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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-09-18
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all right so do you have any uh pressing matters or anything before we get into this I had I've got more people than usual sending uh questions via email which I I feel like people people will get frustrated because we don't actually have a method for going through we're very uh we're very unscientific in our process we just sort of answer things that float in front of us at certain times we also are always or at least I'm always if there's a question that's very similar um even if it substantively has has different uh you know different attributes but we've answered something that I feel is relatively similar within the last couple of weeks whether it's on AJ or it's on beat your jeans or it's on hot blocked I might skip that question just because we've dealt with it before so um for everybody who's emailing me I've I asked a question two or three weeks ago and you haven't gotten to it yet we've probably gotten to some form of it um fairly recently I am I'm not totally ignoring you but we're also just very Whimsical about out what we answered so so um but I will go ahead because there was someone uh who is particularly is never able to attend in person and so wanted to really make sure that we got in this question um because she's been wanting to ask it for quite a while so since she's not able to ask uh within the chat so um this is generally about um changing priorities and motivations in a relationship over time so the Aging male is what she calls this um he's a different animal every decade newly retired yet still working highly identified with his 40-year career firefighter highly esteemed administrative positions he continues with with a lot of this work but he has a debilitating disease that progresses uh resembles Ms going on five years his manliness has taken a hit he's middle open very stable moderately agreeable extroverted very conscientious low neuroticism um we've only been together 10 years as his spouse how do I support his esteem how do I support his health changes that could increase the effects of disease um both of his parents died in early retirement years so a lot in that question and we'll probably answer to more of a general way so this is what happens we kind of take the principles of questions and answer them rather than a lot of specifics so if you had to synthesize that down what would you I wouldn't synthesize it down maybe I unfairly if she if I don't know but sort of you know as as health and life priorities change over the course of a relationship how can you best support your spouse particularly a female supporting a male who maybe not as um you know has taken a hit to his manliness like not as identified with being the the most powerful Alpha in the community and is sort of confronting his own mortality and aging process in a way that is causing him to stress I don't know I I don't know what I don't know what occurs to me um I don't know I I would say that um obviously what's gonna happen naturally is that that he will run a thousand little experiments about where to invest his time and energy and he will be monitoring uh those experiments on um you know obviously retirement changes a lot about your behavior patterns so a lot of things are going to shift and so as a result um of these thousand little experiments he he will be monitoring the result of those experiments for the effectiveness of them in other words how good are those choices so he's in um he was just in a big building uh for 40 years and it had a certain bunch of purveyors who they have the same you know 32 dishes or lunch and it was a smorgasbord and those are the 32 dishes so now he goes to a new building the retired building and some of those people are gone so 20 of those purveyors are gone but now there's you know 50 new ones and so now now you have to re-rebalance and re-experiment to try to find the sort of Ideal Balance to optimize your life experience this is going to be done for his own intuition and his own experimentation and he will live with the results inside of his nervous system so there's nothing you can do about this process per se because he's doing this process and he may he may be it's not very open he may not wander too far from a home base in terms of he may circle around the same people in the same processes that were successful in other words if he was eating Italian food in the old in the old Smorgasbord he's probably going to be eating in some Italian food from the new purveyor that tastes a little bit different and has a little bit different characteristics the um so this experiments will be small his behavior changes will be modest uh in other words he'll he'll be feeling his way a little bit at a time you will notice that that some doors are closing and uh and he can't help but you know to sit in as a good friend of mine our good friend Larry says there's just no upside to getting old you know very Larry very Larry does he's complaining about it and Larry's actually you know in his late 60s and somehow it hasn't quite dawned on him that he's gonna die and he's in total denial over this and he's mad about it whenever it gets a little bit obvious and so uh yeah actually that's one of the extraordinary characteristics of humans is that they are they certainly have a a Time clock in their head that estimates the amount of time that they have to get major survival and reproductive problems solved but they strangely enough are a little bit unconscious of the notion that they're mortal at the same time so they have the time clock that aids their ability to make decisions so a young 17 year old doesn't take on an alpha that is that is 10 years older and 50 count pounds bigger and stronger when they're 17 just because they feel like they're antsy to get a bunch more status you know they know how to abide their time and the same thing is true of the 27 year old doesn't try to become CEO not unless there's some incredibly compelling reason why he deserves to be there he or she so people do know how to kind of look at their lives and have a general scheme for how they're going to invest their time and energy and and uh the important little sub goals that they need to be attending to but they are also similarly remarkably um remarkably unconscious of the notion that their time is limited but they get there they get their incrementally a little bit at the time and this is really the the aiding and abetting that a person might do as a spouse or partner is to take seriously um discussions floating ongoing discussion about a bucket list um it's like hey you know if we were if we were ever going to go in a you know in a river raft down a river in Patagonia you know now would be the time to do it rather than wait three years for example uh as his health materials the things that he might want to be doing we have to not let him go unconscious about the fact that uh the time is limited and to make sure we're looking at this thing through the lens of 100 000 hours and so and to be essentially uh kind of aggressive in terms about pushing for time and energy and money expenditures on those kinds of things where the times passed 10 years ago it might have been responsible to put those things off you know we can always visit Japan we don't have to do it now if we want to do it we could do it someday later it's getting time to start moving a person like