassed if they fell short of expectations that's the message that we give when we hear when we talk source code nice dumbed down source code to people and uncontroversial source code we don't have to talk about Evolution we can and if I have somebody that I can talk my favorite people to talk to are are uh like uh computer programmers it's like yeah guess what it's computer program okay this computer program it is subroutines the subroutines you know have within them a cost benefit analyzing things and so all that's going on is that you're getting the subroutine telling you gee your feedback isn't nearly as good as we as our little estimators think it should be gee you're not getting good feedback oh now you're getting a demoralized feeling of depression that says it's not worth the cost the time and energy invested but you still have evidence and it seems like your competitive position should be better so you're frustrated as hell okay that and so our job is to now figure out what is the what are the stepping stone processes of competitive process of advertising but it's going to get you the better feedback that's it okay in other words it's very systematic uh and actually my very favorite people are people I've had a few of them that work in uh in artificial intelligence they are really easy you can give them the whole download in 20 minutes and we step out exactly what it is that we're going to do you know if you're not one of those people don't worry about it it takes you through it takes us 38 minutes instead of 18. you get to the same place okay but yeah so the questioner here is this some kind of a therapist wanting to know how you tiptoe around Evolution say Natural History or ancient history and say but we talk about how we had to compete for esteem so that's what we use so right out of the living wisdom Library we use the the Mind map and then we we draw Out versions of that talking about the village that's how we get around that problem yeah but uh but yeah the yes I was Jen Jen had it too easy Jen would you ever want Jen didn't spend 20 years in the trenches talking to uh poor Rick is has spent his entire career in rural Virginia talking to people that are that are uh you know essentially uh very conventionally deeply religious and so he came up with the village yeah yeah no I I I got to profit off all that pre-existing toxic masculinity and just came in [Laughter] but my 1.4 million dollar house that's right thanks to the patriarchy but no I mean I am and I am in a privileged position because I don't have many people who knock on my door or give me a call who are not already pretty friendly to the ideas around Evolution and evolutionary theory it happens sometimes um but it's very very rare and it's usually an accident when it happens I was never on anybody's kind of insurance Paul policy where they randomly you know found me as a therapist like I'm not I'm just not in that kind of situation so um so I can be a little more this is one of the rare cases where I'm more disagreeable and dug it like oh you don't want to hear about Darwin like that why are you on the phone with me like what like what kind of sugar coating are you looking for I'm not your man [Laughter] um you said something interesting at some point like the you know we've talked before about how we can forgive uh contemporary psychology to you know some degree for not being up to speed on behavioral genetics although at this point they don't really get a pass like you know I I would I would give them a pass up until 20 years ago maybe um but at this point it's willfully ignorant um but there's also like how can you sit in a in a room doing therapy with somebody who says something like um oh I don't think I can get a job and not realize that you're looking at a competitive problem like that person is is clearly Market testing with you you know they're they're looking for feedback from their therapist about is that true you know is that like tell me I'm wrong tell me where I'm I'm confused about this competitive problem like that just seems so obvious to me and that they would miss that and instead it's this distorted thinking and it's this you have to silence the inner critic and I I just it's it's so divorced from real life that it astounds me that they would just take themselves out of that role completely it's I see no excuse for that I'll give them the pass on the on the like oh they don't realize that the person can't be helped um and the attachment to the the status that comes with you know being the being the purveyor of great tools to help them um but not realizing that they're in a situation where their part career counselor in addition to everything else and that they're there to be distort the person's idea of what is possible for them um it's just like how do you miss that yeah yeah amazing I remember I remember listening to uh David uh Burns for 10 hours continuing ed and uh it was nice it was not not bad listening and there was uh uh it's nice just to hear uh highly practiced competent uh individual that that was uh not psychodynamic and so however I can remember him saying things I I could sort of put up with it and there was little little things that they do that are actually fine like down arrow and um but there was bizarre things like for example oh I can tell you how to make your relationship better it's like wow where relationships are uh you could sort of look at them in two very different ways one of them is to look at them as a system that may have a thing along with it that we fix and the other thing is to look at them as natural synergy that emerges and so the truth of the matter is almost always it's the second not the person so when you have a Haywire relationship that is not as a result of something wrong that the system needs to be tinkered with it's because that's the inherent Synergy of that system okay and so there are there are occasional exceptions where that's true and it's important as a it's been important as a couple's therapist and and as a individual therapist listening to people's situations but I can tell you that it doesn't take me a whole lot of questions to find out that I know that no you've got a mediocre situation and it's never going to change but David Burns's sort of amazingly obtuse you know a concept as a systems thinker that oh no you know this all engines should work perfectly all we need to do is to Tinker this and Tinker that and then your system will work it's like the living hell it will that that that's assuming