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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-04-22
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right all right you're promoted can you hear me okay if you can I can hear you perfectly okay my regular mic is not connecting for some reason all right okay there's the chat all right looks good how are you good Sacramento I got uh I got annalize Scarlett Smith right there on the chair oh Living Dangerously including her for the talk hi Emily oh my goodness she's beautiful and just just it just uh just her not not our other moral wins of excitement of the other other one uh Henry's team noisy I got to keep him away from here oh my God Henry's secretly my favorite he's the most Motown like of all the cats yeah yeah blue is pretty great yeah all right so let's see let's see if we have any live questions going on we certainly have some that have been upvoted in the question tool so we can get to those um but let's see what we've got if there's anything nothing in here um okay Michelle is saying in the chat both of you have inspired me to become a therapist but I'm worried about emotional burnout from hearing people share negativity with me all day how do both of you handle this it's an interesting question because we've actually talked about this in the sort of difference between us yeah yeah yeah uh yeah there is I I think there's a I think the difference between it depends a little bit upon whether or not you're a therapist who feels or your therapist who thinks this is back to the Myers-Briggs I can shut this down at any time you're canceled I I I'm not going to tolerate this kind of speech all right tell us more about how you think and I feel let's let's hear more about that yeah the thing is is that uh sort of the more agreeable you are the more empathic you're likely to be so it's going to turn out that uh in experiment's done with nurses they can tell very early with a very simple test not that they give it to nurses but they could do it because it's been discovered that um nurses that have a lot of empathy don't do so well with the job because it's hard on them so if they look down and see a gaping hole you know a pus festering hole on in your leg they're gonna go like this okay whereas a more disagreeable nurse goes hey you're fine how you feel today so uh the long and short of this is that I don't experience any burnout so that's something that I've sort of been you know I heard all about I think a big a big uh component of burnout in psychologists what burnout really is it's a it's a it's a name people invent Concepts uh but so let's talk about what burnout is burnout is essentially a few little elements of things it's basically um uh a conglomeration of I don't have enough sleep most burnout and quote corporate burnout is just sleep fatigue uh and people drinking too much coffee and basically running on too much adrenaline and not being adequately you know restored so that's mostly what burnout is therapist burnout would be a little bit different so therapist burnout would be sitting in a chair for six or seven hours a day uh listening to people talk about their problems and not knowing what to do about them and sitting in there and bluffing okay so that's going to be extremely common uh you can imagine if you were a uh oh I don't know a lawyer that could never win a case and so you just talk to people about their cases and then act sympathetic and then said well you know there's not that much we can do you're gonna have to figure it out for yourself that's more or less what modern Psychotherapy is and so no of course there's a jaded view in the field that jaded view of the field is something that I've I've been vigorously opposed to just in principle since I was 21 that never made any sense to me um I come from extremely practical people I inherited a very practical uh way of looking at existence and if there's problem you fix it and so um so with this my whole approach doing therapy from the very first client I ever had was all about what's the problem let's figure out what we're going to do about it so it turns out that because no matter how much emotional pain somebody's in doesn't seem to bother me very much and I mean that sincerely uh there are people whose there's a few problems that really bother me and they're disturbing just because I feel like there's no real good way out uh terminal illness particularly when it's surprise or there's imminent death particularly associated with very severe pain these are things when I feel checkmated by a problem and I'm not sure how to make the best of the resources that we have and it's essentially a tragedy uh blooming that that's it's not like I'm overwhelmed by this but it's not pleasant but fortunately it's rare uh most of the time there's something the person can do and no matter how defeated they feel I'm not defeated okay and most of their feelings of defeat have nothing to do with other than a derivative of cost benefit analysis that they're not sure whether or not it's worth pursuing because they keep finding out that the price is high and they don't like it and then they feel demoralized but I don't feel moralized I just feel like well you're not willing to pay the price okay and uh and and you but you're being teased by some computations in your mind that make you feel like you should be able to do this and you can be able to do the competitive situation looks like you should be able to achieve it but somehow there's obstacles in the way and you're feeling overwhelmed by the obstacles and my attitude is we're not overrun by the obstacles we either put forth the effort and we succeed or we fail and if we fail that's okay so we failed at something in life that's not a problem okay doesn't mean we failed the whole damn life it means we may not be able to an attorney be an attorney maybe we have to be a paralegal okay so the uh I don't feel defeated very easily the uh and so as a result I don't carry uh because of uh less empathy than Jen has I don't carry as much stress uh with respect to this so to me I'm I'm more like a lawnmower mechanic that really doesn't feel particularly troubled by how messed up your lawnmower is there's you know we either change three parts we change one part where we say you know what you're a plumbing special lawnmower there's no fish okay so that's sort of my attitude uh Jen's more like one of those nurses that that you know feels more and so as I I don't think she uh she doesn't get burned out easily but the point is is that you know she I think you I think by the time you've listened to four or five you know four or five hours a day you know I think you're I think where I could go another one or two uh uh you you've had enough and so well that's I mean this is why yeah I don't get burned out because I constrain the number of people I talk to which is why it's ironically it's easier to get an appointment with you often than it is with me because I just have fewer spaces um because I need more downtime between like I I know that I I need to engage in self-care like literally I mean it is it's uh it's not so much that I'm hearing bad things from people it's it's the act of the the empathy it's the sort of it's the fact that I I just the the female nervous system is more um uh I'm I'm sort of modulating my energy more to meet people where they are than you are uh just naturally just sort of just that's just part of the process part of how the