this that's very high conscientiousness bright emotionally stable and not that open that's a package of personality characteristics where the delay of gratification is just second nature to such an individual and so it's easy for the the the trade-off between investment and consumption to wind up being heavily uh incentivized naturally into investment and that can actually be essentially a mistake where the person does not understand that there's a time to turn to actually you know look that there's been a tectonic plate movement on their on their continent and it's actually time to be consuming more than it is to be investing so uh so therefore supporting and asking for and cross-examining gently about dreams and goals and open Loops uh I.E bucket lists this is a this is one thing that I would be doing so that we have less regrets five years from now when some important windows are closed yeah yeah I think that's really good running it through the hundred thousand hour filter is always a really important you get out of that small view of things um that's the main thing that I would tell her I I would say that there's some um there's a lot of people who have thought about these questions and written thoughtful and useful things that are not necessarily in an evolutionary psychology form but um you know and sometimes our uh veering up into the woo-woo a little bit but nonetheless still is still useful so there's the um famous book passages by Gail she I think um which talks a lot about these things as far as women supporting men specifically through the their sort of aging process and the different priorities that they may have and the different things that they're dealing with at different points in their life um there's Alison Armstrong who I really like a lot who if any of you are familiar with David data who's kind of in the in the spiritual manosphere talking about sort of male female masculine and feminine energy Allison is the is the feminine equivalent of all of that discussion and so it's a bit woo-woo it's a bit spiritual but she has this extended metaphor of men men go through phases of their life where they go from night to Prince to king um and they they need different things from their relationship and they need different types of support from from their companion at those times so it's just I I put that out there for people who might be receptive to it it can be a little cheesy sometimes um and if you're very anti-spiritual talk or woo-woo talk or energy talk it's not it's probably not your cup of tea but if you're open to that it's um very very useful information I think fabulous you know I'm not aware of that stuff I want to point out to people um that all of that kind of stuff and the stuff that Jan has brought to discussions that she and I have had over the years I've got all that kind of woo-woo talk is very interesting because it's it's basically human beings oftentimes putting their finger on some pretty deep sophisticated circuitry inside side of humans and deep conflicts uh that inherently exists in in human nature and in the Life dilemma and um and so just just because because they don't have the conceptual tools uh that we are just developing now and Cutting Edge neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology that doesn't mean that they weren't able to see around the corners and get to the heart of how to explain what I call wisdom Forks where uh which is where your your instincts are are tickling you to go One Direction and yet your life experiences and and uh a more complex cosmetic analysis may be suggesting something else so it's uh these are these are ancient problems uh for human beings that live long enough to gather enough information to get wise uh it's a different than just being intelligent wisdom is this and so you know Eastern philosophy mystical thinking these to me are are ways of humans um solving problems through a big intuitive bunch of bunch of Machinery that exists in there uh and then putting it in a way that some somewhere somebody can actually see and feel the truth behind it and then improve their judgments and their decisions because of it and um I think the equivalent of that to the left brain are all the little things that John Wooden gave his team over and over again that are not mystical they are very what you'd expect out of a not open left brain very bright very methodical extraordinarily conscientious little Christian man that uh that over and over again I mean in it you will you you will hear the resonant sounds of mystical messages of the ages but but it's translated into something that doesn't sound mystical it just sounds very um deeply insightful and uh and then those those those knowledge bases are not inherently different than what that what we're attempting to do and articulating it through the actual identification of the neural circuits that is a that's a different it's a different level of analysis that we're approaching with problems uh we're approaching the same problems and often coming to the same conclusions the the hopefully value of of what it is that we do is we try to see where where direct conceptual identification of the actual issues that from an evolutionary perspective might yield this insights that we weren't even looking for okay and uh or or more confidence in the intuitive uh an intuitive prescription than we would otherwise have so anyway I I think that's great yeah I remember you telling me about you know Knight to Prince and Prince to King and I thought boy that's every man I know yeah every man I know goes through that process uh any man uh you know that that is seeking to achieve sort of goes through those struggles and it's a fascinating it's a fascinating metaphor and story we're we're formalizing the intuitive model is basically what we're doing so we're making it more testable we're seeing what else it applies to we're we're taking observations that a lot of people have made and we're like okay well let's try to actually identify what these components are and whether this is just a fluke that we're observing this or or how often it applies and under what conditions so so yeah we've had many conversations about how astrology is you know observing the the sort of fixed nature of Personality like people have these sort of attributes that seem very very stable over time and so if you can ascribe them to the stars um you know you've got part of the story right you've got you're trying to explain the same result that we're looking at hilariously more accurate the 20th Century Learning Theory which is a very delicious irony I always remember I had a dear friend who's very very very skeptical of astrology one of the biggest Skeptics I ever knew and and she came home from work frustrated one day and she's like God you know I just feel like there are just there are 12 people in the universe and you just keep meeting the fame 12 people over and over again like my astrology guys I'm like really 12. that's interesting she's very embarrassed when she realized what she said that's a great story awesome awesome all right well we've got um I just posted in the chat for you guys to this is I enabled up voting in the Q a so if there are questions you like better than other questions there's no down voting option there's just up um so if there are things that you want us to to tackle um I think a lot of things have one thumbs up but I think the first thing to get a thumbs up was this one so I'm wondering what to do at a tricky point