that you're going to unilaterally like change this and change that and then they're going to change your response and then everything that he's going to be happy really what if I'm not happy with the how they look okay what if they're not happy with how I look what if the I'm not happy with the fact that I found out that they're a hell of a lot more disagreeable than it is that I thought they were when we first met and then we got married and then a year later I didn't know what I was in for okay so no the the truth is is that there's a A or for example people that are come in quote with low self-esteem about their appearance how do you not recognize that this is the result of feedback that they are getting in their competitive realities with respect to make made acquisition and how do we also not know that this is a pan-human characteristic of feeling like you're having difficulty competing for the people that you want because you are objectively uh in trouble with respect to your market value uh with respect to those people and that appearance is a major factor that you don't like they don't like any of the Stars and they they like to say that this is uh very much of this I.E or inner critic where your inner critic is freaking squawking because you're getting negative feedback from other people and it's competitively difficult and to not to I and Rick talked about this just the other day that people wait he said that when we start when I started talking about this and this happens this happens to me when I was explaining it to Rick 20 years ago and it's happened to Rick and all his people ever since in my people ever since when I start talking about the competitive realities of how it is almost everybody I'm interested in is not interested in me and almost anybody that's interested in me I'm not interested in and that is because of the mathematical relationships of the objectivity of make value okay and then what we're looking for is a magic 10 where both of this actually feel like we're being over rewarded and now that generates a surprisingly strong wind of happiness in the system because it's all designed around a competitive processes when we start talking about the competitive realities Rick said peoples will a lot of times laugh The Laughing relief they'll laugh at unbelievable like oh we get to talk about real as opposed to us tippy-toeing around it and never going to the heart of the competitive problem and nuancing it and nudging and avoiding and but no you're actually going to tell me Point Blank at the problem I have is I'm not hot enough to get the people that I really want and it's frustrating as [ __ ] wow there's a tremendous relief and also anxiety about getting real okay and it's like okay we got a competitive problem it's a [ __ ] okay what are we gonna do about it okay no I'm not going to tell you that the right thing to do is to say to yourself you're beautiful a thousand times a day and to Stamp Out the internal critic what's the credit telling you okay oh well the critic may be telling you things that are ridiculous so I've had people say well I'm just really worried about owning on my shoulders or by this it's like well [ __ ] it it's really the matter is is that that may be a rule out variable for a small percentage of your Market but it's not there's not a damn thing we're going to do about that we we simply you have a market somewhere out there when you bring your A-game there's a magic 10 percent okay that market may be relatively easy to find it may be difficult to find but it's a competitive process where and that's what we're facing facing what the real problems are as you say a person talking about a job that they're worried about they are uh they are looking to you to help them calibrate their their loss they don't know what to do they need Stepping Stones they have ego traps that are making it intimidating for them to even try or to actually uh go on match.com I've had people that were afraid to go on match.com because they they had such high status in The Mating community that they were afraid that if they didn't that they were afraid to even be seen shopping uh we have a mutual friend Jen but that was true an extraordinarily handsome young man in Australia yeah that that that that that is a an extraordinary psychological process that that such a thing could could cause somebody to be in an ego trial so us as therapists uh this was a therapist driven kind of a question our our job is to say what's stopping you from competing what intimidates you about the competitive process we are going to acknowledge openly that we are in competitive processes and that the negative and tentative and depressive feelings that we have in life are coming from our inferences about our competitive standing in a domain to believe that the world of psychology and Psychotherapy uh is anything else that that is not the heart and center and that the individual wackadoodle um variances associated with personality issues are just addressing okay this they are the you know that's like if you happen to have that that's the lousy potato salad that you just have to eat on your plate okay if that's what it is but the center of your life's problems are these major competitive issues and so that's uh that's where it is that we go and we can explain that to anybody in any language and they hear it loud and clear okay and they are either eager to hear more they are nervous about it they may actually have have already operated by virtue of their history and their personality that they are going to opt out because they smell payoffs in trauma [ __ ] they smell payoffs in the ego trap they smell smell payoffs in staining Enlightenment that they're above it one way or the other there may be people uh that do not want to compete and Jen and I will listen to that and that's like blood to a bloodhound pick up well don't think we're not coming after that and you're not going to Bluff me out of the fact that you've got a competitive problem because I know that's what you have okay most people don't come to us with those kinds of things but if we were in a standard practice we would get some of that and uh when I get that I push right into it pretty quickly and pretty resolutely and um and they'll they all they all admit it pretty quickly uh because they know they they I'm talking source code and your trauma explanation for the reason you're not competing right now is [ __ ] the reason you're not competing right now is you are afraid of what your competitive