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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-08-22
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yes I'm watching Married at First Sight Australia right now that's the that is uh I I have less faith in the experts there are you here I can't hear you Doug can you hear me you're here yeah yeah you're actually you're here twice there's a Doug L that's logged in and then yeah this one so a couple of different devices must have worked yeah kind of shut off one of them I can't yeah it's fine it'll just sit there and be in the in the guest panel so yeah no worries I don't know why those emails weren't coming through that is very strange yeah well that's gonna happen once more women yeah Yahoo has decided that we're not allowed to uh share some such information back and forth so um yeah okay so I changed I was saying earlier that I I changed the rules so people can see what questions are being asked in the Q a section it looks like we have a request for no political commentary this week so wow well all right well um so does anyone have a non-political question we have uh Patrick is asking is the only one posted here um a great many media Outlets appear to focus on the parental versus non-parental dichotomy when discussing the field of behavioral genetics I wonder if this does not further add to the convoluted public perception of behavioral genetics uh after all at least in theory those non-systemic random and stochastic events that shape our personality that plumbing refers to as the non-shared environment could just as well be brought about by your parents Crux of the matter is that we cannot foresee and measure personality shaping environmental factors due to their unpredictability and Randomness whether they are related to your parents friends or any other kind of external variable seems to be rather irrelevant or am I wrong that's a complicated question do we want to jump in there yeah I think what we'll do is just explain I think I think what it is that we understand and uh and that is that essentially there's uh it's going to drive me crazy because I can hear hear myself on this phone oh here well I'll just ban you if you ban me from the phone one okay yeah there you go you've been removed you're gonna you're getting removed good all right there you go um from what I can tell the for all intents and purposes this is what the facts are and that is that that um that your uh that everything that they have measured in other words every single environmental every way to categorize environmental inputs uh to try to see if environmental variances have anything to do with adult personality have basically triangulated on zero so what if your dad was cold if your mom was an alcoholic if your dad was rich if your parents were poor uh if you know uh if you had a uh you know if you were sexually abused like one thing after the next it's like everybody's looking to try to find out what environmental input had anything to do with your personality later on and over basically as you search and you search and you search and you search you keep coming up with basically zero and so what this and me what this amounts to uh now when I when I talk about something like abuse I'm not saying it's Pleasant and I'm not saying that that it might not have been CR you might not have been a victim of a crime and I'm not saying that uh you don't have unpleasant memories I'm just saying it doesn't influence your personality when we measure you at 32. okay it hasn't made you uh any more outgoing hasn't made you any smarter Dumber hasn't made you any more risk-taking hasn't made you any more disagreeable hasn't made you any more emotionally unstable hasn't made you more likely to be an addict as it made you more likely to get a divorce hasn't made you more likely to do a major in anthropology nothing okay so the point is is that who it is that you are in terms of your personality is appears to be basically innate uh like like the the bone structure of your face okay now the uh people people are often very confused about this because they have a hard time separating out personality from Life they're not the same thing okay so it's like well gee then nothing happens to us matters are you kidding me everything that happens to you is the only thing that matters in which your life experience is what's important your personality is the is the essentially um uh let me let me explain this a little bit so essentially all people have a template of a value system uh that they are that they're born with in the same way that you all people have a an anatomy so your your pancreas is in a different place than a dog's pancreas is uh and a dog's colon doesn't look like your colon so if you're a human you have a human body if you're a human you also have a human mind now every human body is different from one another so they have subtle variations and those subtle variations can add up to the difference between Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger okay but they're but they're we wouldn't mistake them for two different species okay in the same way that every mind is constructed differently and by the same process the reason that Danny DeVito looks different than Arnold Schwarzenegger is genetic it isn't how they were raised so those differences are innate to them now uh you might say well gee could Arnold have been one way or another way yeah but more or less he was going to look like Arnold wasn't he okay and now the question is more or less would he have acted like Arnold yes more or less he would have acted like Arnold whether he grew up in Austria he would have he would have had the same tenor of his voice he wouldn't had a high squeaky voice he wouldn't have it in a feminate voice it wasn't going to happen that way right so your personality is going to be the same no matter what happens to you your life experience is different completely depending upon what was going to happen to you so if if I grew up in Madagascar I would have had a very different life experience than the one that I have growing up the way that I did grow up however my personality wouldn't have been any different it's like well how the hell is that possible and the answer is that's just how it is okay do you think I would have looked any different had I grown up in Madagascar okay the answer is no I would look the same okay so how would it have been different I don't know a little more sunburn maybe or something but basically I'd look the same so the uh wouldn't made any difference what the hell happened where I went to the second grade school who my little girlfriend was in the fifth grade none of that would have made any difference to how I looked today okay so that's the notion so your personality is not changing according to your parents how they interact with you what happens to you whether you get turned down for your prom date none of that makes any difference okay it's your personality it uh it matters tremendously it is your life experience so if you hit the big shot and won