in my life I'm a fairly new oh it just disappeared on me new successful entrepreneur making around 400 000 a year good for you very successful I've spent over a year working my butt off in a trendy basement in the center of a bustling City and I am for the first time feeling something approaching burnout I want to know which variables I'm ready to change to vastly improve my happiness I moved into the basement in September 2020 and spent around 3 000 a month for the privilege I have five cats down here who would benefit from a garden or at least a view I can afford a much better home now although I'm not yet ready to apply for a mortgage I have over ten thousand dollars in savings I feel oddly stuck even with a lot more money I feel a kind of helplessness learned helplessness question mark why do I feel so stuck when I have the resources to change things for myself uh anyone else in this position would surely make some moves but I just feel stuck and unable to help myself and then there's a correction that it's actually a hundred thousand in savings not ten so I feel better about their situation okay yeah yeah interesting that's a parameter question you love these yeah yeah let's uh just for fun let's let's try to synthesize so yeah uh we've got let's we would kind of ask this person we would say okay what comes to mind for you when you think about the things that that are a little bit mentally exhausting or frustrating about the idea of moving so we would find probably maybe a person that's not that open that uh they're just the hassle associated with actually going to the trouble uh and having to open you know basically take a bunch of time away from current pressing processes and then diverting into that is you know the person's procrastinating is what's happening uh also if they're making that kind of money their circumstances can also be changing very quickly uh if they continue to make money at that level there's going to be more and more options opening up so uh you know that that that could be so I think there's I think there's some uh the the the issue is that what's happening is inside that mind the mind is running a complex cost benefit analysis and it's running it on the basis of estimating parameters and those parameters are changing that you know you'll hit a pause button right there uh probably it's not a person who is who is antsy and desperate to try to make mating displays uh yeah it's it's probably not a male who's thinking oh my gosh do I ever need to get busy and put myself in a six thousand a month apartment you know what I'm saying I five cats suggest that we're talking to a female yeah that's what I'm thinking although you have three well I I have a feeling it's a female and so uh and as a result of that therefore not feeling the competitive heat uh with respect to displaying their their place and uh running into running into the cognitive dissonance of now that I've got a bunch of options what exactly do I want to be optimizing uh whereas for a guy it's a shiny Swank you know singles cool pad that would be the first thing that you should do right along with your James Bond vehicle [Laughter] that's not hard yeah yeah I think that that's what's happening so yeah and also there's other things swirling around there which is that uh any other place that she's gonna go it's gonna cost money and probably be more expensive in order to upgrade and there's probably some degree of uncertainty as to whether or not the success is going to continue so yeah uh what are you gonna do about it well we look around we we try to find out this is one thing that Jen and I will call the hidden step uh sometimes there's some little thing uh it could be like well how do you actually move a piano you know what I'm saying or uh in other words there can be some little step about what this would take that is that is uh that you haven't actually gotten yourself informed about so therefore you can't run the whole CB because we've got some variable in the equation like World of talk to a real estate agent and like talk to One do I have to follow through on a deal if you know whatever so we've got some missing information that's probably clogging up the show yeah including the fact that you could probably get a very nice home for considerably less than a three thousand dollar a month mortgage you know depending on what your situation is and how much space you need and where exactly you are you say you're in a bustling City so it might be expensive but you're still I think there's probably some parameterizing to do there to to get a better sense of just how much opportunity cost there is in taking the time and energy away from this newly successful business that's bringing in all this income which is sort of you know male or female you're you're like I don't want to stop for a second even though I'm feeling burned out I'd like to take some time to kind of get a sense of my bearings and what I want to do the the the flood of money coming in that's never come in at that level before it feels like you can't this would be the wrong time to turn away from that um and uh even if it would just take a take a moment to start to parameterize and to answer some questions there's that is a probably a low level Demand on your attention that's happening where you're just like I I I will wait until I feel four percent more burned out and then it will feel like the right thing to do right now I'm just feeling sort of burned out and I would like to do it but the CB just still isn't quite there for you so that's the sense that I get from that um so I would just start kind of yeah you know make a list of what all would be entailed in in sort of like what what you really would like to have in a new place um and what the steps are to get you from from here to there is it you know how much time how is it hiring an agent is it spending x amount of time every day mining Zillow posts is it you know what what does it involve how much time is it how much expense is it how how much time does that take you away from your current life and your cats yes just one other thing that's useful to know and that is that uh sometimes it takes a while to get used to the idea but a really good solution for a lot of problems is to write a check so if you haven't been very successful before then you're cleaning your own toilets you know I'm saying you're practically doing your own brain surgery in other words you're doing everything yourself and if it causes you a slip disc in your back by moving your own piano that's just what you do because you're not used to writing a check and having other people do things so when if you're if you're making a very good money one of the most useful things you could do is to believe that it's going to continue into the future enough to grit your teeth and write a check so if you're getting burned out and you made 400 000 that means we already made a mistake okay it's fine you did it you you put you put an extra fifty thousand dollars into your income sheet of which the government got a bunch of it when you could have written a check to somebody else for fifty thousand dollars to do a bunch of your work and that fifty thousand dollars they might have only been half as effective as you so in other words it might have cost you five hours of your week in order to get 10 hours worth of work out of them even though they're employed for 40 because they might only be one-fourth as good as you okay but the point is is that you picked up five hours