standing is it's an embarrassing situation and it's intimidating situation and not all of the trauma mongering and reparations in the world from anybody are going to stop that Misery the only thing that's going to stop that misery is to close the distance between your existing performance and what it is that you could be and therefore earn the esteem in the marketplace uh that you that you should be claiming uh or not and find out that you didn't have the choice that's how we do this work that sound about right yep sounds sounds good that was that was that was ranty definitely ranty all right and there were a couple of quick follow-ups that I wanted to make sure we addressed somebody was asking if it makes sense to um get a behavioral genetics book after reading blueprints um and uh flemen is the editor of a behavioral genetics textbook that's pretty good um but I think for I I found more utility just in going into the the primary literature of the Articles the twin study articles so um there's lots of I mean the plemen's footnotes are very very rich and his bibliography is great so you can actually see behind me that big pile of paper on the bottom shelf of my bookcase those are all most of those are twin studies that's that's like really all of that all available um you know on PubMed or wherever you can track this stuff down um and that really starts to even if you don't have a lot of experience reading scientific literature you can read the abstract and get good sense of what the article is going into and then skip to the results section and and look at that and look at any graphs that you can make sense of um and that that is a more systematic sort of education and what people are looking at and what heritability estimates really look like in real life in real experiments um but you can get certainly a shortcut of that if in a good behavioral genetics textbook and plumens is the best that I'm aware of um there was that question then somebody was asking about rationality and voting um and and invoking the Ghost of the book The Trouble with Kansas which is uh political scientists love to hate that book so I would recommend uh there's a if you're interested in this there's a book by a Princeton Economist called the myth of the rational voter um who is uh looking at this idea that he's coming from an economics perspective and so he's not saying that voters are not rational he's going back to what we're talking about that they are subjectively value rational um and that they're voting for politicians who appear to share their biases um or at least pretend to and so they're behaving in a very rational way but it's it's it might not be rational in the sense that it creates the best possible outcome for them in their situation because they have all kinds of distortions about the reality of their situation but that doesn't make their behavior or their vote Choice any less rational so um that's just another resource for that one I feel like there's something else some other quick question um somebody clarified that but uh okay so I think we've run ourselves out of time with ranting apart from uh we have another question which really I get this so often it's going to have to make an appearance on our FAQ which is how is the book coming and when will it be available it's uh it's not going to be available for quite a while we are we've got we still have much to do it's uh it's kind of been been like a series of Chinese boxes that you you know open up one and then there's another little or one inside and there's a little one on inside of that so uh uh it's uh we're we're very pleased with what it is that we're accomplishing uh but uh we're just gonna have to wait because it'll get done when it gets done thank you yeah we've we're made a lot of progress since the last time we officially commented on it but we can't it's impossible to predict when it's going to feel done just because we do keep stumbling into these new open doors um that feel uh it would it would be irresponsible to neglect some of the tendrils that have emerged unexpectedly from this thing so if we're only going to write this book once we don't want to miss things that are uh you know showing up kind of late in the game is really important so um that means it's taking a little longer than we thought we got totally derailed because of covid like everybody else did but we're getting there so yes yeah and as I it's in the FAQ on the on the site but um just I know people watch these replays that don't necessarily read the FAQ you don't need to worry about having your address on file for us to send it to you we'll we will ask right before we send it out for everybody to um to send their address their preferred address because you know people may have PO boxes or they want to send it to a friend instead of themselves and all that so that's all later don't worry about that yes we're shipping internationally um that's all in the frequently asked questions so I get all the emails Doug doesn't get the email so he does he doesn't know all right well I think that that wraps us up for this time so we will see you guys uh in a couple of weeks fantastic and I've been loving Jen your uh hot clock oh yeah yeah really fun stuff you put a lot into it there's beautiful edits and and uh with you included I think it's it's fascinating to listen to I get all fired up and then I have to like calm down no I I get myself fired up this whole last week if people aren't listening this is on my YouTube channel it's also on my website um this is my new sort of uh well Doug has been on two of them now so it's but I I whether it's with Doug or not I do a weekly sort of wrap-up of politics and cultural cultural events from a from the sort of quasi-evolutionary perspective um and this past week I talk all about how human nature is very anti-free speech um and it's part of why we're we're on the cusp of a First Amendment crisis in this country like we have never seen um and are already in the middle of it and uh it's uh it's really really bad news so we have some some interesting things that are going to come creeping through the courts at some point but if you want to hear more about that if you're interested you can go uh listen to that on YouTube so yeah cool all right and I'll I'll recruit Doug for another episode soon gotta get dirty Doug back in the house all right all right I'll see you well I'll see you real soon Jen yeah sounds good all right everybody bye
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