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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-07-17
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there we go we're live how's it going good good all right we're back to Ranch again yeah this time we have questions we might have questions let's see what we've got I actually have not um you what we'll just rant we think this rant yeah so yesterday we uh Doug and I recorded an episode of Hawk blocked which is richier than usual I mean we're always pretty ranty but this one's very ranty about Free Speech issues and government interference and uh in speech and so if people want to watch that it's up on patreon now um for a couple of days and then this one will never see the light of day on YouTube so it's not it's definitely not something I'm gonna post publicly to YouTube but I will post it on my Odyssey Channel which is like a it's a blockchain based uh Free Speech friendly platform that essentially everything that is on YouTube is also on Odyssey but there are things on Odyssey that are not on YouTube so that's how that works if you if you want to get uh uh EP unplugged that's where you go um so that's where this episode will eventually uh land if people want to hear a lot of ranting so let's see what we've got going on in the chat okay so we have a question while I'm getting my act together here to look at the other ones um I have a boyfriend who is low C and disagreeable he admits he has trouble recognizing others feelings many view him as an inconsiderate jerk is it possible for him to learn to be empathetic if so how nope next question no next question hope he's good looking and good in bed and or makes a lot of money or something or all of the above yeah because with uh disagreeable and low C that's got a big life loser right on his forehead in terms of interacting with him that's uh that's the story yeah it's not great I mean the uh just to give a little more context I mean if this person's kind of new and hasn't heard us talk about this before we're uh you know we definitely are are acknowledging the limitations of personality and so what you're seeing depending on how long you've been with him so um my concern is that you haven't been with him that long and he's already low C and disagreeable so you're you know it's less than a year and you're already having some these issues uh and circumstances have not really significantly changed in your relationship he's not dealing with some new Big Life event or the death of a parent or there's no there's no no kind of transient bump that might be causing this sort of thing but that he's flagging this early or early-ish um or really just at all but especially if it's early-ish then you're really just seeing the the kind of animal that you've brought home from the shelter and this is this is what you get stuck with so people can obviously they can go through phases of life that are going to change the expression of their personality traits for good or for ill so if you have somebody who's kind of marginal on instability disagreeableness and you put them through the ringer with sort of you know difficult life events and and they really have a real streak of bad luck where things are looking very bad for them they're going to express themselves in a sort of a more unpleasant way than even their Baseline status would be if things are going really well for them they just won the lottery they're they're you know they've got their dream job they got their dream partner Etc they're going to be they're going to bounce up a little bit you're going to be seeing a sort of a blip of behavior that looks a little better than the Baseline but they always go back to the Baseline sort of over the Long Haul people are who they are so that's really what we're talking about here it's not that you can't incentivize or coerce them into behaving differently in the short term you can you can through some combo of carrots and sticks you can get different kinds of behavior out of people um but you're not going to fundamentally make him especially more empathetic empathetic is a quality having that sort of you know thinking about how his actions are affecting you and and kind of um having that theory of mind to put himself in your shoes and imagine how you're subjectively experiencing something especially the consequences of his behavior or his words that's probably not something that he's going to be able to develop in any kind of meaningful way so yeah well it doesn't development obviously Jen just said it all but I'm just nitpicking on the final sentence there's no development to that that's an emergent property of a of a person's genetics so uh yeah that's not going to be an emergent property of an alligator it's not going to happen someone someone in the Q a is clarifying that other people know what low C is I don't that's one of the big five characteristics for conscientiousness so when we talk about the Big Five personality characteristics we're talking about openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism or emotional instability so this is sort of a major framework through which we understand um what how people see the world and what governs their personality characteristics and um there's lots of reasons to use this framework instead of others for example the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram or any of these others this is a robust and time-tested and evidence and reality based Paradigm that makes sense of personality so we always we kind of that's one of the first frames that we start with with any question is well is there is there personality Distortion and which of the letters is it on so um yeah low conscientiousness and low agreeableness are hard to work around yeah yep all right well that's moving on okay so Dan is saying I bet all of the staff at True North Fest their dogs am I right I don't think so I don't know anybody at True North who fasts their animals I I don't know that you would be successful trying to fast an animal anyway um you know there are cases I know there are kind of natural hygienist type vets out there who do recommend it um there's uh oh I can't think of her name um there's the the charlatan who runs a fasting Center in Costa Rica who's who's like banned from the U.S I can't remember his name either but he had her come to his fasting Center a few times and talked to her about when it might make sense to to fast an animal if you're dealing with a disease process uh good luck I that sounds like a miserable experience for all involved and with with pretty um unknown benefits and uh we can think hypothetically that there might be some but I don't know that anybody's actually tested that in any kind of rigorous way at all in any kind of meaningful sample size um and I don't know anecdotally of anybody who's had any success but yeah yeah I've thought about it I mean it's crossed my mind before when I've been when one of the dogs has had some issue um I will withhold food you know if they're sick if they're if they're vomiting and they're sick and they're you know clearly working something through their system I'm not gonna pile additional you know sweet potato treats on top of a sick system I'm gonna let that clear out but that's it's not anything like a long-term fast I might just skip a meal here or there so yeah yeah Michelle you better better find a new animal yeah yeah right go go yeah just swap them out I'm sure there's somebody willing to take them home all right um okay let's see if there's anything over here I think we've um people have seemed to have abandoned the um the question tool on the website we did disable the downvote feature so you can only upvote things now um so if people want to go back that it's not as troll friendly as it used to be uh I think we've done most of these though so okay let's go to this other we have another anonymous question here so dear doctors one of my in-laws posted on Facebook about her disease I rarely go on Facebook but in this case I went to nutritionfacts.org that's a good step you should should definitely start there research the disease to see if plant-based will help true enough it does I posted the link to the report on her page and all of my morbidly obese sister-in-laws started an attack post saying I'm being unfair I haven't talked to them since and this was two years ago recently the