female brain works so it's not that I'm getting knocked around by the bad news as much it's that I'm just I'm just uh sort of well it's it's it's it's it's uh uh Ginger Rogers dancing backward and in heels right right I'm doing all the same stuff I'm just running around in a couple more circles than you are for the same amount of of words and time and hours um and so you know I talked to a few people a day and I sort of like I can't talk to more like you do I can't talk late into the night like you do um I can't I just can't add that amount of time to my scheduler I get I get super super depleted I to the point where it's sort of like I I'm less much less effective um which is really the problem I sort of am not able to track people as well because I just can't give as much energy to to this it's part of also why I um it's very difficult for me to to date a certain type of mansplainer because I can't tune out I remember like talking to a sympathetic male at some point about this difficulty that I had where I was dating this guy if anybody's watched High Fidelity the the Tim Robbins character his his characters um called that Ian guy and that Ian guy is like the sensitive New Age ponytail quasi-bootest douchebag um and I dated a lot of guys like that particularly in Berkeley who all had this kind of persona and they'd they'd they'd sit there and they'd lecture me about you know that how when they went on their pilgrimage to the north of India you know to visit the Dalai Lama and then they they went into Tibet now they have this five hour long sod now that they do every day and there's the drums and the chanting of the whole thing because they have to they have to honor the the spirit of of this ascended master and Madison it's very difficult for me to not like hang on every word not because I'm interested per se but because I'm sort of I'm waiting I'm making sure that I have every little piece of information so that I'm I'm maintaining my energy properly in that in that moment and it is exhausting like it's just totally exhausting so it's a totally different whereas if you were dealing with that you would if you were forced to listen to some guy talking about his five hour long uh it's that Buddha you would tune out you'd be thinking about basketball yeah yeah so even though I wasn't interested and I was kind of signaling to him that I wasn't interested I still couldn't turn off my brain so it's really it's an interesting females are just more sort of captive to this process than males are I think yeah I wouldn't have listened I'd interrupt right you'd interrupt him right right yeah I guess people when they're talking I only give them so many minutes right after the I I give them enough to tell the story then after I've already got it I'd give him a couple three minutes more and then it's like no now I'm gonna tell you foreign mowers yeah it's the other thing is that it's funny that you talk about the lawyer who is bluffing and will never win a case like it's a it's a very different experience for me than when I was doing astrology so when I did astrology I was bullshitting full stop you know it was just like I was just making [ __ ] up and that was actually much more exhausting because not only am I doing everything that I'm doing in therapy but I was I was just making stories up and trying to maintain internal consistency and trying to you know make sure that it was something that would make sense like it was ridiculous and it was absolutely because it was as much performance as anything else so I actually find this work less depleting in that way like completely because it is you you know that there is an answer the the truth is out there you just have to ask the right questions and figure out what's going on and if it doesn't you know the number one rule that we both have is if it's not making sense it means there's something you don't know so if somebody's telling us a story about their life that's just not adding up in some sort of bizarre inconsistent non-consilient sort of way we know that either they're not telling us the truth or they don't know the truth that the information that they're working with is incomplete and somebody's lying to them and so they're representing you know oh my husband did this and then this happened and then this became the situation it's like that's not how human behavior works it's that that doesn't make sense so we just know that we can follow the breadcrumbs enough and it's going to get down to source code and there's no uncertainty about reaching that outcome so there's no anxiety so there's no kind of like oh am I going to be a good little therapist and get a gold star today because I'm going to figure out what's going on and get the answer right and get an A plus it's like you know you know you're going to figure it out there's no it's just a more complicated math problem sometimes so that is very uh it's it's not the same kind of energetic depletion as just making [ __ ] up which is what most therapists do very similar to what astrologers do so yeah it's a whole whole different Biz people have have no idea how amazing what it is that Jen just said that unless you're a psychotherapist of some kind you you don't appreciate that there's no appreciating what she just said yeah Rick's Seidel 20 years ago started to appreciate this it's like oh instead of having this infinite mysterious landscape of the great Sigmund Freudian mysterious mind with all kinds of trap doors in it that you can't see right this is just Chinese checkers like there's rules you hop over the little thing that's it straightforward it's really true yeah so it's uh there's a tremendous relaxation where you simply methodically go down through uh what what the issues have to be and just as Jen was saying if it isn't making sense yeah they're not telling you the truth or or they're confused somehow because uh it is the way it is these are I saw somebody pop up a thing what do we think about David Burns I like David Burns's uh quintessential cognitive therapist of CBT he he lacks an understanding that uh uh he has many gaping polls in his knowledge uh and so for example he he doesn't understand Behavior genetics he has no idea about that yeah it doesn't understand anything about evolutionary psychology so he has no idea about that uh I think this new guy Mike Abrams is is probably the closest thing you're going to get to the David Burns 2.0 exactly David Burns was remarkably talented uh very very smart guy super stimatizer so he had check sheets worksheets for everything under the sun in other words he he was a uh he was a systematizer supreme when it came to the how does that he did things so he never felt checkmated he he was a lawnmower repairman he he had the gaping holes in his knowledge with behavior genetics certainly EP and because of those things he did not understand uh he didn't have a conscious uh understanding and knowledge that the human the Lemma is actually competition so he he inferred it and he kind of wasn't afraid of it and he he understood some ways to try to keep people out of the ego trap one of the better chapters you're ever going to read in the history of political psychology is going to be called dare to be lousy and feeling good so he he had his pulse on it and I listened to him actually on on tape and he has uh he's got a very pleasant direct almost sharp angle CBT way about him so I believe that he was uh for his day in other words it's kind of like looking at a football