the the championship then you got you get to think about that your whole life how cool is that if you missed a big shot and lost the championship you have to think about that you know that becomes an unpleasant event in your life so is there a difference in those life experiences absolutely there's a difference in those life experiences the one that hit the big [ __ ] the shot excuse me has a has a bit better of a life experience well is a completely different life experience of course not okay there's so many other things that happen and whether or not you hit the big shot or not yeah so life uh I think one of the points in plumbing is that uh he doesn't say this directly but life is long so when you have bad things happen to you it turns out that people take a ding on the chin for a while and then they return to Baseline and when something fantastic happens to them they ride in the Sun for a little while and then they then then they return to Earth in other words you're you're constantly angling towards your own sort of genetic mean about what that what that what the basic environment that you have that surrounds you which doesn't really make a damn bit of difference between a Suburban Detroit or you're an urban Phoenix it really doesn't make much difference in terms of the environment the environment is effectively the same so what's going to count a great deal is your personality and your your personality is going to be looking for opportunities and threats uh with respect to your capabilities and your talents and the tools that you have and you're going to be operating within you know you know Urban Phoenix or Suburban Detroit basically with the same adapter problems which is made seeking friend seeking and trade and exchange competencies that and it's because you're An American in the 21st century with whatever books brains and personality you have your life experiences are going to be pretty damn similar that is precisely what we found from Decades of research on monozygotic twins so two MZ twins they grow up they're separated apart at Birth when we look at their life experiences they are remarkably similar is one person's life experience at this moment better than the other one of course okay it's one of them a little bit healthier a little bit happier in Romance et cetera et cetera of course all of those things are variances but those don't stick those are just part of the natural vicissities of life so I I don't believe that there's a damn thing they're ever going to find that takes place in early childhood other than being injected with some drug that permanently changed your brain chemistry and utero that will make a difference okay brain damage will make a difference that will change your personality okay you do enough drugs and blow out enough brain cells into your personality will change okay but short of brain damage your personality isn't going to change all that's going to happen is your life story evolves so I hope that uh all the developmental psychologists out there working on trying to figure out the great mysteries of personality development are totally wasting their time okay they can look back at the last half century of developmental psychology in this Arena and find nothing but BS that didn't hold up to anything so that's that's the story for whatever whatever news anybody's reading uh that they're trying to make sense of the answer is from the very best that I can tell all of your little experiences add up to nothing when it comes to your personality I think that's that's what it looks like Jan is that looked like the same thing to you out of blueprint yeah that sounds pretty comprehensive we have a little bit of a follow-up here which can kind of get us into more uh even more Nuance here so it says your your gene-based approach to human psychology and treatment assumes and requires that individual Societies in the human race in general have no inherent value that morality ethics and religion only have value if they Advance the propagation of the genes of the person using them to modify their behavior yeah I I don't think this is quite a fair characterization of what we're saying the question goes on though so so it says doesn't this limit the adoption of your views and approach because most people seem to have an inherent need for a belief system or a God to provide a reason to justify valuing one's own life and the lives of other people both of you have commented that you try to sidestep or avoid discussing the broader issues during consultations but I believe these General implications need to be addressed before your gene-based approach to evaluating and managing human behavior can be widely accepted well first of all I couldn't care less whether it's widely accepted or not yeah I'm not really interested in in trying to convince people that aren't smart enough or courageous enough to uh to look at the truth uh second of all the notion that you need any kind of belief system quote anything that would have anything to do with something religious or anything even similar to that uh that you need that for anything it's also untrue the uh your values emanate naturally from an evaluative system that is embedded in You by the genetic code if you are a cat you inherently value Wiggly things that look like the the tale of a mouse you value that so let's get clear what values are what values are are they are they are opportunities and threats in an animal's environmental situation that are correlated with increases or decreases in likelihood of Gene survival that's what a value is okay and so you find out that you value something by how it is that you field so things that you feel are are essentially What a Feeling is is it's an analog output to the calculation that the brain is doing in terms of the survival value the gene survival value of a given environmental input so when you have sex if you use a condom and it feels very good to you you have blocked the genetic purpose in other words the biological purpose of the activity but you have the reason you sought the activity in the first place is because you are seeking the feeling that is associated with an increased statistical likelihood of Gene survival you see that you can't I mean you can you can manage to intelligently cut the cut the action between there but you can't stop the motivational system the motivational systems value systems are working right down the lines of Gene's survival okay so you don't need uh and so why you value your friends and the the uh the potential value of a coalition that could be as wide as the United Nations uh why would you value anything you don't need any belief system all you need is your Gene survival value operator that says I want to live in a situation where I can talk to trade if I I have a a neighbor out there I want to know that that that person if they're disagreeable and have a disagree uh we have a disagreement about who can make how much noise or where you can put his fence that we have a we have a social system that can actually adjudicate those disputes between