sister-in-law who routinely does the worst damage to my esteem in the village wrote my husband and I a letter asking for a quote sit down to clear the air the question is should I give them the satisfaction and reply with a letter telling them how much they hurt me or just ignore the letter and go on with life I haven't thought of them for a while because I've been very busy but that letter has caused turmoil in my emotions do you think sometimes it's better to not take an action yeah I guess my first reaction to these things is that that you can't give a bad answer because there's too many unknown parameters so there's too much about uh let me so let me scroll through a lot of things that immediately come to my mind how valuable are these people what were the relationships like before who are all the players that are involved how United are they in solidarity against you you know what uh what are everybody's financial situation in other words how would that matter well it does matter in other words people people calculate how valuable people are as insurance policies uh behind that these sorts of things the um all there's so many factors that are involved here right so I can think of um I can think of for example a reasonably simple way to to attack a problem like this but it may have no bearing on this individual uh I would say I I would say for example I would probably write a write a letter that says to to her uh to the person that's saying that and I would CC everybody that matters the four or five sisters or whoever it is to say listen you know there was a a blow up you know a couple years back as I would try to be helpful with some something and then you know some people took offense I'm sorry anybody took offense okay and I also hurt my feelings that that my my uh that my sharing of that information was somehow taken on the wrong way the uh the truth is I was just trying to be helpful I don't know whether or not that advice was was uh valued whether it was useful or whether or not it would uh would would work if it was used I don't know it was just an idea okay so it was my the best idea I had from first uh from information I I am exposed to and then I have some confidence in but what do I know okay and uh and quite frankly what does anybody know so uh the truth is is our our Aunt you know is a is a is there is her own person and her own has her own unique problems and therefore it's unknown what would work okay so I was just trying to be helpful that didn't go well and so I've been you know I've been quiet recognizing that somehow you know I stepped on some some feet unnecessarily and you stepped on my feet as well okay so if anybody has anything to say about this from that perspective it'd be interesting for me to hear it but you know that's how I see it right now okay uh so I've given you in other words I would probably say you know I've essentially given you an apology if I had accidentally offended you in some way not that I see how uh and I I think that I'm owed an apology for some of the reactions that I got okay so that's kind of how I I see it and I'd be happy to hear from you and now if that if something that well reasoned and fair and reasonable gets a bunch of negative reactions in other words why would I write something like that it's a last chance for them okay if you are ready to give them a last chance to swim for your Coalition boat uh and basically under the conditions that that these are the conditions upon which we proceed okay and if if these kinds of if what I'm seeing is a completely reasonable set of conditions it's not a set of conditions under which you're willing to proceed if you now bite my hand in defense then you're done okay and uh and if they bit my hand in defense as a result of that I would probably write to them I say as well looks like we're looks like we can't work things out all is fine yeah I wish you all well ciao basically I'm out I had this go down with a cousin 20 years ago and uh I gave her I apologized when I didn't need to and I gave her a chance to to basically then put an olive branch back in the middle of the table she didn't she bit my hand and that's the last contact we've had in other words the the point is is that she was out of line uh in her criticism of me however uh in other words a famous phrase from John Wooden is in Friendship you know the Fine Art of friendship is go more than halfway okay well under the crisis I did I went more than halfway what I got back was the petulant personality that was the cause of the problem in the first place the stalker okay so it isn't the case that all of my human relationships with all people are smooth all the time because I've got enough of a disagreeable Edge that once in a while I can do something that is that I would could defend it later in other words that was a reasonable thing to say I was in the right I can understand why that would have hurt your feelings and I can apologize for the fact that your feelings are hurt I will rarely apologize and say I was in the wrong totally no I almost I'm not I'm not sure I've ever maybe once and definitely not to me but I witnessed it oh no you've been with me once once and it was a banner day you know dear diary today so but the point is is that you know what if I I actually I I sort of apologize to a friend the other day it was a little bent out of shape about something and I said uh I you know this isn't an apology because it it's not something I'm capable of doing I know what I said was if I was if I was able to apologize I probably would oh my God I gotta hear that story that again it was the kind of situation where really I wasn't out of line the other person was hypersensitive okay so the uh and so the point is is this that I the Fine Art of friendship is go more than halfway basically buffering against their own personal sensitivities like my cousin okay so I went more than halfway and what did I get back narcissistic petulant bite on my finger it's like well I'm done okay that was it that was that was the chance she got and now we're 20 years later and quite frankly I haven't missed that interaction at all can you move on and spend my life talking to Jen Hawk rather than talking to Valerie right so I.E I've only got a hundred thousand hours left and I'm going to spend him as wisely as possible with the people that that are are the most enjoyable for my existence and I'm not going to try to save every relationship from everybody that has an ax to grind with me that you know in other words to try to smooth out every little nook and cranny of the theoretical Village the hell with that okay you know I I'm all about taking out the spoon or and skimming the cream off the top like in other words eat the best food hang out with the best people read the best books watch the best movies do the things that uh create the most happiness for me and everything else is a mistake so that's why you know as you look at this thing there's an opportunity somebody is missing you that's why they're writing to you two years later wanted to quote clear the air fine we'll clear the air we're going to get crystal clear about my perspective about what went down we're going to apologize for the fact that it may have hurt their feelings which is what caused their reactions I.E the Fine Art of friendship we go more than halfway there's no reason to [ __ ] apologize for what it is that you did you posted on that woman's thing some advice about how it is to maybe best help herself completely legitimate it was intelligently researched it was no guarantee of anything the fact that they're hypersensitive and that the fact is is that their personal inability to deal with the pleasure drop or willingness to listen to any of that on your part that's fine okay well my my understanding is this isn't even the question is not even about the person on whose page she posted this is another sister-in-law so it's like what do you even have to do with them yeah they're super super disagreeable well it's disagreeable and and this is and they are yeah very sensitive about these issues clearly they're struggling with their own issues here and they're leaking those issues all over your behavior which there's nothing wrong with it so the point is do we apologize yes we do if you if if the CB warrants you know like this is and and there's a follow-up here where she says that you know my husband and I do