player you know back in the 1960s it's like well you know you guys were pretty good for the 1960s you know what I mean it's like watching The Green Bay Packers play you guys were pretty tough uh a modern NFL team would blow you right off the field you know in practice but but for your day you were good for his day for what it is that he understood psychology to be did David Burns was was very good uh What Jen and I do is completely revolutionary past what David Burns ever dreamed was possible it's not that we're necessarily massively more effective it's just there was so much more accurate in other words give given given any 10 cases the r-10 cases will spend a lot less time confused and a lot less suffering and a few of them will be markedly better in a way that they would never be better from a course of cognitive therapy that's because cognitive therapy is inherently obtuse with respect to so many things that challenge people David Burns would tell you if you've got a tough going in your relationship that you need to work on your relationship and you need to do XYZ he would not say uh-uh your relationship is fundamentally Haywire because it's an it's an emerging process between two genetically determined personalities and if it's been mediocre for the last seven years it's going to be mediocre for the next 70. so get the hell out now he's never going to say that that's because he doesn't understand Behavior genetics and he doesn't understand that relationships or emergent properties to fix personalities so the uh that he said he's he's is a is a victim of a of a paucity of knowledge uh in the in the uh in the 20th century about the nature of individual personalities he believed fundamentally he doesn't know this but his fundamental understanding is quite slightly okay and so he's not a hardcore blank Slater because he's not even a psychologist he's just a guy that went to med school got a great Psychiatry and then started doing cognitive therapy uh so that's who he is that so he he doesn't even probably know what theory he is he probably doesn't even really think about personality very very much but if he did at the root of it he would probably be a common sensical blank Slater in other words sure yeah we've got some individual difference between us to some degree a little bit but pretty much is what you learn from your parents and your experiences and we're going to change some of the thinking that you've got as a result of that today in cognitive therapy yeah that's how he thinks that's how they all think yeah yeah well it's funny we had you know question about David Burns we also have a question about Jordan Peterson sort of where what are the main points where we disagree with them if any I haven't read a paragraph Jordan Peterson so I actually wouldn't know that Jen would know better no that I this disagree with him anything really I mean he he's an interesting cat so he's sort of you know he's bringing this mystical Union perspective to things but he doesn't bring it in a particularly explanatory way he brings it as this um something that my Mystic chip finds very pleasing he sort of brings it to the the grand narratives of of collective life and he situates he's he's really sort of an evolutionary psychologist through and through in his practical approach and anything that we could call clinical with how he approaches a problem he understands personality he understands behavioral genetics um but he he sees this sort of larger Collective uh archetypal drama of of humanity and he sees it repeated cross-culturally as as um Joseph Campbell did and and you know I I don't think that's incorrect I just don't think it's necessarily useful for solving clinical problems but I like the Artistry of it and um I I think it speaks to a larger group of people than he might get to with straight up up EP Concepts so I you know I don't I don't know I'm sure there are things if you pointed to them that I would quibble with him about uh in in like straight inferences that he makes about human nature if anything he probably does um overestimate how much people can sort of brute force their way into a higher Octave of their personality so you know he spends a lot of time um he's he's not value neutral with with personality attributes so he's he he does not really embrace the abnormal as normal kind of perspective that we would see in plummet so he he is going to see greater conscientiousness is more virtuous than lower conscientiousness and he's going to recognize that people can can force themselves through a mixture of carrots and sticks into more uh a more consistent expression of that high conscientiousness and I think he sees more value in that process than we do um yeah so there's some there's there's utility and virtue for him in being the absolute best version of yourself that you can be really consistently there's there's no Hedonism in his worldview so yeah so that's that's really the only part where I would depart I think yeah I actually uh that's consistent with that little video you should you had me look at them he's so uh is so intent on being precise you're looking at the very high conscientiousness and a pretty wound up nervous system there yeah that that would follow yeah yeah I haven't uh I haven't read the new book I'm not I I don't have all of his rules for life memorized I know that one of the rules is never lie or at least don't uh don't tell falsehoods yeah friends we're going to toss that without people because I think that is a terrible idea okay but it's it's hard kinds of reasons to be deceptive it's yeah it's an inherent characteristic of human uh human life it's an inherent characteristic in the animal kingdom so uh no we we be deceptive uh strategically when it serves your interest and uh to try to have some higher plane of of incredible uh transparent virtue is just a sir I forget exactly there's some Artful way in how he phrases it it's never lie but it or at least uh yeah I can't remember somebody some bigger fan might know and can comment but um it's speaking to this sort of like impeccable conduct you know he's it's so important to him he's he's a big believer that you sort of are are you were bringing into being something with your language that is a constituent of the universe and so if you're going around telling falsehoods you're giving away a little of your soul in that process in this very metaphysical way and that and that by doing so you will come to to disrespect yourself um and so so by doing yeah oh there you go Warren's got it tell the truth or at least don't lie so yeah that's that's the beautiful beautiful phrasing that he's very very good at so the yeah the reason for that is because it's it's all about this you know the the sort of world view is you actually don't know what you want all you can do in life is to be as impeccable and true and straight shooting as possible and let ships fall where they may and find out what life has to give to you as a result rather than you trying to kind of game the system and I'm going to lie to this person because I think I want to manipulate their behavior in this direction because that will better serve my interests that the the the sort of higher level of existence is well if I tell the truth and I lose that relationship then it was a casualty of the truth and my my sort of sovereignty in truth is more important to me than that relationship so it's it's a very different it comes from his personality that's a that's a sort