individuals we understand inherently that um but life hasn't inherently tragic process which is the things that I want maybe the things that you want and we both can't have them and so how we wind up adjudicating disputes or conflicts between individuals mindset being something that is of immense value that's called the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States okay I don't need a belief system to value that of any kind that's just my Straight Gene survival apparatus recognizes that the tremendous value of having a peaceful situation with Micon specifics okay so the uh so this is so there's certain things about this question that that I don't know if if this person is parroting in other words they're throwing us a challenge from somebody else or whether they actually think this but the if you're thinking that you need God or anything else to be good you don't good means that I am about you to somebody else and that that I can engage in trade relationships with them that are valuable to them I am a good to them that uh that is the fundamental notion of a good in economics is something that you you if you could get it at no cost it would be worth something to you okay so the uh so we can absolutely and are good to each other not based on any kind of belief system but based on the fact that there are objective characteristics to interactions between people that wind up statistically increasingly the uh the likelihood of Gene survival for both so if we are part of an insurance scheme where if I have extra food left over at the end of my feeding and hunting and I give it to you and you need it then I'm of value to you there's no belief system that that uh the no quote belief system that that intertwines us what intertwines US is an interdependence and utility that each of us find in the interaction that's all what it takes I.E all it takes is self-interest that's all it takes to bind people together and have them act in very positive ways for each other occasionally uh because they because we value the same things and have things trade sometimes it's worth uh for one person either stealing it uh taking it by force or defrauding okay so that's why we have had the evolution of governments has been to try to essentially reduce the expense of force and fraud in Human Action uh to to optimize human behavior uh the value of having uh neighbors and and interactive con specifics so the uh but the fact that uh that we as individuals living close by and interacting with each other and interaction means trade we're trading something okay uh whether we're trading DNA as we're horizontal or we are trading uh smiles and friendship basically signaling that we will be insurance policies for each other or I'm trading a book for 17 apples one of the way one of the things that's happening is when we interact with other people we are trading okay and the reason we're trading is that the actions of trading improve our statistical likelihood of Gene survival or they tickle the instincts that believe that we are okay so we don't need any kind of coherent belief system to make that happen uh that is uh and and in order to have an acceptance of anybody to see it is how it is that we are viewing the world uh what that what that takes in other words to flush the notion that you need God to be good you know I'll tell you what uh Sam Harris put the bayonet to this whole argument in a book called the moral landscape the uh so the uh he he skewered that entire notion and so if you want a detailed uh analysis of of that notion at all I would actually direct you to that book that will that will Checkmate anybody's argument that any any such thing is necessary or useful yeah yeah I think implied by this line of thinking and questioning this is sort of something that comes up where I.E when Charles Murray is talking about differences of of you know mean and average characteristics including IQ across different populations that he's making some kind of value judgment about those populations relative to each other and he and others are very uh very careful and very explicit to say that this is not your the the fact that there are differences in attributes and and some of those might be more valued than others in contemporary Society for one reason or another is not a statement about the intrinsic Mo's just hacking up along back there the intrinsic worth of that population or of Any Given person within that population so I think this can become a very dangerous kind of line of inquiry when you start to look at behavioral genetics as ascribing some some sort of definition of intrinsic worth um like oh you have a higher IQ or you're more agreeable or you're more conscientious there's therefore because you're more successful in propagating your genes you're you're a more valuable human so I think that's kind of what this question is touching on and we are very much not ever saying anything like that we're we're we try to be very careful to to contextualize these things that these things that there are certain attributes um that you have that other people don't have that may be perceived as valuable at a particular Moment In Time relative to your social context and what you do for a living and all of these all of the different things that we could use to contextualize that question but that is that that this gets into the realm of unknowable philosophy to start talking about intrinsic human worth and and what what it where is meaning and and is there more meaning if you have a life that is defined by certain characteristics than another life so that's all really into the weeds but I I sniff some of that in this question so I just wanted to get there too I mean the truth is like somewhere in Sacramento right now there's some really brilliant human right but if they die today and I found out oh well they were just brilliant human that died they were UC Davis Professor what's it to me answer nothing okay if my cat gets six today I'm going to be in a panic so in other words the the uh the value of any human being is subjective to the individuals that know them that's all that's the way that works so and we are intrinsically built to try to protect and defend and Aid and to bet the well-being of the people that we that we love that's that's how that works I'm not sure we don't I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything I I I'm lost a little bit but anyway the point is yeah we don't have some objective scorecard behind anything about of course people have subjective work to other individuals but it's any kind of objectivity doesn't make any sense right yeah and if there is any objectivity it would be equivalently shared among every every member of the popular like there there isn't there isn't any objective standard for what makes you a more valuable human being than another one I guess is one way to say that that there's no that that it's all contextual it's all social context it's all who you are to the people that you're interacting with and that can sound I guess a little nihilistic and that can bother