not wish to continue contact we're well off and do not need the relationship like there's no reason to go through all of this and respond if if you don't want the friend like if you run the CB they've run enough of your red lights this is not the first time um this person adds no value to your life you don't you don't owe them a recounting of all of the all of your grievances we often feel like that's necessary for people to process or get closure or whatever and and it's you know this is all context dependent and it's dependent on the individual relationship but the concept is that you don't owe them anything um and you know I I've talked before about my my particularly disagreeable friend who um finally last year it was like one too many times where this person just I I just I I couldn't I couldn't really handle the disagreeableness anymore I just constantly found myself on the short end of criticism and of just shitty Behavior just generally shitty Behavior again and again Doug saw it in person um Can can definitely vouch for it and it was like it was not even a conscious thing where it was finally all right you just went to that was one too many times and I uh he has asked me he sent me emails sort of basically whining asking for an explanation of why I've ghosted him um and and I'm not it's like yeah there's a lot of if there's a many years of friendship and in some sense that you know I can see how a lot of people would expect that and that's probably the right thing to do but in my case I I can run the run the data and I know that it's just I I I'm giving an inch and he's going to take a mile just like he has every other time so if I reopen this whole negotiation I I lose all of the sort of protection that I have around me by leaving the relationship which was what I needed to do so um it's not always just to kind of get to the general principle of the question it's it yes sometimes it is better not to take action if if you do want to take action because it makes sense to do so then everything that Doug is saying here is the the protocol by which you would want to do it um but uh but by no means is it always necessary it's up to you I would say one other thing that depending upon her circumstances sometimes um there there's a you know there's an infinite number of permutations about how to do this but another permutation is to write back to the sister who wrote to you and say you know what I really appreciate you saying that uh the truth is is that that you know I feel like maybe we're uh maybe we're all better off just the way things are uh yeah for now and but thanks thanks for saying hello and and uh maybe we'll say the most time down the road sure yeah I've done that too yeah like freaking Pleasant okay yep and uh but we that's another permutation for that specific individual so yeah anyway that's that's probably what I would do but in your case Jen I know that individual and that would have been a mistake that's the Lucius Cornelius solo problem that you know as soon as he started to itch he had to scratch his whole body raw um okay so it's uh the famous dictator of Rome he had a bit somebody actually wrote to me that that turns out you can look up there that condition is now known but was that it's some condition that they've got a name for it that if you that your body has a low-grade constant chronic itch yeah if you scratch it you will just scratch like crazy wow so solar uh Sola had this and so he you know he was a man of superb self-control so he would go years without scratching himself you know what I mean just feeling is she just talking about it and he would just lose it and that's that's uh that's a and that's what this is like like you know if you're a guy like no don't scratch it don't yeah no but it took me many times of kind of like trying to Signal some distance trying to signal that I was you know this was too far and then not really Having the courage of my convictions to completely close off contact and then let like feeling like maybe he got the memo um you know and letting it come back yeah and it just I I had to go through that a number of times before it was finally like I'm not taking the risk again I'm not I'm not Charlie Brown kicking this football that's just not not gonna happen so this is all very relationship specific and you just kind of have to know what your end game is so very good yeah yeah all right all right we have a couple of follow-ups uh Mark is saying with the dog fasting question that dogs don't do ketosis so that's an interesting if that's true then you know you wouldn't there wouldn't be the same sorts of benefits fasting them um but uh yeah who knows we're not experts we're not vets um we're we're pets guardians but uh I you know just try to do right by them as much as possible it's always an issue with the lack of evidence in the in the dog and cat based world it's really hard to know what the right thing to do is because we don't have these these studies we don't we don't have really good robust data in any direction so you have to blend what you know with your intuition and with your knowledge of your dog and your sort of deductive reasoning and just all of all of these things and do what is right for you and your pet um okay yeah someone saying play your own game be your own man don't ask anybody for a stamp of approval yeah this whole discussion reminds me of the the famous AA saying which is keep your side of the street clean you know you just keep your side of the street clean you don't worry about the other guy's side of the street you just focus on your own life do your own thing so um very very good principles here um a couple of follow-ups there was a question in the question tool that I wanted to get to this is interesting so um hello I'm a generally happy sucker Triad college student guide so uh you know an agreeable conscientious person but I get what I prefer or refer to as quote intrusive thoughts an example would be that sometimes I walk down the street I get thoughts about a car coming by Rolling its window down and someone having a gun and shooting me if I'm driving my car they tend to be something like a semi tipping over onto me or hydroplaning onto a rail guard I get very tense up until the moment that I recognize that it's just a thought as a child I would also have these thoughts especially around cars swerving off the side of the road onto the sidewalk just for me or that every time my mom got a phone call it was someone someone calling to say something awful or tell my mom some awful thing I've done many of these thoughts are gun based or car based I try to implement ideas like the buffer zone I.E not driving for too long or too late at night meditation exercise but I don't know I don't think this sucker Triad helps because I'd much rather be stressed with a lot on my plate which I think exacerbates them than to be a happy potted plant and not meet my potential where do intrusive thoughts like this come from could it be a stressed out nervous system mixed with conscientiousness well it's mostly just conscientiousness it's mostly conscientious you're running every possible permutation of everything that could happen and you're just an overdrive with the worst case scenario yeah I think that uh yeah I my OCD friends will swear that their OCD gets worse when they are you know sort of sort of under more stress I don't know if that's true it's almost a religion about about these things that you can imagine people making all kinds of correlation coefficients and grabbing a hole essentially trying to see a pattern and therefore possibly uh find some way to mitigate the mitigate the unpleasant process but this is just a derivative of a high C nervous system so high C nervous systems essentially by definition what they are is that relative to the bell curve I mean what what conscientiousness is is anxiety conscientiousness is actually more formally and to be extremely accurate about this what what it is is it we call one person more conscientious than another person because their the computations that they make about risk are more conservative than the individual who is less conscientious so highly conscient individual basically believes that the risk factors are greater than the person who is of lower conscientious therefore they are willing to spend more time and energy in order to reduce the risk they don't do this in a cold