and you might say well that was a pretty lousy employee yeah that would be a bad one but even a bad one you know you would have been probably better off and if you had a good one it's a good one's a miracle so a good one is like as good as you are or 80 as good as you or sometimes better okay at some some things so the point is you if you're burned out and you made four hundred thousand dollars you should have made 325. and we should have we should have had 75 000 to other people doing a whole bunch of work and making making your life better so now that's the next move is to to do that that's a that's a quick way to get unburned out is to delegate yeah yeah good all right all right so this one is definitely at the top we have a lot of votes for this so so more generally on Consciousness I don't know if this is a follow-up to another question or um oh yeah I think he asks earlier do you have thoughts on Quantum Consciousness and related ideas even though it's advocated by Minds like Roger Penrose I've tended to dismiss it as miss it to them and then more generally on Consciousness Stephen Pinker has speculated that it could arise when the brain's model of the world becomes complex enough to include itself Jeffrey Miller of course evokes sexual selection um something like perceiving and narrating a reality for courtship and I believe Dr Lyle has connected it to the internal audience which doesn't sound far from Pinker are you aware of other plausible explanations I.E Quantum Consciousness which I'm I'm not even I can't speak to meaningfully whatsoever I wouldn't I wouldn't know what exactly that means in this context here's the thing the uh one of the fascinating things that we have to deal with is try to figure out how on Earth the Mind does what it does and there are there are kind of um there's there's multiple ways to to look at the problem so apparently a very impressive new new uh um a new uh cost set of Concepts come out some book somebody sent to me uh that Richard Dawkins just recently heartily endorsed something about uh and I'll and I'll have to read this thing some some uh Hotshot is talking about how the mind does all these integrated mapping mechanisms and bunch of nested Maps Etc et cetera and so uh even just hearing a description of it I can't I don't know what the name of the book is I could look it up the point is I'll read it and I'll probably be quite interested and it may be moderately useful but it's probably not going to be nearly as useful as some gushing person might think who happens to be super interested in that problem um I'm not particularly interested in the problem now I can remember um uh and I I didn't quite know why I wasn't interested in the problem until I read a synopsis of the Thinking by none other than tubing Cosmetics uh writing 20 or 25 years ago where they wrote The Following commentary um and the notion was that the the level of in of information and its processing is the correct level to be looking at Psychology you could look at it mechanically and you could say well how the hell does it do it does it do with dendrites and then when it comes to motor control it's done with the myelin sheath and then how does the myelin sheath know when to get wrapped is because of enzymatic changes that take place in the DNA when we repeat repeatedly fire a neuron and then nearby glia cells get information that says oh my goodness we're using this Neuron a lot we must need to use it a lot more in order to survive so let's squirt out glia so we can wrap these myelin sheaths so that the neuron firing cannot leak electricity all over the place so it becomes a much more accurate effective movement beautiful piece of science almost useful to the point of where it's like hey now that I actually know how it works I actually have more confidence in the process but it's not like every coach through history didn't know that repetition was the mother of skill so what did it really do for us well not not that much but it's really fascinating I it actually increases my confidence that I could learn how to text better for God's sakes it's like well just keep doing it Doug you're going to wrap some myelin sheath around it okay you could try more than one finger at a time that will never happen I saw Melissa pick up her phone and do this I'm like seriously he texts like this it's a one figure one finger typewriting that's what it is as far as I'm concerned so but the point of all this is that to be in cosmetics sort of took all of the fancy the fancy investigations and fascination with neuroscience and just took it right over there and shoved it on the side of the desk and said who the hell cares okay go ahead and enjoy yourself I hope you know it might be really interesting one day to understand those but the truth of the matter is is that you know we what we're interested in is what causes people to have a feeling what causes them to have a motivation what causes them to to actually take specific actions and it's going to turn out that feelings and actions where in other words feelings are are prescriptions they are motives okay so is what they are so the motive specifically is is a feeling that is driving an action that you're actually seeing taking place as the organism changes its location in space making a decision about with respect to a bunch of alternative possibilities why because it's run computations so it's going to turn out that and of course this is is known in intuitively in cognitive therapy they call it automatic thoughts okay they think they can change them by talking back to them but you cannot cannot do you have a better understanding is what we're going to call the Adaptive unconscious so the Adaptive unconscious is information estimations of parameters that you have inside your head uh that involve values it involves things that and that specific type of animal values so you value things differently than a dung beetle okay because you're a human you have a human value computer and your job is to take in information from the environment from your senses and also from your memory banks about your previous association with these kinds of dilemmas and to run a cost benefit analysis and come up with the the option for behavior that appears to have the greatest biological efficiency that is what it is and what will happen is that will give rise to a feeling and that feeling will be clearly correlated and coexisting with action so that that is how it takes place so what is that cost benefit analysis those are essentially estimates of the genes uh the survival value of given targets as well as your estimations of your perceived probability of success which is going to depend upon your life experience personally with a given domain as well as your observations of other people similar to you Etc in other words you've got self-efficacy programs that are running and updating constantly and you have sensory data that is bringing you in new information in real time that is updating the cost benefit analysis of the whole Enterprise guide keeps cracking jokes to cute girl and then she keeps looking like it's flat and then she's roving around and learning it's like whatever the dates of loser I might as well wrap it up and get out of here okay so you uh so you're constantly updating this constantly updating the cost benefit analysis and it's changing in real time how you feel and therefore your motivation for specific actions and therefore ultimately your behavior computations around Gene survival