people so um there's this it reminds me of this uh if you're interested in this kind of philosophical like getting into the this this sort of nietzschean weeds here with this kind of thing um there was this great article published in the first edition of the Journal of controversial ideas which was founded by Peter Singer and some Associates um and the article was something like there is no ultimate meaning of life we we don't have it we're never going to get it and that should make us very very very sad and it's just this kind of tour de force of the fact that yeah there is no there is no meaning there is no sort of uh intrinsic values separate from who you are to the people who love you and who you love and that that's just that's a short-term little blip in the in in the void and that's all it is and that's you have to create your meaning around that even though it's ultimately meaningless so this is this is totally uh kind of a departure for us because it is more moral philosophy than we normally dabble in but it's um it's interesting to think about sometimes yeah it's my way of thinking about it and this is all law Sam Harris and that is that you are a nervous system that has the capacity to feel okay and those feelings the positive feelings in there are in inherently the good and negative feelings in there are inherently the bad so our our job in life is to try to figure out how to essentially activate those neural circuits uh in a way that we have the best life experience it's like okay if you if you have a chance you're only going to live five more minutes you know what is it that you're going to do or uh look at life as sort of a roller coaster one there there's there's a it's an experience and it's over so the the process here is to try to have the best possible experience and uh we we we understand that there are inherent conflicts of interest between us and other people so we have ground rules for that and we try to figure out uh how to how to make those ground rules and Harris actually talks a lot about that that a lot of people's ground rules actually don't make any sense and you have to defend yourself against their ground rules at the point of the gun okay because they may think that uh so for example I understand right now I don't know if this is true but if the Taliban see in your phone or in your packages right now that you have a Bible they'll kill you on the spot okay so that that is apparently what's going on in Afghanistan at this moment no politics Doug oh yeah the political free free episode right but that's a uh but that but that's actually a comment about uh where is that we in other words there are inherent conflicts between individuals and so sometimes those conflicts require uh that you have to defend yourself of violence so the uh but inject but in principle we can see how human beings you know in theory wouldn't have to do that and that in fact the the notion of how to design uh societal processes is how to activate optimally the moods of Happiness inside the individuals that's that would be the that would be the the apex of the moral landscape about how we would do this all right let's go on to some of the questions yeah we got lots of other we AJ has a question here I'm going to try not to take too personally she says Jen often mentions what she watches on TV we were talking about reality TV when you joined us curious if if you Doug watch TV what you watch and how much and also do you believe there's a correlation between weight and hours of viewing that's what many experts say um there may or may not be a coalition between uh waiting hours of viewing but the but we have to remember that that would be a spurious correlation uh of some kind that wouldn't really have a causal connection there the um that we know that how much TV people watch is basically dictated by behavior of genetics so uh and we also know that behavioral genetics is uh is going to be the the dominant force of determining what a person's body morphology is so the it all comes back to individual variation in genetics and so it doesn't so looking you can find all kinds of correlations uh between um you know if if we go to a chess tournament we're going to say well the chess make people smart or did uh being smart and competitive and nerdy make them attracted to chefs obviously it's the latter okay so yeah that's a that's a useless correlation yeah it's a it's just a proxy for a whole other set of behavior and and characteristics so yeah as as many things once you start looking into all things behavioral genetics and this takes us back to the initial question with these environmental factors that are actually genetic factors if you peel them away enough and you look at well why is the child growing up in that sort of environment it's because the parents have genes that prefer that sort of environment and so they have created it for the child so it's not the fact that you have a lot of books around and that you read to your kid a lot that makes them interested in learning and they want to go to college it's because they share the genes with the parents who are intellectually driven and therefore have books around so there are a lot of things like this that when you start to pick them apart and you you detach the correlation from the causation you find a similar story um the other part of that question is what you watch and how how much TV you watch I I I watch almost no TV I watch a few shows so after I've watched the The Mentalist I've watched every one of those at least twice I haven't watched much since I have to wait I have to wait a few months to where I've forgotten the plot lines and I'd go back and watch it again did you give up on lost last I checked we watched all the way through lost so uh loss was a phenomenal absolutely phenomenal show and so yeah I'm gonna have to wait a few years unfortunately lost you can remember it uh some of it so well that uh yeah where the Mentalist is and it's important so but the loss was lost was the most imaginative most phenomenal show I have ever seen and uh I I don't ever expect to see a sequel so that that was something special yeah all right well our most uh upvoted question here is from Maureen so she says EP supports that the male is attracted to the waste tip ratio we have good evidence for that which is yet when I inquire among the men in my family one says he's a leg man another is a breast man why would they be attracted to the breast or legs the length of the legs or the size of the breast doesn't give the fertility cue does it oh um actually there are estrogenation cues in the legs and certainly in the breast so the uh what you're looking at is that one of the things that that men are attracted to is the way sips ratio uh turns out that the waste tips ratio is actually a proxy for what it is that they're actually looking for it looks like what they're looking for is curves so they're it looks like the the male brain has a curve detection mechanism uh looking for the angulature of those curves and it looks like the angulature of those