calculus the way the nervous system works is it works by a quantity an unconscious or adaptive unconscious is what it is uh running very sophisticated cost-benefit analysis which give wise to feelings okay the feelings a quote of anxiety are then what causes Behavior and so an anxious Behavior as a behavior is a feeling that we want to avoid so we do things that would reduce the anxiety and the nervous system has a prescription in it it's not anxious for nothing in other words there's some cost-benefit analysis that it is running if it is driving the anxiety in other words then the anxiety is a derivative of the nervous system uh anticipating a loss so when a car drives by it's amazing to me I have these cats both of them that are one wants to see the cat by the way the question in the chat is can we see the cats you know remark of this cat is just an amazing cat there she is there she is there we go oh she's so beautiful yeah oh my goodness and therefore worth a lot more than yeah obviously the um the thing is is that the cats are amazingly this one specifically as way too little anxiety so this one uh that's because she sits in the driveway and it's my car that comes up there and of course I'm terrified of running over her and so and she's she's very confident that she's not going to get hit and so she's not afraid enough so the um uh anyway so that's an example of a lack of conscientiousness in this cat uh and that's true this cat also was the same cat that was uh that was on a log over a river out in the country and there was a bobcat about you know 80 yards away and this cat was up there on that log scratching the log scratches fluffing her tail you know just to tremendously risky Behavior Uh that's just this cat this cat is very low anxiety there's no neuroticism in this guy uh the other cat I have is very neurotic much different much more so these are genetic very and um and so I forget what this whole thing is so so you're you're intrusive thoughts are just a natural derivative of a high conscientious nervous system that is that is vastly over uh overestimating the the uh perceived probability of disaster relative to the average human and so uh and the opportun is is going to pretty pretty consistently overrate the probability of risk because there's so much to lose or actually it doesn't overrate things what it does is it's running a calculus on how much you could lose versus what it's going to take to mitigate that possible loss by some Factor I.E look both ways before you cross the street even if you can't hear any cars that's particularly true now that you've got electric cars they will sometimes sneak up on you okay so the uh but yeah that's all you've got is that what an intrusive thought is is it's just a um it's actually what happens is that you're unconscious uh is is creating or running scenarios uh below the level of your awareness and as a result what will happen is what arrives in Consciousness is that which is perceived to be worth putting into Consciousness for you to be aware of so your brain is uh it's not an intrusive thought so it's not it's not coming from out of the sky pushing itself into you and then bothering you that that's the way that they might think about it in modern psychology but that's a misunderstanding what's happening is is that that that risk factor is actually emanating up from your adaptive unconscious to get to your awareness because but it's it because it's considering it to be a potential significant threat okay now if you are hyper hyper conscientious we know that it's going to look weird so I've got a really sweet kid that lives in my house about 80 percent of time named Sam that kid it has is very OCD he's a wonderful person but if he's standing in the kitchen near any of us uh he'll sometimes get a weird look on his face and we'll and we could ask him what are you stabbing me again [Laughter] oh my God not feeling aggressive at all he's feeling very afraid he's afraid that somehow he may reach into a knife drawer grab a knife and stab me okay that's not coming from some latent Freudian aggression that's coming from an OCD nervous system that is worried about what's the worst possible thing that could ever happen the worst thing the guy he does not worry about me doing it to him that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't make sense to him what makes sense to him is that he could do it to me and he'd feel terrible about it it would be the worst thing that could could happen so that oh man well for exam ah that is the only intrusive thought I'll see him coming out of this room and they'll stop and then and they'll look down and he's worried about what's on the what's on the rug in front of him you know what I mean and whether he's got the white socks on I mean there's all kinds of stuff going on and that's that when you when you start to reach the upper reaches of the conscientious and and neuroticism chips you wind up with some very interesting things I got another friend of mine that hasn't been in his backyard in 10 years because a raccoon was back there and that raccoon may have pooped and that poop might have had a worm in it and that worm might actually wind up somehow through the leaves in the air into my friend's head and that worm in in one case in the last 50 years in the United States ate out the brains of the person that got that thing and so my friend's very worried about this and won't go into the back or or have anybody who's walked through the backyard come into the living room and he won't let the wife go in the backyard either yeah yeah this is quote intrusive thoughts so uh that that's where they they come from odd nervous systems that are uh inevitably built as high wire racks around conscientiousness you know processes so there you go yeah it's funny yeah you can get an intuition for this in the in the population by you know looking at comment threads on anything that that has uh that suggests some baseline risk so the the story about the backyard just reminded me so I father I I follow Heather Hein on Twitter who is Brett Weinstein's partner and um you know just has a lot of really great stuff to say and so she's been posting little excerpts of their book which is coming out this fall this hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century which I think we're gonna really enjoy and probably Echoes a lot of what we talk about but she posted some excerpt or some some notion which is that you know you should spend lots of time outside spend as much time outside as possible and if possible spend time Barefoot with your feet in the earth you know this sort of we're missing this she wasn't making any any woo-woo claims about grounding or anything like that she was just saying it's good for you as a as a primate to go wander around in the dirt sometimes and the comments are just some people you could plot these you know you could somehow operationalize them for you could assign them a level of conscientiousness or a level of neuroticism or whatever you wanted to do and and you would plot them and they would be a bell curve because you have you know most people are like sounds that's cool I haven't thought you know interesting but I'd get kind of dirty feet but okay you know I I could try it um and uh and then you've got some people that are like hell yeah I haven't worn shoes in 20 years and I don't wear shoes unless I have to and then other people who are like hookworms though you know and and you're you're gonna get yeah that's that's a great way to to tear up your feet and to get disease and to have all this so you could just see it and real time as people just wear their personalities on their sleeves and it's in the way that they respond to the exact same suggestion you just see you can track the openness you can track the conscientiousness you can track the neuroticism um and you know some of those people are they're never going to go barefoot anywhere because they are they're held in check by these these very intrusive thoughts that we could we could call them whatever we want to call them but it's this this overestimating the harm that exists out there in the world um and that can be specific to certain things you know some people are are very conscientious in some Realms of life and not in others so as is Sam for example actually it's not it's interesting uh uh Larry has always been worried about