value are in fact the root of what the hell is going on inside of a human how that takes place is endlessly complex and interesting and a neurological Rubik's cube of the 10th degree of course it is okay it is unbelievably complicated and this new model that somebody has about shells of maps and how they might interact hell as far as we know maybe Quantum Computing uh whatever the hell that is at the root of it what do I know what do I care it's not going to help my clients make better decisions what's going to help you make better decisions is getting better at estimating parameters in other words getting more accurate about estimating the parameters and actually identifying consciously the parameters that are in there so that we know which information to go see exactly like we were just doing a few minutes ago with what we believe is a young woman with her with her cost benefit analysis on leaving the basement okay so in other words where where are we looking we're not looking into the quantum shell of her of her you know I don't know occipital lobe to try to figure out why the hell it is that she's going to do what she's going to do and what would be a better decision no we're looking right down into what we know the Gene's survival problems are for that organism and what types of things can get you into a dilemma where you're a little bit stuck behind what behind uncertainty about parameters that's precisely what would stick a machine would be like well I don't know which alternative to go for because there's important parameters in running the cost benefit analysis that have sufficient uncertainty but I'm not sure what is the right direction to take and so from our standpoint the right decision is well what's the cheapest investigation that you can do to start giving you a better parameter estimate I.E never make a big decision when the small decision will do so that as we go and try to get more information to update our parameter estimates we start to find the system the motivational system beginning to unlock and now the person can start to behave more confidently and has a feeling that they know what direction they want to go because we unlocked the Dilemma by getting more precision and parameter estimates so that's what I think about Quantum Computing and all that Jets and Consciousness Quantum Consciousness we could actually come up with some really great new language yes leave that to Larry yeah I think there's a lot of overlap in in the uh population of people who are interested in evolutionary psychology what sort of cognitive psychology like the the actual workings of the brain and the actual mechanics of everything and so we have a lot of people in this community who are really that's like a sort of um little sub passion that they have related to all of the other things and it just happens that you and I are both mostly interested in the Practical applications we don't need to know the the specifics of the law of gravity we just need to know to get out of the way of the piano falling from the building so we don't get crushed by it so it's interesting to some people to really like model that and figure it out and you know what's the speed and the wind and the resistance and everything um and we just we just want to know like how quickly can you move can you move are you able to like can you if you're only able to move part way which way should you get out of the like what's better to get crushed um this is a strange analogy that's what comes to mind so um and we're just we're both very practically oriented in that way both when we talk to clients and just working through these things um in principles so so neither of us has a real passion for that sort of that that very detailed um hypothetical kind of uh abstract analysis of how the whole thing works but a lot of people do so um yeah yes that's how that's how we think yep weirdos that we are all right it's a little narrow yeah people not interested in anything yeah it's absolutely Philistine it's just ridiculous um all right so this is uh what's the next one okay I think this is a double oh this is just follow up I see I understand when heterosexual couples with young kids split up why the females would look for majority custody maternal instincts and all why is it when it seems males are genetically predisposed to not wanting much to do with raising kids why do they fight for so much custody what is their motivation is it to assert their power over the female are they afraid of losing a scene with their friends or family or do they see their awarded custody as a feather in the cap to show off protection and provision for the next mate or something entirely different um and then somebody suggests that it's because it's an intrinsically competitive process there's something to be one in custody um I think it's all of these things depending on the individuals that are engaged in the process Us and how disagreeable they are and with the particulars of the situation are you might also have a little bit of egocentric bias asking the question because you've observed a lot of very acrimonious processes where the males have made a strong play for custody when um I don't know if that's universally true I don't you you might have a better idea because you've sat in on these types of hearing more often um but uh but yeah I would expect it would be on a bell curve and that you have an over representation of your personal samples of hearing women go through these processes where men really want either full custody or exactly half um and I think in those cases it is it could be any one or all of those things um the the showing off to the next mate you know it's a harder thing to explain why you don't have any custody of your kids if you're back there on the dating market and and you have little kids like well why don't you did you not want to see them and and if you wanted to see them why can't you see them you know it's very problematic for your data eating prospects um and and then of course the competitive aspect and the the winning um if you feel wronged um and you this was in a process that you wanted all of those things could be factors oh there's one other huge factor that everybody's missing the money well sure that's I think that's the competitive piece yeah yeah if you yeah if you get 50 50 custody the ex-wife doesn't get a cent okay uh if you uh but if you get if she gets 80 or whatever the heck it is it's like oh the check just got a lot bigger so uh the the males looking at that thing like hey I'll just take my kids half the time and that way I don't have to give you another 2 000 a month yeah that doesn't cost doesn't cost anything to to you know feed them mac and cheese and let them let them run around and yeah that's it I I would say that that is often the primary driving force of the Aquaman I mean there are definitely other aspects of that but uh and there are some guys that are that are super attached to their kids and yeah yeah that's another big factor yeah they just they don't want to not be in their kids lives yeah but I would say the number one thing that causes the ferociousness is not let's not get too far afield here looking for the resources yeah all those other things I would say Jen I would agree with you yeah we're all in the game this is a smorgasbord of motivation that but that's a huge one that I see yeah yeah you can watch just how fast that problem goes away if the ex-wife says listen don't want anything um all take care of it financially