curves that they are most attracted to is about a two to three ratio in someone who's about five foot four so the so those the angles of those particular curves then so for example if you're a taller female if you're 5 10 then probably you would need a more severe waisted hips ratio and there's wider hips and thin relative to the waistline in order to tickle those curvature instincts uh maximally so go ahead and change that put yourself on a torture rack the point is is that everybody simply has if you're a male or female you have some degree of the characteristics that the opposite sex uh finds attractive okay you have varying degree of those and uh opposite sex has variation in in which particular cues that they are attracted to so that's why for example you will find you'll find quite quite a few females will shrug their shoulders at Brad Pitt but they will not shrug their shoulders at George Clooney okay because the subtle differences in houses I'm a Clooney kind of girl myself right okay so these are these funny little things even independent of Personality okay so just just straight morphological cues they are are tickling the the instincts of individuals somewhat differently so however we're going to find that the things that are tickling the instincts are generally they are going to be sexualized cues so even the way people's feet look for example uh or hands hands can be more or less effeminate or masculine uh and so that can be a significant uh issue for some people depending upon what's uh what somebody's hands are look like for example there's the famous Seinfeld episode with the man hands so I don't know if people do you remember that I didn't see that yeah it's one of one of my favorites this is yeah Seinfeld was very tapped into these things a very long time ago and um yes it was a notorious episode where Jerry every every episode Jerry's finding some reason to disqualify some otherwise very attractive young lady and in one he like he just he can't he can't get over the fact that she has these very masculinized hands um and that don't seem to suit her otherwise and it's just it's too much for him to overcome [Laughter] Princess and the pig yeah so it's going to turn out the legs absolutely the shape of legs and their length uh is a fitness indicator for males looking at females I have no doubt that it's probably also the other direction in other words uh females looking at males undoubtedly have significant preferences the shape and proportions of the of the male's legs with I know they do if you have some guy that shows up with very skinny legs uh versus a guy that's much more uh much more muscular in those legs and then I can imagine also there's a point of which uh for a given female the leg muscles of the male become too much in other words it's overly testosteronized and then it's like oh no that's too much so in other words this is all about proportion and individual variation Etc so legs breasts waist hips the thickness of a person's lips you know what I mean the how how uh arches of their eyebrows the the color of their hair and the amount of it and whether it's curly or straight there are all kinds of variations in human presentation and individual variations surround all of them that's how that works yep all right let's see what else we have voted up here so we have I always work too hard to strive for more at Great cost to my happiness and health I'm never satisfied I know it's impossible to completely override my natural ambition as an open high conscientious nutcase any tips to reduce my constant striving and then we have somebody uh responding to that saying that they've found that their similar personality traits have settled down as they have achieved more over time I.E they're a little older my internal audience became more satisfied and now I can be happy in some domains where I used to strive incessantly in my 20s so interesting context there I think that the first questioner is a little a little younger so yeah and we would expect that in other words the reason why you're doing that is that you're running a cost benefit analysis on what it what it would gain for you in terms of being able to trade in made Sprints and trading relationships and therefore what it might mean for your Offspring as well the resources that would be involved and so your Gene survival circuitry are running cost benefit analysis on whether or not it's worth it to continue to work hard to distinguish yourself from similar competitors and so the we're not just distinguishing ourselves from theoretical competitors we're distinguishing ourselves from people that we know are extremely similar to us and therefore competing in the same ecological niches so I don't really care what's happening right now at Stanford University in the Cutthroat world of neurosurgery among the residents like who's going to be the chief resident okay I couldn't care less they're not competing with me where we are in different ecological niches so what I would care about uh would would I might be carried cared about uh Brett and Heather's book that they're coming up with on the hundred gatherers guide To Living it's like Oh I wanna you'd be more concerned if you listen to their uh their weekly podcast where they've been going through the chapters every week and it's like every week I'm like God damn it they're just they're all over the same space but you know we love them they're brilliant so it's it's too it's it's hard but I think to the point that anoki was making in response is that I think I would be much more agitated at 25 about that kind of competitive pressure than I am now where it's like well I I think there's enough room here for all of us and I I have had the time to calibrate that in a way that I I didn't necessarily when I was younger where you feel like not only that you have to you have to strive to make your mark to to you know make your place in the world um but there's also just more noise around what that place is and so kind of Everything feels intrinsically more competitive um whereas when you get as you as you age and you get more specialized your Niche gets smaller and and so you just are there's a little more power that comes with that position um as you get more established and and you know that you have something to add to even a very uh overpopulated space yeah what's actually taking place there is the parameter estimates on the cost benefit analysis are getting they're getting more accurate and so you you can uh and what you what you will ultimately find is uh unless you are screaming narcissist you will start to figure out um as Daryl bem says once you once uh famous psychologist said once you figure out you know look if I if I work this weekend if I work every single weekend for the next 20 years maybe I could be Sigmund Freud but if all I'm going to be is Leon festinger forget it yeah why why sink the cost right correct because you're you're comparing the possible payoffs you're basically what what all Investments are is nothing other than gambles it's basically like buying a