of cosmology and approach to to navigating the terrain of life that would come from somebody that super super conscientious um and and also uh you know all the other sort of unique personality characteristics that he has so that makes sense just uh the just just a little warning for everybody um I'm nowhere near that I don't think Janice either and we even look at it appropriately as that that's a that's a freak personality that's a man who never picked up a hammer and attempted to get a permit in Sonoma County to fix his garage okay because you better lie to the idiot clerk on the other side he just has an issue with you fixing your garage so there's all kinds of reasons to be deceptive in the world and the uh the so as a philosophical principle that's a very Dalai Lama like uh version and uh so so I I have to roll my eyes and and chuckle at anybody that's given advice with that however we can hear aspects of it that we understand what lures him and others to that feeling and it's a feeling uh that's a little bit it echoes what Jen and I talk about when it comes to self-esteem so our issue is you know work diligently on whatever this is work work outside of the the intimidation of the ego trap and uh and then when you are when the CV looks like you're not making enough progress or whatever the goal is and you feel essentially burned out depressed and not interested fine that's fine um in other words we will we will let the chips fall where they may uh but what we are not going to allow ourselves to hide from The Challenge and hide from the market realities that's a that's a a slightly different you know it's a similar song and a different key uh for a slightly different purpose but not dissimilar in other words both of what he's thinking about moral Purity ours is a particularly different genre of that with respect to your own personal competitive issues uh that is where we come down on that Integrity issue I.E don't lie to yourself I have no problem with you lying to everybody else depends on who oh you're not gonna lie AI to the Gestapo agent come on are you kidding me to to take some purest attitude only in an unbelievably moral and safe pure bubble because you ever make that kind of a situation out so the um uh so but the point is is that you are in that moral bubble when it's inside yourself okay that's a precisely where you are and so we Face Down The Lure and intimidation of the ego trap and the Lauren intimidation and seduction of Enlightenment uh the enlightenment facade and we are attempting to earn our own self-respect uh in a way that and with our attitude that we're going to live with the outcome no matter what the hell that the uh the process as long as we do a good process so that's that's where there's an echo to that and I can understand because people are probably hearing that that greater message it tickles down into that very same ego uh uh internal process that we are talking about and it and that that's where he's touching on a deep truth yeah yeah I think he's doing a lot of good in the world from his strange little perspective I really wish he'd get off the carnivorous diet that oh well oh well um okay so we can uh we have all these upvoted questions which I don't want to ignore entirely so we don't take away the incentive to use this tool um but we have one that's been uploaded so many times that we can no longer ignore it because it's the number one it's just it's a sex question do we want to tackle this or do we want to sure this is why would nature design it so females don't enjoy penetration and then we have this this questioner saying that she's spoken to many other women who come to the same conclusion uh most women fake it um the the things that are enjoyable are the methods that do not lead to procreation so what is the deal here evolutionarily speaking and then we have a few people uh weighing in on this but none of them are saying what I would say which is that that's just your experience man I think this is I think this is not a universal I think there are a lot of women who feel that way but there are a lot of women who don't feel that way and you have some um selection bias in who you're talking to is is just my general take on that I don't think there's some overarching uh uh perception of reality that follows from this no yeah obviously in other words so if this were the case you know uh women aren't just thinking to themselves when they date a guy oh gee I hope he's fine with just holding hands and kissing and then you know going down on me and I hope that's fine with him because I don't want to do anything else no that is not the phenomenology of the average female on in the average romantic situation at all so if it turns out you know there are certainly uh we know that there's uh it's difficult for many women or impossible for some of them apparently uh to have orgasm serenicals or close to Impossible probably not but uh the we we think there's some good speculation as to why that is and uh one of the reasons why that probably is is that an orgasm is a fitness indicator so it's a it's a it's a device to just as your feelings of looking at a handsome guy that's a response to your nervous system to tell you that those are good genes and that this is a good thing to pursue only if he has an Australian accent laughs exactly this is how it works the uh the uh what was I going to say oh yeah so in other words no this looks like it's uh that that it's a uh it's a fitness indicator so it it causes a statistical increase likelihood of pregnancy uh because it will will Shore up the backflow and so this uh so this it looks like in other words uh if you're not liking how it feels and you're not orgasm that there's part of the issue is that now I'm not saying that oh no you've got the one guy and he's a loser and get rid of them I'm saying that your nervous system uh statistically there's something to that uh across the natural history of the species so all things being equal somebody who's really happy and excited about their mates General sexiness is less likely to be having uncomfortable and unpleasant and non-orgasmic you know uh penile vaginal sex than someone who is in a lousy relationship or a mediocre one or even so so one okay so that's uh that's true and we we can there's plenty of research on that so the handsomer the guy is the more likely the females to orgasm like you know I mean you look literally facial structure configurations that the male are predictive of How likely the female is to orgasm so uh so obviously this is uh this is a selection bias issue not that there isn't not that this isn't uh this has been a long-term you know even when it's been openly identified and discussed which has been true since the sexual Revolution you know the 1960s and 70s um in Playboy Magazine you know when I was feverishly looking for the next one you know as a 14 year old we were reading about this issue and uh long before I got any action I was realizing oh this is this is like she might not like it this is a project like this is not going to be easy to do and so the uh and so you know it's it's been an open discussion and a puzzling one for Humanity to because obviously for the male it's pretty simple business and it's meant to be uh so for the female as you'd expect she should be the choosier sex because she has more to lose by the wrong move and she is it's exactly what we would expected by Evolution Evolution would say you better be very encouraged and if you