don't worry about it okay you you know it's the same 800 bucks but how often does that happen yeah like I said just see how fast just see how often and how eager he is to take the kids to that point 80 of the conflicted custody Arrangements yeah so of course we're not going to why because the money is a very big deal yeah I just I yeah I think that's huge and I think it's a huge liability to have no access to your kids as young as a young dad um because it's no good way to explain that it's it's like either you you uh your wife's a horrible [ __ ] and so now you have a horrible [ __ ] ex-wife in the Pro in the in the spear who's trouble for a new relationship um so that's not good um or there's something really wrong with your character so you can't have the kids or you didn't want to have the kids and all this like all bad scenarios so here the ideal young dad back on The Dating Market situation is oh I have them on weekends and you know sort of half time and everything's cool and we get along but yeah that's yeah yeah it's not always how it goes yeah she's so kind of a [ __ ] but she's still kind of a [ __ ] but don't worry it won't apply to our relationship she she stays in her Lane but she's totally a [ __ ] not like you [Laughter] beautiful yeah all right all right here we go so dear doctors I come from a family of pretty neurotic disagreeable people it's always it's always bad last year for the first time ever I decided to boycott our family Christmas tradition of meeting and exchanging gifts after eons of doing the same and getting pilloried and rebuffed for overspending on presents my cost benefits told me that enough was enough and that it wasn't worth enduring another Christmas where I'd inevitably get mocked for my generosity in general agreeable Goodwill since birth I'm a people pleaser in my family big shocker my rejection of our foregoing Norms has deeply upset the familial matriarch in particular as well as other members of the family who see this break is in the front they are insisting we return to the old Norm even though I had very unpleasant Christmases as a result being treated like an enslaved elf I'd always end up crying in my room feeling like a fool for spending so much on people who were capable of so little gratitude should I return to the norm and mathematize the misery wow that's really interesting so I'm not sure I exactly understand this so yeah is that she's blowing off Christmas entirely or that there's this gift exchange thing that turns into a fiasco I'm not exactly sure what the question is I'm not and either it sounds like like giving up on Christmas entirely and certainly the gift exchange um so yeah I don't know if the if the option on the table is is not doing Christmas at all or just not participating in the gift exchange because that would be those would be slightly different yeah processes I say definitely definitely give up on the gift exchange yeah yeah really a big big cinnamon sucker okay yeah the um now if it's Christmas in general which it very well might be that uh my attitude would not be to mathematologist in misery if it's miserable every damn Christmas don't go okay please don't go what I probably would do is just let's let's understand that the family in theory with a big question around the age like you have to make the H and it looks like the question mark in theory as a coalition there to save your hide in case you're in deep trouble like hey I happen to need a kidney and uh bro so in theory these people because of Hamilton's rule they are more invested in you than they would be in somebody on the street so in principle if you got into deep water this is a survival Coalition that is a value to you and so as a result you're not going to want to be in a adversarial situation with them so if you don't want to go to Christmas just you know uh all we want to do is we want to blame big Louie and and use the concept of the uh that there's nothing as permanent through our current temporary so we just say ah not this year you know I'm going to tell you why some of the op you know wanted to I.E whatever goofy thing that you can come up with I've got a bad Mitten tournament on St Pete's Beach so I just have to go to but whatever it is whatever it is we have some reason why we're not going and we wish everybody well and maybe send the whole the whole group of them by email a little uh uh two minute Merry Christmas hope you're doing great blah blah blah blah blah here's my cat see y'all later have a great time in other words we don't declare war we're all nice about it and then we just ciao and you're like Hey we're like 20 minutes of hassle we wind up saving ourselves four days or three days hell why wouldn't we so that's my that's my attitude absolutely get out of everything in this life that you don't want to do that you can get out that is the right strategy yeah the agreeable uh individuals always feel they have to do more explaining than they actually have to do so this is why we have everybody read Harry Brown's book Freedom in an unfree World um and and I also I I used to have it as a little card up on my desk it's not it's not here but um the the work that she did is a mixed bag but Melody Beatty who wrote the book codependent no more had a wonderful phrase that is um no is a complete sentence like you don't you don't need to the agreeable always wants to contextualize the no like let me explain if I can just make my case then you'll you'll give me the allowance that I I feel is owed to me and so I if I can just be reasonable with you surely you will see the case that I'm making and the the agreeable person just it takes a very long time to get through their their very sweet golden retriever thick skull that that you can't these are not fair negotiators they're not negotiating in good faith um and so you you can State your act actual cost benefit and they're just gonna be like so okay so you're coming right like we'll see you there like you need you need to come and you've just gone to all this trouble to try to explain why it's not in your best interest and why it's not fair and and you have this earnestness about that process that is just not respected by more disagreeable actors so um the only way to deal with that is either to to to ghost the situation or to just you know make an excuse and not go like Doug is suggesting and that's very uncomfortable for the agreeable nervous system because it feels like You're vulnerable you're in trouble they're gonna come after you they're gonna they're gonna drag you back to the Christmas Gulag um but uh but you know it's you you actually can you you can be free you can get away with this that's a new that should be a chapter in our book The Christmas gulag you're like well I love her enslaved elephant yeah yeah no I mean it's very common especially this time of year when people start to dread the holidays and a lot of people whether it's spending time with in-laws they hate or um going back and having the same conversations about their diet and being you know like just all of the conflict is always the same because the personalities are stable so you can expect the same arguments the same issues the same problems um and uh if you've gone through it 15 20 25 times um as an adult you probably are you've probably had it and you probably don't want to do it anymore and so you're twisted up in knots about it when really you just say as Harry Brown says they can't stop you yes yeah powerless to stop you yeah one of the one of