lottery ticket you you have the value of the prize has to be estimated you have to multiply that by the perceived probability of success and then you have to divide that by the amount of uh energy or for example money that it would take so it's like what's a lottery ticket worth intrinsically mathematically well if it could be a million dollar prize uh but there was a one in five million chance uh that then we already we now know what that is and then it turns out that it costs a hundred dollars so we done do the math and we figure out what it's worth and that that means that ticket's worth 20 bucks okay I believe and so it's a it's worth twenty dollars but it costs you a hundred well you want to do it uh well the upside is a one in five million chance in a million okay so maybe you do want to do it but don't make it an investment strategy for your for your retirement we recognize that that would be a bad investment when you're 25 years old and you have a lot of talent you don't know what those parameters look like yet you have to hit the ceiling you have to find out where they finally tell you no okay which is the the problem of a young Brad Pitt like where you know where where do you stop well apparently you don't stop at Jennifer Aniston okay apparently there was one more one more notch in your belt that needed to be done and it named Angelina in other words you you you you rise until you hit your limit and once you hit your limit then you start then it starts changing the parameters on the investment processes and now now we chill out which is exactly what that the older quote wiser individual I.E better informed individual is trying to tell the younger person [Music] okay hopefully not you know Brad Pitt's case you start drinking too much and verbally abusing the kids on a plane and get kicked to the curb so you know so I don't don't do what Brad Pitt does I don't know anything about Brad Pitt oh yeah team Angelina all right what else we got going um the next one that's gotten the most votes is what part or which which aspects of the big five does being a hoarder or a minimalist fall under so what is it about the big five that governs that I don't think that's any one of the big five per se that's sort of its own little circuit yeah I mean you can't take five yeah you can't be much of a minimalist unless you were pretty conscientious um so these these things get this is this is sort of goes back to one of my principles that I always try to remind people of which is to not get too attached to the big five qua the big five like it's there are these five very general personality attributes but they are describing a lot of a lot of heterodox things there's a there's a lot of things that fall under conscientiousness that we could kind of lump in if we were forced to categorize certain traits or certain attributes or certain preferences or characteristics we would call them these things but they are they're being pushed and pulled in so many directions by so many other facets of your personality that it's really overly simplistic to say oh well that's you know if you're 90th percentile conscientious that means you're more likely to be a minimalist than you are to be a hoarder there's so many other things going on in the mix there including some environmental things so so there are some you know uh childhood and and adulthood factors that can contribute to these kind of behavioral patterns so it's it's not anything that you could point to really simplistically in the big five I don't think um but clearly there are people who to tend in different directions with how much clutter they're comfortable with or or how um how much much anxiety they feel if they don't have a cabinet full of food and and all of these things that are going to eventually it total up in in one direction to a minimalist or a hoarder but of course those are continua as well so you know we could call somebody somebody has hoarding tendencies if they have a garage that you can't walk through I may know somebody like that someone may have minimalist Tendencies if they have an office that looks like yours so here we are we have the same individual who has a garage that you can't walk through and a very minimalist office so what does that mean what kind of personality does Doug Lyle have if he has different spaces with different amounts of things in them so this is just speaking to the complexity of that question agreeable with females yes well yes all right yeah it's true but yeah I think there's there's a little of everything definitely some some yeah all of the above even the big five folks um that that is a that is a intelligent shorthand for for what are as we are attempting to communicate with each other about these uh variances in personality um the however the truth of it is that these are interactions of thousands of genes so two people that are at the 70th percentile on extroversion actually have quite a bit of difference between the two of them and they're in the way they relate to other people socially it's just that they have more similarity uh in all probability to two people who wanted this at the 70th percentile on one is at the 40th percentile so they share some similarities there but those are not the same genotype okay and so there's a lot of differences one of them may laugh quite a bit more uh one of them uh one of them may try to steal the show more uh it's uh it's really difficult I mean it's not as simple as five numbers those five numbers can tell us quite a bit uh but they but they are uh but as Jen says it's not even it's not even a hundred more personality characteristics it's just a whole big massive uh Arena of variation so it's uh yeah that I'm trying to it's like how how many Browns are there how many Reds are there in a paint scheme infinite okay there are infinite Shades and there are infinite shades of uh personality characteristics in people it just turns out that we can talk to each other about those in the same way that we could talk about colors so we could talk about colors in a way that's meaningful red blue blue green brown gray okay good it's great what does that really tell you well it's really useful when we're talking to each other but actually we recognize that it's just an entire spectrum of variation and that's the way to really look at color all right yeah no that's really good analogy it is it is just like colors yeah um okay so similarly uh we have another one what personality Dimensions account for some people suffering PTSD after a traumatic event and others not having that response is it their level of neuroticism in part yeah um but but yeah there is this is one of the the areas of the twin literature that I just found the most interesting is this kind of this this literature really started with combat veterans in Vietnam um so there's this whole uh you know index of of combat vets who uh had different childhood experiences and identical genetics they were twins who both went off to war and had these very differential their experiences um in the war were different and their