have sex and it's a lousy time maybe you're not gonna have sex again with that guy okay if it's a really good time then you're probably gonna you know then you're gonna seek it out again and so that that's what all has conspired over the Millennia yeah or you know more than Millennia to shape this into the fitness indicator of this and therefore It's Tricky it's like dunking a basketball dunking a basketball is effectively a fitness indicator sorry about that Jesus one question where we could avoid the misguided Sports metaphor apparently not okay I I will say that it's we're in a unique position talking to so many people because this is I was just talking about this on my um the the Virtual Village thing last weekend where uh you know I've talked to quite a few people who have had experiences of somebody uh approaching them in public and being upset about their mask status but I have talked to just as many people who have had that happen because they were wearing a mask and someone was upset about it as people who were not wearing a mask and someone was upset about it so everybody who has had the experience in One Direction or another thinks that through their egocentric bias that everybody that because they were wearing a mask and they had somebody come up to them on a bike trail say take your mask off you idiot that that's the prevailing kind of wisdom in the in the wind when really it's just you've got disagreeable people out there who are just as likely to pick disagreeable fights depending on whatever they they perceive reality to be and that you're more likely hanging out with other people who are behaving the same way you are so they're having similar experiences that you are and everything kind it gets distorted in that conversation and I've had the same experience with this question where I talk to a lot of women who feel this way but I talk to also a lot of women who are upset that they're not getting enough intercourse in their relationship that they they they are looking to go get it elsewhere that they really miss that that that's the only way that they could achieve orgasm so this is very much like your your subjective experience gets um it's it's like you're living in a little Echo chamber like you are on social media in terms of who you're talking to and the friends that you're talking to who are affirming your view of human nature and reality so a lot of our priors are very misguided on most things and this is one of them so yeah all right I.E classic example of some truth in it you know yeah so truth and the Distortion of the parameters is and when it comes to a wider question of evolution and species-wife all right we have another one here why do police officers do bad stuff with their body cameras on do they not think they're Behaving Badly or do they just get caught up in the Heat of the Moment why is it so hard for onlooking cops to stop them so I guess that you know they're not it's not like they can switch the camera off before they do the bad things so I guess the question is like why why is the why is the camera not constraining them their behavior I think it is constraining their behavior um but they're running cost benefit analyzes on on their behavior that goes beyond that most of the time yeah you've got how at 400 000 police officers in the United States how many do you have okay so yeah once in a while you're gonna get some wingnet who gets into a situation and they're not thinking very clearly and they've got limited impulse control so yeah don't I mean this is a great example men is selection biased and tremendous uh sort of distortion of reality so you know how often does a police officer get out of line and do something Haywire not very often okay so the uh so that That's a classic example this is a this is a this is an example of of you know how how it is that you unfortunately it was I'm just all tongue-tied because it was the sports analogy Sorry God damn it let's go take a moment yeah Center yourself forget the whole thing so we're getting excited today [Laughter] can't be salvaged yes I'm sorry it's a highlight reel you can't you can't judge somebody's career by looking at a highlight reel because you're you're looking at a bunch of cuts of the great things that they did neither can you judge them by You Can't Judge Joe Montana by looking at his hundred worst plays you look terrible so that that's what you're watching with this stuff and that's what's going to give you a tremendously distorted view of reality mm-hmm yeah yeah it's it's really this is you have to keep in mind what is getting what the incentives of the all of the media channels and everything else are to generate outrage to keep eyeballs on the screen or on the page long enough to sell more ads that's the whole that's what they're doing um and so as a proportion of arrests I mean those you've got millions and millions and millions of arrests every year I think 10 million arrests every year in the United States Alone um and you have 13 in in in 2019 13 unarmed black men were killed by police so that's that's too many but it's not happening it's not you've got people who are getting on social media saying that they feel unsafe driving to the grocery store because they're they're if they get arrested their their odds of getting killed by a police officer 50 50 and that's just such a departure from the actual reality of these numbers and and how um what people are really looking at but every single case of of a cop who has acted out of of out of line or who has acted super reactively or has used unnecessary force in a situation where they didn't have to particularly if it is a a particular demographic assortment in in the situation is getting just infinite play on all of the media different different formats that you could encounter so you're getting this narrative over and over and over again and you're getting the sense that it's just dangerous to even get in your car and drive anywhere and it's and it's just not um well speaking of vastly more likely to be hit by lightning yeah speaking of sports did you see uh or just bring a little politics in here did you see what LeBron did on Twitter yesterday oh man so there's this case where there was this African-American teenage girl who um ran after another girl with a knife with with what looks like for you know from a Layman's point of view on the video to with lethal intent um and white officer shot her just as she's bringing the knife down on this other girl um it all happens in a Flash it's all very very fast um and uh so the the girl with the knife was killed she died at the hospital later we don't know what happened we still don't know the full story about everything that that went down but within uh you know this this happened as the verdict was being read in the the Floyd shelvin case um and so LeBron James's response on Twitter was to take a photograph of the white officer who who fired the shots in this other case um with the photo and just in all caps tweeted out your next with an hourglass emoji I.E he'd acted inappropriately let's let's go after him and to his credit I mean he took it down but this is the kind of you know before people know the full story before they know that essentially the the cop was it looks like saving the life of this other African-American female in this interaction by by firing with deadly force and this is what they're trained to do it's not he wasn't misbehaving in this case they're they're trained to fire