the uh a remarkable session that I had uh that I probably talked about before but this comes to mind it's a woman who really wanted to visit I think her sister in Las Vegas and she lived in Tiburon and um everybody involved by the way by now is deceased so I can share this story without acting like I'm leaking client confidentiality and um the husband uh was a tough old guy a very controlling dude and this lady was in her 70s and she wanted to go see her sister and when I we talked through we get we get down through the parameters okay uh okay um she's got plenty of money she's actually got her own bank account so she could actually buy a ticket she could actually pay the cab and when I talked to her about okay just exactly how is it that he's going to stop you from doing this it got to be really interesting she envisioned this cab coming in um you know in front of their home in a really fancy area and if she walked out to the street with her bag her husband would wouldn't let her go and he would and she envisioned this wrestling match with her bag and I said if he grabs your bag or grabs your arm just stare at it don't fight don't pull your arm away just stare at just stare at his hand just like that okay so now it doesn't go according to his script where he's dominating and you struggle and then you give up now don't do anything sit right there just sit right out there in the middle of the street and let and let him have the embarrassment of the neighbors watching a bizarre spectacle okay well that woman went on that trip okay so her her understanding about how she was going to deal with that conflict I actually don't remember how how that went down I don't remember what took place there was not a showdown in the street that was her worst case scenario but there was some other you know nasty little process but she just went it because she had thought through the worst case scenario and we had scripted and we knew what we were going to do he said he would sit there for an hour you just tell the cabbie I got plenty of money don't worry about it sit right there it's like Checkmate this is not you are going to win that okay and so she could see that my God I can win this thing and she could mentally see that she didn't have to do anything brilliant or heroic or quick-witted or anything else she actually knew how she was going to beat this guy at chess and so once she could see that she's like wow yeah that actually would work he would flip out and if he actually grabbed her it's like hey call the cops you're not allowed to do that it's false imprisonment you cannot do that all right so the uh so knowing how to win enabled her to play and then by playing she got to go and she had a great time so this is I forget what this is about but it analysis about in the Christmas gulag whatever it is I.E just they can't stop you they can't stop you and that was one of the fabulous phrases in how I found free to run free world when I I read that and it is resonated throughout my life that actually these are paper chains and they are powerless to stop you you know the only thing that can stop you is oh you don't have enough money you can't afford your rent so now you actually have to do this or you do that but once you realize that it's like oh it's down to money is that that's what it's literally down to if you're a 19 year old kid and you want your dad wants you to do this and you don't want to do it we're gonna argue about it what's it really come down to money and boy did I get an education on that because I had some conflicts with my father uh in my early 20s and Alan didn't have any conflicts with his parents because he moved out at 16 when he made himself financially independent selling alfalfa sprouts okay and I watched him just take over it's like you just took over his life and there was going to be absolutely no way anybody was going to tell that guy what to do and that started real early and nothing has changed half a century later but the lesson was there like I was still dependent so I'm still arguing and negotiating and then I realized oh Allen doesn't even negotiate he just he just doesn't you also just knowing something about both of your families your your family's more valuable coalition to you than his is to him you know he you you didn't want to take the risk of a big rift where you know your father was a very important brain to have on team Doug you know very brought a lot of talent and a lot of skill and experience at the table so um where where Alan just had a lot of kind of disagreeableness competitiveness you know the obviously loving family but not not in the same service that would be the right term they were sort of a confederation of sorts might might grudgingly save him in the Foxhole if they had to watch but it's a different situation so this depends on the the questioner too you know thinking about you know you describe them as disagreeable neurotic like how how much of a coalition really are they and and how Dependable are they if you're in a tight spot and and so what is the the the general cost benefit on that alienation Independence uh access that you're talking about so um and that's all wrapped up with what we we often call this Stone Age stickiness this idea that every that a lot of agreeables have which is any misstep that you make in the village any relationship that you tarnish by saying no or by withdrawing or ghosting that it just follows you around forever that you can never Escape it you're you're going to be kind of held responsible for those relationship Dynamics for the rest of time and and it's going to be this big reputational hit which is really not the case in in the modern um modern world most of the time it's a little distinct with family depending on what all of the all of the different little pieces in operation are there but certainly with friends with mates with jobs the the inference that oh I can't have them mad at me because I if there's somebody mad at me in the village that's a that's a mark against my name on the big tablets in the village and and so when they all tally it up who gets to be saved in the famine I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna die I mean that's basically what's going on in your head so so getting away from that inference and realizing that you you have that Independence you have your own Coalition you can piss people off in the modern environment and and get away with it in a way that you couldn't in our ancestral history yeah I actually have another perspective that always floats through my head about this and that is I don't need to be the best person on the team I just don't want to be the worst so my job is not actually to optimize my standing in some Village it's just to not be absolutely on the cut line yeah keep in mind that if you bring any CB to the equation at all you're still in the game and a lot of time times that's plenty good enough yeah a little one minute thing about everybody at Christmas wishing everybody well is plenty good enough and the fruit that sucks always well received all right all right okay should we wrap up do one more what's your one more all right this is a silly super hypothetical out of the box question but when I'm certain many have asked themselves quietly how long can we expect the concepts from evolutionary psychology to be valid and accurate for example in several tens of thousands of years why do they disappear on me when I'm in the middle of contraception in society uh would have favored more