PS PTSD responses were different and it just it tells you everything um that you need to know about the the importance of the genetic component here because two people can be in in the face of the same very traumatic event and and not have very different responses but if they're genetic twins um it's a different story so yeah there is there is kind of a heritability of your propensity to have um PTSD in general regardless of the the severity of the event um and a lot of that is associated with neuroticism but that's not the full story yeah yeah the other the other piece of that that comes out is that there's also this is where it really gets deep with behavioral genetics that there is um the the nature of nurtures plummen would say it that there there are also people have different personality characteristics that the your your likelihood to experience a traumatic event itself is heritable because you're you're um adrenaline seeking your your uh your need for that kind of stimulation your tolerance with for risk like all of those things are heritable so there are certain people who are more likely to find themselves in a situation that would uh generate a trauma um and then so that's heritable and their PTSD and response is also heritable so it gets very nuanced yeah anything to add to that or any other thoughts yeah I would I would probably also add that um my thinking about what PTSD is uh is actually it's a um to demystify it we demystify PTSD in the same way that we demystify trauma if we get uh people have this notion that we use the word trauma and then suddenly all bets of all causality and laws of genetics and behavior and everything else goes out the window uh because it's this magical terrible thing um then PTSD would would be you know obviously post-traumatic stress disorder is the uh suffers from the same Mystique so what we want to do is we want to think of it don't think of it as get rid of the word trauma um and instead use the word unpleasant experience okay so if we have uh in fact you could say an extremely unpleasant experience so if we say okay like oh well I've forgotten the trauma I've repressed it okay so let me get this straight you had an extremely unpleasant experience and you've forgotten it okay let's think about that um if it was uh and and we think that then it got driven underground and it's doing you know we're eating away at your soul and your your integrity of your life like termites okay well let's let's explain why that has no basis in in any biological theory that I know and that is is that the the response to an extremely unpleasant event should be to avoid similar characteristics of events in the future okay that's all and so I have that you know uh you have a ton of those things an unpleasant event is to have my cat scratch me in the morning uh to to uh to wake me up which is why she gets locked out of the bedroom because I'm anticipating that I'm trying to avoid it so we we try to avoid unpleasant events we try to avoid extremely unpleasant events more okay and so because they have a higher biological value I.E more negative value therefore they should be have high priority in memory in order to uh to avoid that that's why when people are extremely ill after they eat a specific tasting meal oftentimes they they will spend years with a with a conditioned version as a result of that that is a defense against future losses so PTSD uh is a is a defense it's a actually an Adaptive system that helps the individual avoid circumstances that could lead to similar losses that they experienced in the past those losses might not have been realized losses they could have been just statistical likelihood losses like three guys right next to me in a foxhole all got shot to death and I saw their faces explode okay that means that I was well aware that that could have happened to me and so what were the circumstances that surrounded that I was in a foxhole and there was a bunch of gunfire okay so therefore if I hear gunfire in the future I hear a car backfire as I'm driving as I'm driving along the road I should be hyper reactive to that noise okay that's that's the hypersensitivity of quote PTSD I didn't eat away at my ability to go to the office and sell insurance didn't have anything of the time the the coding should be narrow rather than General okay so one of the mystiqs of PTSD is that that there's a generalized destruction of the human life around a traumatic event that biologically makes very little sense in other words the what it should be is not a decompensation and inability to to function instead it should be an automatized avoidance reaction that is narrow as possible for the organism to actually continue to make the idealized decisions under conditions where there are threats that are evident as a result of Coatings in memory so a uh a rabbit that narrowly escapes a fox that jumps from behind a given Bush uh doesn't is now not terrified of going out there and looking for carrots it is specifically probably going to be a little bit nervous about not just that bush but bushes where you know in other words now it's been cued that hey I have to be extra careful so it will it will expand to a narrow amount ideally biologically in order to Encompass situations that are extremely similar to the situation in which the traumatic event took place but it should not generally widen because if it did the costs of of putting compensatory behaviors and avoidances would start to overwhelm the benefits of it so nature actually delimits the the extent to which a PTSD reaction would generalize okay and so that kind of thinking by the way is not common whenever you hear people talking about trauma and PTSD Etc the the it is not in their landscape to think of it that way the think of it as extremely unpleasant dangerous circumstances therefore you should remember those circumstances but you know if you were caught in an alley in Calcutta because you know and and damn near lost your life in a knife bite that shouldn't cause you to have any particular concern when you're walking around Knott's Berry Farm in the middle of the day in Orange County okay so that's how that works uh in other words the general generality and specificity of the sequelae of trauma should be intelligently designed by your nervous system and therefore not derail your life if it derails your life if it looks like it's derailing your life there's probably a very good chance that if we looked at your identical coach when their life looks quite similar to yours even though that they weren't in those circumstances okay yeah one we can do one more since we got started late so um there was a there was one about AI um and uh Universal guaranteed income but I think that gets us into politics so we'll hold off on that um and uh we'll do that another time so this one is uh on the theme is anxiety genetic um what is the best treatment for generalized anxiety for a male in his 20s so yeah we're just kind of centering around this theme today yeah it is genetic okay so uh but but it's going to be an interface