little infectious things so yeah yeah and it was after the anthrax scare so yeah whereas Sam loves knives he's like into samurai stuff oh interesting so he he is pictured in his mind many times you know cutting the head off of a of another Warrior so that that that's rattling around that cage and therefore it's not too hard for it to get loose and you know in a situation like standing in the kitchen yeah that's how that works yeah oh that's funny oh man oh my goodness all right what else do we have here we have admiration of the poop obviously that's all right um we have a question when you mention a good book you're reading I often run out and read it too I just finished facing reality um you're kind of a book curator for me so don't hesitate to mention other ones if you want to from time to time so yeah facing reality is great if if people haven't read that that's Charles Murray's new book it's very short um it's uh you know you can read it in a night or two as as he says himself in the intro and we will be talking to him soon so if people have questions that they would like to uh to send Charles Murray's way uh email them to me and I'll look at those and especially if you've read the bell curve or human diversity and or facing reality and you're familiar with sort of what he has to say I would love to ask him some questions that he hasn't gotten 10 trillion times um but uh yeah we're gonna sit down for an hour and talk to him here in the next couple of weeks so that will be available when we do that so um all right other books what are you what are you reading right now that you would want to recommend are you reading anything good let me see I'm re-reading human diversity in prep to talk to him um yeah just such a it's just an Incredible Book like it's it's it's I mean it's massive it's yes dude home um and uh but it's just this comprehensive you know race class gender state of the literature like what do we know about individual differences and how do we know it and it's just I mean half the book is footnotes I think the the well that's the appendix so yeah this this is how it shakes out so this is the book these are the notes so I mean you've got a lot of documentation here so this is great um yeah I've got it I mean I don't know what else I'm reading I'm trying to read uh the new CBT and so yeah right right right um yeah all it is is I I have I have frustration boredom and gloating that goes on um I feel like uh I feel like I'm I'm seeing that uh that Mike Abrams has has certainly tried to he's walked along the same road that uh that that I have in terms of being sensitive to the the tremendous value that EP and behavior genetics would have for Clinical Psychology I feel like he you're kind of watching a classic process of uh a bit of the the uh the let me try to try to uh you're watching him struggling with the adjacent possible in other words uh he he's getting the elements in there inside of his head to start to actually get to a different process in Clinical Psychology he he is limited by um is limited by something that that Echoes the very first question we had today I.E low conscientious uh disagreeable boyfriend what do you think and my first answer is useless not gonna happen okay Mike Abrams wouldn't have that reaction because the history of Clinical Psychology is neurotic little nutty people coming into you and your job is to try to unwind this mess and if you're if you're talking to my friend Larry who's worried about some bud crawling is here you're thinking how the hell did that get there we have to go back in history oh it turns out your dad was in that which he was okay no surprise okay and so oh well your dad was in that oh let's talk about that and so in other words if you take essentially any version of the blank slave as having a substantial uh part of the importance then you're going to wind up trying to trace the history of the problem back through Child Development and it's all a mistake and so uh so that's so Mike Gabriel references himself in the new CBT which I'm delighted to see because now that means if I got challenged by a psychology board or something you know if somebody snarled at me for for being irresponsible and because I talked to somebody and then you know a month later they jumped off a cliff and it had nothing to do with anything I didn't even know anything about it but if that happened and some some you know relatives sued uh and came after me and the board said what the hell do you think you're doing I would say it's the new CBT you know so Mike Abram's work is a little Shield out there that that defends me from being seen as a total whack job by everybody else in my profession right and that we're but we're watching in that book the fact that he's still trapped by the paradigm which is fine the uh so yeah I'm sorry that's the book I'm reading it's I can't do any better than that yeah I look at I look at books to remind me that a book that I have to tell people that is extraordinary is right here this is uh uh you this is the one you can never remember the name which is troublesome inheritance uh quite frankly right now is is is you know is as important a book as that might be found uh yeah so I just sort of understand uh what what is happening in the world and and just to understand the nature of the world that you live in now would be actually very incomplete any analysis that you would have would be significantly um significantly compromised if you did not understand Nick Wade okay right beautifully understands Nick Wade perfectly well right so our discussion with him yeah I'm having little things rattling around in my head that I'd like to ask him that the most important things that I want to ask him is I just want to ask him anything and just let him talk I know yeah I want to make sure that he doesn't just kind of do a stump speech though you know I think he's got when he he's generally people are just like tell us about your work and he's I think it's kind of it gets a little tedious for him I'm sure to go through the same stuff and yeah what's it like to be so hated and misunderstood so I I'd like to give him something a little novel and interesting to chew on because he's such an amazing thinker um and he's so and he is so misunderstood um and uh so yeah uh this just I just finished this this is um this different Murray Douglas Murray um The Madness of crowds this is an incredible book so if people want to understand the current Insanity of identity politics and and kind of have a primer to understand critical race Theory to some degree um and where it's not it's not a CRT specific book but um but he really lays out how we got here sort of through the progression of Academia I mean he talks about identity politics beginning with the the sort of the gay rights movement and the feminist movement and uh and and just generally how this has blossomed into something that we've lost control of and how social media plays an important role in that so that's the last like new really thought-provoking book that I read someone's asking me about be who you want to be which was this um psychologist Christian Jarrett wrote this book about essentially how to re-retool your big five um and that's a case of I've got a hundred thousand hours and I'm not going to finish a book that's totally not going to surprise me in any sort of way it's not that he's not that he's wrong or that the book is useless it's just I got the gist of it in the first couple of chapters which is you know it amounts to things like in order to be more conscientious you just have to be more conscientious you know you got to set your alarm to get up in the morning and you have to there's this kind of magic transition where if you do a habit long enough if you if you just force Brute Force sheer willpower get yourself into doing something I.E being more conscientious going to the gym every day that that at some point that becomes native to your personality because it the Habit becomes ingrained and this is just you see the same thing through all the psychodynamic literature and certainly you can get to a place where you've you've brute forced a new habit and your CB changes on the Habit because you feel better if you get up and go for a run every morning before breakfast or you you know they're they're you can give yourself new information through new habits that will change your your assessment