unique personality types and strategies how long can we just jumped again how long can we rely on the information of contemporary evolutionary psychology before we have to update in other words what do the doctors think is the quote speed of evolution and how impactful is the environment on long-term evolution so yeah we we get versions of this fairly frequently there's um the answer to that is the following yeah I'm going to give you a slightly different answer than I would have four or five years ago before I read Nick Wade so what's changing now is not it's not the basic template of human nature what's changing subtly are the the statistical probabilities of different personality characteristics so you can imagine that 10 000 years ago people might have been more xenophobic than they are now in other words The Village on the other side of the river yeah if base if there's 12 tough men over there and we only have six they're going to be scheming to kill off those six men so that they can get the winner okay and they would have and uh so they were more dangerous than than they are now we know this we can actually see the thickness of the skeleton and the skulls of humans have become thinner and weaker on those dimensions in the last hundred thousand years so it has paid people to be friendlier so we see that human nature even though you were people were walking and talking and scheming and thinking and had internal audiences and were just like you basically um uh 150 000 years ago but they were rougher they were a rougher more disagreeable more testosterone driven kind of a creature they were like a bunch of they were like a bunch of thugs in a game okay that's how to think about human nature what like today if you saw a bunch of people that were a bunch of rough dudes with a bunch of rough looking tattoos and some weapons hanging around their necks uh you know roaming around your city you'd realize whoa that's a tough bunch of people that would have been human nature that would have been average an average group of males 150 000 years ago okay now so what has happened so it's the same people that the plot the what the statistical relationships have changed there was an occasional nice guy back there too okay but now that nice guy is you know 50 of humanity and the really tough guy is now three percent of humanity and they used to be 70 Humanity or 80 percent Humanity so the gene frequencies on personalities have changed but all of the motivational basic equipment hasn't changed at all in other words so so the what we're going to call human nature hasn't changed personalities have shifted so uh into the future for the next hundred thousand years there won't be any change in human nature per se it's the same goals the same goal structures the same schemes the same witticisms the same dancing and art and athleticism and acquisition of material goods and uh display on spectacular ways these are all deep circuits that are part of human nature that are not going to change what will shift inevitably will be personalities and that's what idiocracy was about yeah apparently I just I only watched it yeah yeah and the drifts the drift to lower conscientiousness lower IQ like I mean it's a stylized sort of parable um but it is I mean you do you do get uh drift under environmental pressure for sure yeah yeah that almost has to be happening so so uh more conscientious and intelligent people are absolutely not having children they're yeah biological zero I'm a biological zero yep zero Cheryl's biological zero Allen puts one little point on the scoreboard that's right well yeah yeah [Laughter] about that I mean Alan has has beat us all in that regard a lot of point on the scoreboard so when you look at all this you're like hey it was obvious that that's happened so what what does this mean well obviously there's a genetic drift you know probably relatively slowly uh it's a very nice slow drift towards lower conscientiousness of course the the environment is less exacting it it extracts less penalties for uh Stupid self-indulgent Behavior because there's more rails everywhere on everything okay so of course that's going to take place so don't expect a you know don't expect 100 years from now if you could have a time capsule to see that human nature will have morphed into something really cool and Sleek it's sophisticated oh no their elbows are going to be in their soup and they're going to be driving something really fast and they're going to be doing a lot of stupid [ __ ] but they'll still be brains out there and conscientiousness uh but you're you're undoubtedly drifting towards less of those characteristics so if we were to say you know highly conscientious people the the second percentile or the 98 percentile now will become the 99th percentile in 50 years right 98 of our conscientious now I.E a pretty darn conscientious person that will be that individual would be at the 96th percentile 50 years from now in other words they are more unusual and that's how that's going to work that's how the whole thing doesn't get thrown out it just gets these parameters get modified yeah it's a whole separate conversation that we probably don't have time for today but you know the the one uh Wrinkle In This is a deliberate Gene editing um and like you know as we start to meddle with the genome with crispr and these Technologies and we start sort of playing God for lack of a better I mean I I my general feeling there is that before we see any meaningful significant change to the population we will probably run ourselves extinct we'll probably get hubristic enough and and uh you know just meddle a little too much and cause massive massive destruction before we we are able to engineer a species that is more effective or Kinder or smarter or more beautiful or any of the any of the things that we would you know want to do with that sort of thing right it's starting off right now with you know the single mutation for sickle cell we can go in there and splice that out and and so the red blood cells so you know we retrain them to make more effective blood cells and this is all very laudable and exciting and it's like what else can we do we can go in there and fix everything and pretty much every science fiction novel ever leads to a pretty bad conclusion with that so it's an interesting idea um but that that combined with AI I think are probably the the extinction of the species before we could do anything you're 25 25. uh yeah you're definitely not making it past there The Beatles said so so all right awesome all right well I think that that wraps us up this time yes good cheerful cheerful stuff I totally believe that background because it's so you so oh yeah oh no I wish it were yeah it actually fits so well that uh I I just I feel like you're there it's it's soothing I I like to be surrounded by knowledge during these uh these troubled times so awesome well say hi to your kitties for me and I'll talk to you next time and thanks everybody for coming and I'm sorry we we never get to all the questions but we just keep plugging away as best we can so um and uh and I know the website is terrible and rejects a lot of forms that are submitted and it's there's really nothing we can do about that other than trying out different browsers and and it locks me out half the time too so um that's yeah I get a lot of messages about that too with them all right well good all right all right see you next time bye
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