until the threat is over um and that's that's the situation is tragic all around but this is the kind of thing that gets spun and gets played and gets exaggerated and I saw protesters today uh you know know that we're out out in force with signs Seeking Justice in this case and it's unclear what Justice would look like in this case so so these are these are all the kind of complicated tendrils of this whole discussion so just because there there's we have to keep in mind what we're defining this is a Define your terms saying what is what is bad behavior on the part of police what do we really mean by that all right all right let's look at another question what else do we have here uh Warren says how do either of you terminate a therapeutic relationship with a Paloma special how often does this occur well it's really interesting um you know I I would say that that's so that's such an individual issue the the the uh because the plumbing specials come they're so different um I've uh I've certainly tried to escape a few Plumbing specials and I've been hunted by them [Laughter] eventually eventually I could make myself scarce the um but uh I think I think most of the time a few times I've made it clear I mean I don't know how many Plumbing specials I've like you wanted to give up on over the years maybe less than 10. but I can remember you know making it clear when I knew it was a plumbing special pretty early you know the less I'm sure Robert former would appreciate it he was totally away and for people who don't know what we mean by this this is Robert plemen's you know in author blueprint which is our sort of Behavioral and when we call someone a plumbing special it really just means like you've got such significant personality Distortion that that there's really we've given you all the advice that we can like this here you sort of have blocks to outcomes in your life that we can't we can't get you passed yeah yes um it's uh some individuals are our friend Larry our friend Larry is a blooming special yeah oh you're gonna use the line yeah but the point is that the uh the truth is is that there's people for whom the distortions uh let me explain briefly um what Psychotherapy is and what it can do all it really is is the removal of distortion so it's the removal of your misunderstanding of reality and that misunderstanding of reality uh there's you know a couple aspects of it one is it's the your misunderstanding of the environment or your misunderstanding of yourself okay so either of those two things puts you in a position to misunderstand the relationship between yourself and the environment and if you have misunderstandings then what you have is you have uh you know to some degree frustration and defeat uh and and a lot of emotional turmoil uh depending upon the nature of those distortions so it means things are not working the way it is that you think that they should be working and the time and energy that you spend pursuing a betterment in your existence is is not yielding the results that you think it should yield and so therefore your nervous system gets the feedback and that feedback is depression frustration anger jealousy any negative emotional state boredom it's all nothing other than a signaling device to try to cue you about how the relationship between yourself and environment isn't looking very good relative to what it's it believes it can and should be very often people are right okay so very often they have some misunderstandings that is leading them to a behavior pattern that is ineffective in terms of optimizing their resistance however sometimes people are inherently Haywire about the nature of reality and the nature themselves that's a plum and special okay that means the distorted mechanisms the mechanisms of assessment are inherently so distorted that the person cannot be it is not a matter of them being disillusioned by appropriate experiences and therefore being recalibrated no this is an engine that is just fundamental behave wire okay if that's true there's no point in me talking to you it's a total waste of your time and it's a total waste of my time because there's nothing that I can do say or an ex life experience is that I can engineer for you to lure you in to get you excited about doing and then you can be become enlightened about what the realities are of that situation okay so let me give you I have a young man that was so sure coming out of UC San Diego he's going to make seventy thousand dollars a year I knew he wasn't I knew he was going to make 40. his mother was all arrogant and smug and when I said brace yourself he's not going to make seventy thousand dollars this is in like 1998 okay uh nowadays maybe he would coming out with a neuroscience degree but not in 1998 there's no way in hell that's going to happen and so and I remember smugness and the arrogance on both of them and I said listen you need to plan you know where you're what you're up to and what you're thinking of because what you're speculating on and what you're attempting to thinking that you're going to use it's just not gonna happen well of course I was white and and two years later when I saw the young man he was a hell of a lot more humble because he was he was working diligently in the lab for about forty two thousand dollars a year and working hard and you know they didn't roll out any red carpet he had to earn every nickel uh just just as I expected he had a nice fine future but that's where it was going to start okay that was fine so he because they had too much arrogance and not enough ability and I didn't have enough credibility and they had essentially uh a distorted view of reality that then they had to go through some suffering of the adjustment process to get reality back in line I.E wow what a disappointment oh my God nobody wants my resume holy smokes not 60 not 55 not 50 not 45 where's it go answer 38 okay so that so he they have to go through their recalibration but he was able to do it he wasn't such so arrogant that he couldn't you know he wasn't he was a perfectly happy hard-working young 26 year old by the time I saw him the next time so that's just recalibration and sometimes we can engineer those things sometimes we can coach them in session okay and sometimes we can have a very short pathway towards where where we see the main mistake and to get you to re-engineer and see it from a different perspective sometimes we'll take a look and we'll realize you're a plumbing this is a total waste of my time and when they're a total waste of my time I made clear that I don't believe that I can help them okay and I just say I don't this is not my specialty uh you need to talk to Dr schmoe the psychoanalyst freudenberger over there in Marin you can talk to you about your childhood issues because that's what he does and I don't know maybe they'll maybe get some help there yeah yeah I think there's a difference between a you know a plum and special and a plum and special that we we feel incentivized to to terminate the relationship with to use Warren's language I mean some of them are you know that they they're definitely Plumbing Specialists who are very sweet humans who were able to make some progress toward their goals and who do continue to find benefit in talking to us and so it's really just the the kind of disagreeable Plumbing specialist that we're trying to send to Dr Schmo and Marin but that is a pretty effective way yeah very often we'll have people that inherently have a lot