of whether that habit is a worthwhile inclusion in your daily life or knowledge but that is not I mean I that's not changing your personality that's that's living life God somebody else understands this I didn't finish the book because it was a lot of stuff like that um I just didn't see that it was going anywhere other than that direction and I didn't feel like I needed to I don't think it's even got a place of honor on my bookshelf it's out of my house somewhere so yeah unfortunately I was hoping I could do some big review on that and I may still but it's not um it's just not that great so yeah you gotta gotta save your time for the good stuff I have uh well we have the reading list on the beat your jeans website um which I believe is beat your genes.org although I get that wrong some percentage of some percentage of the time um and let's see if what the uh uh if people haven't read Catching Fire uh if you're interested in health and diet and natural history of human beings uh uh now mine has the signature on it oh well aren't you fancy oh here are here here is a uh a pair of books that that people might find super interesting uh I actually have gotten the conclusions have been confused in my head so I think one guy came up with the idea and it turns out was the other guy because they're so they're so similar both of them are uh but they're very they're very different uh they're they're two guys that that wrote on uh essentially a creative process and one of them is called an imagine I believe and the other one is uh yeah you told me about this well this is good hold on a second right um okay they are imagined and the other one is the author is uh Stephen Johnson and I don't know the name of the book but Stephen Johnson is a really pretty amazing uh super high IQ writer uh he's he's a polymathic sort of a character he's his interests are pretty diverse and he's so he spent a deep dive on creative process where good ideas come from that's it that's it those are so those two bucks were uh it's very helpful for me to sort of understand that that helped me put some pieces together as to the nature of the creative process I think that there was much to it the two two big Concepts but uh just just to give you that are that are beautiful that are really super useful to know about um and the two are the adjacent possible and the fact that the problems are solved uh analytically versus holistic quickly in other words so this is a this is an amazing thing to watch in yourself is that um two two different ways that human beings solve problems is to as you can imagine become extraordinarily analytic looking down analytic meaning taking the things together into tiny or tinier and tinier and tinier pieces okay so you you can you can imagine that that as you do that you what you're doing in your mind just like when you're solving a math problem you're taking apart little bitty pieces and this would do that and that would do that and that would do that and that would be the other and therefore this complicated algebraic expression we we essentially can understand you know that that's how well I don't know if we're analyzing how many minutes you know a person sits at a stoplight in their life we we could put an equation together with a whole bunch of little pieces and get an estimation Etc et cetera in other words but that's analytic okay the a different way we solve problems is holistic it's like literally two different ways that the mind will go about a problem and um the and the creative process uh that the is served by actually both in other words your because the mind being an information processing device it it has to essentially assemble all of the possible little details of fact that it knows okay and puts them all in a pile so if you're a chemistry professor you've got all kinds of little things that you know about chemistry thousands of thousands of little things and you've got principles that that organize these things and so you've got all these like knowledge of this okay so but now um you've got a problem and that problem is you're trying to figure out if you know titanium under these conditions would do this or that and it's and uh or you're looking for some you're looking for some combination of things that will somehow transform solar energy into this thing so you've got a problem and that problem has never been solved but you suspect that it might be able to be solved and so what happens is is that the first thing that the mind is going to do is it's going to go through an analytic process where it's going to assemble everything that it could possibly knows and and then what it's going to do is it's going to see if the interrelationships between those could be moved around and the solution actually exists in our knowledge space that's going to be what we call the adjacent possible the problem has never been solved but it's solvable because we've got all the tools necessary and all the knowledge necessary in the Box okay a different uh uh process is that the mind sometimes has complicated problems and it needs it's got some knowledge somewhere but the knowledge is not highly interrelated so for example the uh that same chemistry professor can be working like crazy assembling under analysis everything that he or she knows notice I put the she in there it's really good it's really really inclusive basically you're just you're a total feminist what it is is that so he's got all of that stuff I slipped back into normal masculine mode yeah he's got all that stuff and and yet he finds himself trying to move these relationships around hypothesize different things that's all analytic okay now now he's stopped and it turns out that no matter how many times he moves those parts around he can't find it in other words there he cannot see a solution now now he goes with his nephews on a bike ride around Lake okay so he's not even he's just watching them and he's watching the bikes and there's some pretty girl on a bike coming the other direction and he looks at the bike and looks at her bike and looks at hers checking out her legs then he looks at the pedals and he sees how the petals sort of maintain a reasonable relationship with the wheels up 360 and suddenly like a flash he puts together something in the problem that he could not put down he didn't get it together in two months of staring in that thing under intense analysis because there was a relationship in nature that existed in his knowledge base but he couldn't get it through analysis he could only get it through a holistic process that was in a very different circuit located in a very different part of the brain and that had to fire at the same time that there was an open loop to try to solve the problem and Kaboom that's what a moment of insight is if you actually watch it in somebody's head on an EEG machine it's going to turn out at that moment you're actually watching two different locations in the brain the neural circuits are firing simultaneously that's what Insight is okay that's what's really cool there is probably no process like it as Jeffrey Miller said that when he was a grad student at Stanford and John tibia didn't lead to Cosby news and David Buss and uh Martin Daly and Margo Wilson came for a year for the advance center for advanced citizen Stanford an 88 89 to 90 and he was a grad student there he said I never thought I would ever have my mind blown again um like that because what happens is is that every time you turn you walk down the hallway and you see the old professors smiling at the young cute grad student and you're like boom evolutionary psychology he's trying to get laid okay she's being friendly evolutionary psychology she's looking out to sign up to power for a competitive Advantage it's like pretty soon it's in what I call an inside Avalanche at every time you turn around your brain is putting things together that it never put together before okay the um and then he said he never thought he would experience that again until about 10 years later when he tripped upon the knowledge and spent and he realized marketing got around a bunch of marketing people because he was putting a seminar together that was going like hell because the psychologist had no interest in marketing but the marketers came in and they were like super interested in evolutionary psychology they got it they're like money okay and so uh and then he