between the fact that if you are a high anxiety individual there are circumstances that are going to cause you more anxiety and circumstances that are going to cause you less anxiety so your so for example um my anxiety people are going to you know they're going to have anxiety about specific types of things so it's sometimes a good idea to save money it's a good idea to uh to uh well I don't know I don't know what else causes you anxiety live on the right side of the bridge so you don't have to travel over the bridge uh every day uh to go to work if that makes you upset in other words you're going to do things that are going to help you avoid anxiety as best you can uh if you are but if your level of anxiety is just generally High that's not a disorder okay so the the Geniuses of Psychiatry have nothing for you that's going to be useful that's going to be a trap so all that you can do is you can look at the major sources of your anxiety and try to figure out like a potted plant how we're going to move our way around it okay so uh source of anxiety for me was going up and and trying to hit on females okay thank God that the internet came along at just the right time bill I was able to avoid that anxiety and instead just write cute little notes to them and get dates that way so that that like completely I was able to completely bail out and never have to deal with it similarly if you're an individual with whatever those anxieties are your job is to maneuver Your Existence around uh as best you can in order to dial that anxiety down if possible and other things that you could use exercise you'd intelligent food don't drink coffee and get to bed on time so if we do those things there will be a general tenor of the nervous system to be more relaxed yeah I think there's also this is this is sort of you know we we dance around this all the time with the mismatch with the modern environment so there's um I've been I've been talking to the people who are in my Virtual Village they know that I've been obsessively rereading All the Little House on the Prairie books this has been my sort of self-soothing of late um as as you know we Face the apocalypse it's just been really really sort of uh fascinating to reread these books that I loved as a child I just read them to tatters and it's a very different experience when you read them as an adult I remember stopping right around the point if you guys have read them where um the the kids start to get about 12 13 and I can't really relate to them anymore because they start doing grown-up things and it's just not as interesting I like I much was much more interested in their kid lives um but reading them now they've seen it Through The Eyes of the adults it's like they didn't have time to to have too much anxiety like they had anxiety there you definitely saw the same kind of distribution of traits um but people were so pressed to survive there was so little room for error um in their just constant hustle their constant hustle to feed themselves and shelter themselves and battle the elements and um battle everything that was coming at them all the time and that was a comparatively very easy life to Stone Age life um so we we are in a different situation now with especially with the person asking about a young man in his 20s I would suspect there's nothing particularly pressing for his time and resources and attention in his life in terms of his actual survival prospects you know he's probably a little bit of this animal in a zoo that we talk about where things are pretty safe things are pretty secure and I think that can that can lead it can lend itself to a lot of mental activity and a lot of um you know perseverating on uh anxious thoughts and on on centering yourself in your world in a way that just was never allowed in our previous history that's so good Jen and so so um not being that highly conscientious myself I'm not particularly anxious to be lazy and just you know into them yeah like what right into ladies on the web so but other people with higher conscientiousness yeah absolutely just to reiterate and add nothing new but essentially if you've got if you've got time to sit and spin uh then a lot of times people will sit and spin so that's why sometimes it's useful to put yourself in situations where you are you are under under the stresses of focused attention go play co-ed volleyball for example that now you won't be able to be anxious about all these other things that you're anxious about or I go become a rock climber it was as soon as you're quite finding those rocks you're fully focused and in flow because you don't have a choice you have to focus on that so those would be that type of thing is just a that's exactly what you're talking about I think that's fascinating that of course you know if you're in the middle of a struggling business and you've got customers coming into that restaurant and you're or best waitress just called in sick you don't have time to be anxious about all kinds of diverse little things you are fully focused on I I essentially survival activity so right yeah right you can you can get an experience of this even if you're just out for a walk on a trail and you're sitting there and your head is just swirling with you know that that schmuck at work you know I can't believe that the [ __ ] and like you know screw her and then you you trip and you fall and you rip a big gash open on your on your knee and you're a couple miles from your car and you're not sure how you're going to get back you're suddenly you're not apart from that initial sort of oh I wouldn't have tripped and Fallen if I wasn't thinking about that bastard at work you you you shift your attention to the most pressing thing in front of you um and so you may shift that attention in in a way that is congruent with your personality predisposition and so you might you might be more upset about it than someone else might be but the the nature of what you're thinking about has much less to do with this kind of um as ramdas would call it future tripping you're not you're not in your head you're not in this kind of like what is going to become of me sort of thing in this in this existential way it's more how do I take care of my physical reality right here right now um and that becomes all-consuming and people just don't really have that experience um for the most part in the modern era which is mostly a very good thing you know it's really it's it's a wonderful thing that we get to live with that sort of comfort and safety most of the time um but you you do get this sort of uh pathologizing tendency of certain certain attributes if they don't have anywhere to go productive so yeah all right all right well that that'll do it we got to most of them there were a few left that uh we will just we'll try to roll them over if we if we don't get to them just bring them up next time and we will see you guys in a couple of weeks fantastic Jan Goodson all right all right say hi to the kitties all right will do all right bye
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