of anxious attention a lot of high conscientiousness Etc and so they need they can make use of short-term constantly in other words to know actually you're misreading that let me look how I would look at it and they get some relief from that so right it's a constant course correction and um you know that but but we don't it's not it's not the same thing as as many people come in in a very frustrating situation in their life they feel big pressures they're not sure what to do they're confused and they're pretty unhappy and what we discover is pretty major misunderstandings of self and reality and when we fix those then there's a huge relief and a major change that can be effectively permanent uh and so that's you know that's the Psychotherapy of every therapist's dream so one of the interesting things about uh under understanding this correctly you know really for the first time in history is that we understand what very effective therapy looks like uh in other words what the big gains are to a Humanity it's basically the removal of distortion and so we understand that there are limits so this is actually an interesting difference that you're going to see between us if you if you labor through Mike Abram's book on the new CBT he's still half-assed Blank Slate believer early trauma Theory and personality you know there's still going to be I.E trying to change you through this and that and the other now this is all a total waste of time so uh so there the the Psychotherapy of of the next hundred years uh if it doesn't drown in trauma Theory and just become an extinct species in the next 30 Years which it looks like it's trying to do but if it manages to crawl its way out of the current mess and and see the world right side up there is great promise in basically the accurate understanding of human nature and the accurate understanding of human nature is going to become increasingly impossible to deny with personal genomics that's going to arrive on the scene in a big way in the next 10 or 15 years so Behavior genetics is going to have its way one way or the other evolutionary psychology is more complicated but once Behavior genetics pushes the door down uh evolutionary psychology will be able to slowly follow so evolutionary psychology is vastly more complicated than Behavior genetics uh but they they come from the same fundamental root and so once the once the door gets broken down then psychology and therefore Psychotherapy has a chance to you know come out of the Dark Ages yeah yeah well we have the next question on the um the question tool actually kind of gets to that relationship between EP and behavioral genetics and polygenic scores and everything else so this is um can you explain how different mental illnesses fall along the big five such as BPD bipolar depression autism schizophrenia anxiety suicide and other common mental mental illness disorders and a couple of people piggybacking on this um someone once asking about uh also MDD why is there data that one depressive episode results in another being significantly more likely and somebody also asking about ADB ADHD so sort of broad question with few specifics but just what's what's the relationship here that between genes personality and these uh these DSM categories how about it yeah I would I would say we don't have anything better to add to this than Plowman talks about when he talks about the the abnormal is normal so the you know the this is his whole chapter in The Blueprint book where you can't there is no Gene for bipolar there is no Gene for ADHD these are constellations of thousands of genes that are that are being tweaked in these tiny tiny little permutations um that many of which serve some evolutionary purpose so we've talked about 80d before um the the we've got something like bipolar and schizophrenia something that looks like a Continuum which is not quite a Continuum but very close to one so there's there's no point at which with any of these things you can you can say oh that person is diagnosable with X disorder and this person is not um because everything is the Continuum apart from possibly pregnancy and possibly death I think everything else can be be placed on a normal curve and so his point in the book is that there is nothing that is abnormal you don't have an abnormal diagnosis of schizophrenia because by definition on the on the genetic distribution of these polygenic scores and these attributes that is that is a that that manifestation of that genetic phenotype has its rightful place on that bell curve um and so we we're in the business of pathologizing it and medicating it and big Pharma has plenty of interest in that as well but it is part of the human expression of these genes in the whole distribution of the whole game um so I I don't I think the whole diagnostic model is is problematic in that in that regard and you can't go around diagnosing people with these things with the intent of medicating them because the whole idea of diagnosing them with X over Z is ill-advised and poorly formed to begin with so um there's certainly some of these things that you guys are asking about we could talk about personality factors on the big five that map onto those things um but I think that's that that's sort of a misleading conversation to have and it it runs a risk of being super reductive and oh well I have really high openness and so therefore I'm on the Continuum for schizophrenia and it's not that's just not quite how it's working I think the two conversations are better had uh separately and and you know let's understand our personality in this really helpful heuristic way to lessen the Distortion in life rather than worrying about it being pathologized with some diagnosable illness beautiful let me uh let me give an example that I just happened to get today in a session so I just came up with this I don't think it has anything to do with sports oh my God they're off my game this morning [Music] okay how did how did we sort of get into this mess um we got into this mess if you're going to teach a young child a young child looks over at his uncle and says wow you know that he you know what what's the word I.E your Uncle Bill is tall okay and then Uncle Marty is short fall short oh so now the kid captures a category categorical concept so you don't explain to the kid your your Uncle Marty is six foot four and three-eighths and the other one is you know five four and a quarter no we we don't explain that it's not economical and it's not the most useful way of doing it we use categories and so it's going to be that that's how human beings learn language that's how they economically talk to each other and so that's what happened when it came to personalities that came to the the very simplistic view of personalities that there's a type for God's sakes okay you're this type of personality and that type of Personality yeah the um now that you know that then starts to be well there's four types and then it turns out well that the problem is the astrologers saw a problem oh no well you get that but you're also that so you're a Scorpio Rising while you're this and the other oh God watch out for those okay so you start to see you've got a a Ptolemy epicycle nightmare in other words you you can't put it together you just keep making the systems more complicated uh Etc so what happened as as uh when it came to attempting to understand psychopology in the 20th century for the first time a lot of human Minds try to understand us