got wind of it and he realized oh my God if you don't understand marketing you are missing the elephant in cultural's living room and along with all of EP took me a cosmetes didn't see it David Buss didn't see it Jeffrey Miller saw it and it and the result is spent so that's an example of an inside Avalanche I forget where this all goes the point is is that just for your own edification to understand how you solve problems so uh when I'm solving any problem I now realize I've got a meta process and The Meta process is okay all we can do is assemble All the known facts okay and then when we we once we move them around if we get stumped we've got to go take a shower or go take a walk a go Goof Off go shoot some baskets do something okay but get out away from it while the other part of the mind starts looking and that that was the beautiful point I believe in the book of margin was the notion that you have to the analytic part is so loud it's so valuable to be analytic but the truth of the matter is is that all oftentimes you are you're if you think of Alan goldham or just continually trying to solve the same problem the same way over and over again there's no room if you're all busy doing that or getting completely out of way and getting a creative solution to a problem that actually is not solvable in Alan's case he's always solving problems that are solvable because he's not particularly open but if you have a very open mind and you have the uh ridiculously optimism that you might be able to solve a problem that probably is not solvable then the way to do it is that you have to get away and that's that's what the great writers and the artists do is they have to get away they have to get out away from all of their analytic process and just let that mind wander because out there uh in the in the unconscious the brain is looking for the patterns that are similar but it will be looking for it in metaphor one of the interesting things that I've got uh from a conversation with Shan Geisinger was the the idea that dreams were were problem solving and metaphor which is really interesting um uh yeah that people been thinking that and suspecting that for a long time that I had never read anything credible that caused me like like every wisdom tradition throughout history um like every every society ever had that Insight yes but to to see that that would be a way that the mind would solve a problem uh that was actually very interesting yeah the Freudian notion is that the it the truth is so painful about all the Deep things that it's turning it into something it's turning the Deep evil ID into something that is more palatable or some some [ __ ] that they think yeah but that was uh but the notion that you're actually going to solve nothing you're not just going to do a dreaming that's the point you're also going to do it in Broad sunlight Consciousness uh if you can get the analytic Parts quiet down so that's uh that those two books uh where good ideas come from and imagine those are those are two very interesting books I think for for just about anybody yeah yeah cool what yeah we'll add that to the there's a whole book list on the beat your jeans website and then I have a book list that I'm always adding to on my website under the resources tab too so books and articles are all there so if you're ever kind of in the mood for something new um and I I have an EP I think a public EP wish list on Amazon but um my real name is not on Amazon so you would never be able to find it unless you just looked at evolutionary psychology wish lists um but I'm happy happy to talk to anybody there's lots of great stuff out there so yeah the other the the thing that kind of both of those those books are dancing around too where you've got to get away to let that process do what it does the other mistake that people make is that they spend too much time um in discussion with other people so the sort of um where where their ideas are all derivative of what other people are thinking and that can be productive I mean it can be really productive because you get to the synthesis sort of but you're not going to make those great leaps unless you're completely like you just let it all cook and and so it's really hard for people especially when people are very online and they feel like they need to uh you know see what other people are talking about and they need to read read and they need to talk talk and they need to process process process when really it's it's on the walk in the woods that the you know you do get these insights or it's in that dream um and so there is this kind of the the space just outside the AJ it's impossible is often you can't even see it from where everybody else is you really have to go on a vision quest to go find it so uh that's a often does not feel like the right thing to do at the time yeah all right we have one other question that I know is a this person really wants this asked and then we have to wrap up because I have The Village at two so I want to make sure I have time to take the dogs out before that so um hello doctors I live in Europe under a socialist democratic government that is taking covet avoidance measures too far the vaccination test digital certificate is mandatory to go to restaurants hotels or to enter the country's capital to travel at all people are just doing their business as usual no countermeasures coming to Media or among average people how do I cope with this coveted fear mongering I'm frustrated that I can't do the usual things I used to do how can I mathematize the misery as I don't know how long it will take to have a version of normal life again I've read how I found freedom in an unfree worlds can you give me some advice and to clarify my country is economically in the tail of Europe completely EU dependent so we could make some guesses as to what what that means but but not a not a major power um I guess I would I would look at it this way the um there's probably I I guess I'm the I think the inference that's sitting under here uh the unspoken inferences I don't want to take the vaccine because I don't trust it okay well obviously someone's going to take the vaccine I think that's what she's asking then you're gonna needs to be implied yeah yeah so um I would say that the following uh is is true that that I would probably suffer as best I could for certainly a few more months a map of housing a misery I would keep an eye I I don't know what what uh do you know what the what anything looks like in terms of uh conventional vaccines that may be arriving Jen do you know I know that there's there's something I don't know it's timeline there's the novovax um but I people throw out all kinds of timelines about what that what that looks like and where it would be available first but I don't think anybody actually knows for sure got it yeah the um yeah I I don't know what to tell you it's an interesting bind I mean for myself we are we're moving towards that bind in other words there there's there's there's creeping authoritarian process in the United States that that you could very much wind up in something not dissimilar to that in California uh so we we don't know where we're going to be in terms of the laws of the land here in four months the uh my attitude is I'm just got I'm just going to delay things and and have my life uh uh I'm gonna I'm gonna fiddle around with this as long as possible uh and not not be vaccinated because uh I don't know what I don't have a feel for what the risks are yet uh the risks are are clearly not zero and they are not trivial uh so we may be it may be the case that the the uh there is some reason for reasonable fear of a more a more contagious thing that somehow can step around the uh the vaccines there's evidence in England for example about half of the people that that died of the Delta variant were vaccinated and so that's not front page news but that is Truth uh there's not that many people died there's 117 deaths out of about 92 000 people as you can expect the vast majority of the deaths were older people yeah I'm just sorry to interrupt but this is the kind of thing that drives me nuts because that's not what you're reading in the U.S press what you're reading in the U.S press is that everybody who's hospitalized with Delta is unvaccinated and so it's which is freaking true like this is an empirical [ __ ] question like why do we have to have truthiness around all of this like who's dead and are they back like what's the truth here why is it so hard to get this all right the reason for that is that this is a massive power and money grab on just are a Confluence of Nefarious interests okay which is what we talk about Ad nauseam this week on hot clock yeah and that that is what the truth is But to answer this person's question I I personally have enough concerns about the vaccine that uh about the vaccines that I would be delaying this until I get put into a hell of a corner okay so uh I uh and so I'm I'm waiting you know for so that that's my attitude so the the Delta variant that is spreading appears to be significantly less dangerous uh if you are you know if you're under 60 years old and in reasonable Health uh if you're God knows if you're 40 or under you basically no risk at all from the original vaccine or from the original uh so the so as you run your own cost benefit analysis on whether or not a vaccine personally makes sense for you with respect to your health that's one CV the other CB is what does it mean for your life my sister incredibly as I was worried uh about the vaccine went and got it because she wanted to take a trip oh well she survived no no terrible side effect from it and on on goes her life and now she gets her free pass everywhere and that's fine that that was that was her uh her trusting that her loss of probability that we're gonna smile on her just fine I'm not gonna do it uh I Got One Life to Live and and I I don't know I I don't want to be making a decision on a math equation when I don't know half of the equation nobody knows half of the equation I don't care who says they do nobody knows it's impossible to know we this thing has been in public deployment for six months we don't know right yeah all kinds of evidence of all kinds of trouble we just don't know at what rates right so so as a result and now we don't know we have essentially conspiratorial kind of clamping on the on the actual evidence of the United States about the deadliness of the Delta variant uh so that we can't now run the other side of the equation about you know so in other words so we've got basically tremendous amounts of motivated deception in order to put you in a position where you don't actually know what the right CD is okay that will wear you down behind social pressure and inconvenience into taking a risk that you wouldn't have otherwise taken perhaps so my attitude is be patient you you may know more in 90 days than you know now it's certainly worth it I believe to to hold out for a while and let's just see what the evidence as it comes in if it comes in that there's more that there's convincing evidence that the CB uh uh is is different than I suspect then I'm going to have a little I'm gonna have I'm going to discover a shift in my attitude right now I'm so untrusting of every source that uh I believe the British Health Service Source because I that those look like basic numbers to me by little accounting people who work for the government that are putting everything in the right column if you look at that things look very good for us with respect to the Delta variant there's definitely I've seen the you in the UK case I haven't seen this for the U.S but I wouldn't expect that it would be wildly different when you superimpose the curves throughout the entire pandemic you know you've got this sort of you know you have a surge of cases followed by a surge of deaths and it's like they map onto each other very nicely and that has not been the case with Delta you have the surge in cases but now we're at the point where we would be seeing the the increase in the deaths and it's just not there there's a tiny little bump um and uh and part of that's just because we this thing's been blowing through the population part of it may be the vaccines I'm sure it is um there's there's lots of reasons for that but it's uh yeah it's it's a maddening information vacuum for things that would be relevant for people to make really truly informed decisions and this is what we talk about on the show yesterday about you know sort of uh the the ways in which that information is being shaped and constrained and censored and everything else so all right before I bet a whole lot of my chips I'm going to wait for another card yeah we'll talk about I'm waiting for another quote Yeah well this is yeah the I I have I devised a kind of um a general principle for this kind of problem this this mathematizing with no end in sight sort of problem um which is that the parameter-less mathematization of misery so this is this works almost as well as if you do have parameters it's a hack basically because we are uh Stone Age animals with um you know non-infinite time Horizons for making plans for the future we operate kind of in a at a six week Max like we really can't anything beyond six weeks is effectively infinite to our brains we can sort of plan oh yeah we're going to Costa Rica whatever but it's not this is very abstract and there's there's lots of literature particularly in in econ and in Poli SCI this is one of the reasons that people can't take meaningful um climate change mitigation action is because their their time Horizons are just not corresponding with their behaviors they're not seeing any consequences good or bad to the behaviors that they're making in a short period of time so there's there's a ton of rational Choice literature about this so basically you just you just do it in six six week chunks or three week chunks and you sort of you tell yourself look you know wherever we are in six weeks that feels long enough that it feels like something could really meaningful meaningfully change um either way you know you're going to have different information you know that the the whole thing is going to look different you're going to have some you're gonna have to run another CB at that time so it's sort of like let's just Buckle in for six weeks and and deal with this inconvenience and it's gonna suck and you know I'm really unhappy about it but in six weeks we'll know more we'll know more about vaccine efficacy and safety we'll know more about you know how how much freedom and movement is possible without it all of these things will change and so you just kind of buy yourself that amount of time um and allow yourself to mathematize accordingly and then six weeks comes and goes and even if nothing has changed you just you just re-up you just do it again um and it kind of is a way to fool your nervous system into feeling like you have a little more control over your ontological security than you actually do um and it doesn't matter that you know that it's sort of a hack and it's kind of untrue it still works so well I like that what it does it's telling the nervous system to quit spinning on it because there's no reason for a daily update and spend a little bit more time and look at the evidence then but this is me when someone's spinning over a relationship with a new boyfriend or girlfriend it's like okay right we're going to know a lot more in 30 days so right yeah you do this in any any case like this yeah you don't need to be making any decisions now just go out and do the best you can we'll reassess where we are in a month and that's uh the same same kind of very great great Jen wonderful yeah it needs a pithy name the parameter parameter list mathematization doesn't exactly roll off the tongue so yeah all right well yeah you went six week reset yeah that's not that's not bad that get us a book contract yeah there's gonna be a good one all right folks all right I gotta I gotta go run to talk to my peeps um and uh yeah so all good all good to see you good thank you for everybody to come out and ask all these questions and and really truly if you if you have questions for Murray um get those to me soon um because we're we're sorting through those and figuring out our uh game plan oh there's a cat out there there's a tuxedo cat I need to go adopt it by which I mean feel it and bring it inside one more book for cat lovers the fur person by May sartin is a fabulous little book uh wonderful story yeah beautifully done I keep I keep trying to push for a cat around here so maybe maybe my I've manifested it so all right I like that or maybe it's Henry text all right we'll see you next time bye everybody
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