and so in doing so what are you going to start out with you're going to start out with teaching a little kid tall and short so narcissistic the anti-social or sociopath or borderline okay so it's like that's about all your average site student can do is to memorize these names and so this is what they did now alongside it you had something else happening and that something else was Insidious and that was the wise uh biological psychiatry so underneath the threat that Psychiatry had from Clinical Psychology and social work in other words if you're all just going to talk to patients so none of you are doing any good pretty soon people are going to figure out might as well go to the person that cost you one-fourth the money okay uh and that that is precisely what was happening there was no insurance billing in 1962. uh Psychiatry had had worked very hard to exclude Psychology from treating anybody that door was being broken down interestingly enough behind psychology breaking that door down Social Work started to break the door down okay so pretty soon turns out that little lady you know doing her little knitting you know with a cup of tea in a nice little office with Afghan pillows was just as comfortable or more comfortable than freudenberger and Marin who sits behind you with a pen and his glasses and his cold cold personality it's like why pay him 300 an hour when I can pay her 50 and I come out feeling probably better and so behind that threat Psychiatry bets the house on pharmacology and so that is precisely what happened and that happened in the 1970s and so behind that very threat they then needed to essentially create a a Bible of their new religion and that Bible is the DSM Diagnostic and statistical manual what a joke there's no stats in it okay just it's a nice way Sam that reminds me of the government you know alphabetic the department of Warren war and Justice you know you know whatever it is but we're going to say whatever it is that makes us look good okay the uh Department of Defense we never went out and killed anybody so the uh so this is what it is it's the diagnostic and statistical manual well what's kind of what they're going to do is they're going to use categorical processes to give names to things that are disorders and therefore they need a cure a pill it's like well you can take the blue one for that you read one for that and then if you have that oh then you need the purple one and the blue and oh that just complicated it up it's like the four type diet for blood type just complicated enough for a human being to feel productive solving a little problem which is exactly what psychiatrists feel they feel oh I know what you need you need a mood stabilizer and then you need a little of this too so I'm going to give you some of this and some of this and then we're going to look at that and then if it doesn't work we can come back and adjust it perfect good we're gonna have you come back and you know these visits I don't want to hear about your problems I don't want to hear about your relationships I don't want to hear about [ __ ] all I want to hear about is hey you know what's your thirst like you sleeping okay you know this appointment is seven minutes because I'm gonna bill it so that psychiatrist is going to see nine you know six seven eight people an hour they're going to build what the psychologist would go for an hour and they're going to have two secretaries and a cool [ __ ] and 400 000 a year and don't think that they're going to give that up not a chance in hell and psycho Farm has made a fortune out of a nothing part of medicine they create a massive bunch of addicts and drug pushers to do their bidding who incidentally are all innocent they are just innocent buffoons that have bought into this because they don't know any better okay so that if they if there's anybody listening read Robert Whittaker Anatomy an epidemic and learn the story of your profession and and the fact that it's an incredible scam okay now so what do we get disorder disorder disorder disorder disorder disorder categorical variables what does Plumbing come along and do he blows that concept to smithereens it's not Robert Plowman it's 14 million pairs of twins and 2700 investigations that have been published it is by far the story of Personality all of the other crap that's in the trash can all of the social learning and all the parenting and all the parenting Styles and all that goes in the garbage because it accounts for none of the variants okay no the Big Kahuna is genes and therefore what's causing these individual differences in disorders is just where you stand on a bell curve with respect to some characteristic in human nature and there's no fixing it with a pill because as Jen explains there's nothing wrong you're just an oddball okay you know if you're seven three you're an oddball there's nothing wrong okay you could say well what do you mean wrong or there isn't one thing wrong there's a whole it's just like looking at somebody that's very unathletic it's like they're uncoordinated and clumsy and they just don't have a good hand-eye coordination they don't have any strength and they don't have any explosiveness they don't have any timing they don't have anything Dan it's like well what do you call that well it's perfectly functioning organism okay that thing may be really good at chess okay so but what do you call it lousy athletically okay well what are you going to call schizophrenic lousy in terms of your ability to actually make correct inferences about the nature of your Social reality you may be perfectly good about throwing a football okay and catching it but the rest of it some other things it's a problem you may even be reasonably bright okay you may even be reasonably artistic oh they're very artistic no they're not you're actually less artistic than usual well they can be brilliant ah rarely usually they're not because usually those are bad genes so they're usually less intelligent than the average person they're they're uh they're usually less creative than the average person but they are but they're odd okay sometimes they are brilliant a la John Nash okay so uh sometimes they're incredibly creative that these are these are massive bits of Gins you know masses of them there isn't one gene wrong and one neurotransmitter wrong and one level wrong none of them it's not even remotely like that so that's like saying the reason you have a relationship problem with your mother is because one day she spilled your Wheaties on your lap like no no that isn't what it is okay all right all right yeah so it's a Fine Place to close it were you you look like you were gearing up for something else there was it a sports metaphor this is the only time I just I'm completely let loose to totally not slightest bit self-conscious because I get to talk to you because it's like ah it's life like nobody's listening it's fabulous fortunately it's it's just our friends yes yeah I do feel the less inhibition here you know I don't feel the medical legal uh cancel culture liability on their own house we'll find out find out if we survive what's the what's the joy in life unless you're walking on the edge anyway all right well thank you to everybody for coming out we will see you next time all right all right nothing we don't think we have anything else right we're good all right all right well good to see you guys all right have a good one bye [Music]
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