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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-10-29
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oh yeah oh God Statue of Liberty going down oh it's Planet of the Apes just felt appropriate I don't know just uh all right so I'm gonna do this uh okay so once again everybody you can upvote questions in the Q a and that's um we will let that guide us um I had a couple that were emailed so we'll try to get to those two um let's see do we have anything else to start with before we launch in yeah somebody wrote me a question about uh what we thought about the uh the reparations to the immigrants for their trauma that's one of the questions I have as well so that person must have emailed both of us yeah yeah well we'll have to answer that that's a yeah well we have one that just popped into the Q a uh very expeditiously and I think we tried to get to this person last time and didn't so um they've they've elbowed their way forward so uh I've read numerous studies claiming that women are average uh higher in conscientiousness on average than men are do you count this as an evolutionary mismatch after all high C can work wonders for the for the male sexual market value whereas it's of secondary importance for the female sexual market value so is there did women evolve higher conscientiousness on average if in fact that is true for you know non-uh no good reason um I think that we have a problem with the measurement and and the language that we're using to describe what we're measuring so men and women definitely have different brands in other words they've been selected uh both by natural selection and sexual selection for it to have slightly different characteristics uh if you're trying to use a list of questions that you are defining as conscientiousness it is almost inevitable if I come up with 15 questions that there will be a sex difference okay it depends upon how which set of questions I ask whether the males are going to look more conscientious so the female is going to look more conscientious I guarantee you when it comes to keeping mechanical equipment uh uh essentially important to maintain males are going to come off as far more conscientious than the females oh what what an absurd unfounded claim [Laughter] ridiculous oh it's uh the uh to the point let's talk about kitchens so yeah that that uh looking for sex differences in things is is going to be um uh in personality issues it's going to be um uh I would say I would say even if we start parsing things even the disagreeable is going to get interesting uh I think um I think uh yeah I I don't even know I don't even want to speculate I think that in general females are are going to be uh considerably more agreeable I can see some really deep evolutionary reasons why that would be true oh yeah they're more vulnerable they're more vulnerable and they um they actually are going to be far uh they have nothing to gain by Warfare um all they have to do is they have things to lose if or their tribe is attacked so they're not going to want to be uh warmongering or in any way trying to uh encourage heroic Warfare Behavior it's not going to do them any good so the uh but but the males can sniff the excitement of if we we could profit because we could wind up with two Brides instead of one uh if we win and we wipe those guys out uh so males are conditional Hawks females are going to be consistently more dovish uh so they're so that that's going to be essentially a disagreeable characteristic that's going to be in there so yeah but something like conscientiousness it wouldn't make any evolutionary sense for males to be for example generally less careful about things that are important and therefore more likely to to accept error and cost that doesn't make any sense you can see that with then within specific domains you might see things that look like conscientiousness particularly anything that has to do with for example uh social processes so that really gets down to your uh agreeable so female is going to be more worried about making sure we say thank you you know what I'm saying if you measure it wrongly or or sloppily that's going to look like conscientiousness when really you're just measuring agreeable disagreeable Dimensions the uh but yeah I don't think uh conscientiousness is to use a gen Hawk term that that you know you get educated as you writ large okay conscientious is writ large we wouldn't expect any um any sex difference at all that I can see I can see no evolutionary reason why that would be true I could see that the differences between males and females would be domain specific yeah yeah and I think this is just the broader question of um all of the any big five instrument is so dependent on you know measurement bias and how the question is worded and this is why some some people think oh you know it's better to measure the big seven or the you know maybe we should uh disaggregate like this is really 12 things or 15 things and pretty soon you have something like the Myers-Briggs but um it's uh depending on the particular test and and what exactly it's trying to look at I mean conscientiousness is a great example the the way that Jordan Peterson uh you know divides that is between orderliness and industriousness which are very different qualities in a any given human and somebody might be very high in one very low in the other might be high in both um but depending on the test and what it's seeking to measure you could you could turn up as very conscientious um and not be one of those facets of conscientiousness at all so yeah let me uh let's get you know there's a place in the world to try to get super clear on these things it's here I mean what the heck else are Gemini here for and um and that is that the the what you're what you're doing is you're attempting to make estimates about what are in fact sweets have thousands of genes so the the uh so in other words let's suppose there's I don't know 7427 genes of an innumerable combinations that they could be that give rise to what we're going to call but conscientiousness Associated Behavior um the you can imagine that uh two people one of them has 2647 of those uh that are on the high end and the other one has two thousand and six hundred and forty six like okay there there's a difference between those two people you would be impossible for you to detect it you could not detect it if you had that you had a million years and a bunch of AI robots uh working on every and watching that person those two people 24 7 you couldn't detect it is it there yep sooner or later we could compile enough evidence that we would actually see that there's a difference between those two people but it's so infinitesimally small it's of no meaning okay so at what point does it become meaning how about two genes different how about six how about 13 how about 147 okay so what you're doing what you're really looking at folks is you're looking at uh continuous variables of infinite uh fine gradations that can can only be measured very sloppily okay now the truth is is that we can communicate with each other about third parties or ourselves fairly accurately but I would I would say probably the best we are is putting ourselves into something that looks like quartiles okay so somebody's in now I will tell people okay you're a 99 tall conscientiousness well that's because I'm hearing something on the other end of the phone I'm hearing a description of a behavior pattern that very clearly it's at the 99 total uh and it helps that I have a broad range of clinical experience in 60 years on the planet I know what one in a hundred looks like I know what it looks like for Brands okay I can smell it pretty quickly I know so an expert can actually do a much better job of estimating than a novice but the truth is all of us have the ability to basically probably put people in quartiles with respect to almost any personality characteristic and that's about what we can do and uh beyond that point um you know it's going to take a lot of experience with within a domain with a lot of relatively homogeneous people for you to be able to know the difference between the 70th and maybe the percentile that's not easy okay I even need like for example with intelligence hard for me to tell the difference between the 70th and 80th percentile okay not hard to tell the difference between 70th and the 90th not that easy to tell the difference between the 80th and the 90th okay so in other words you start to realize hmm it's not that easy and these percent uh and so anyway the long and short of it is what you're measuring ultimately are a genes which effectively make these infinitely finely graded so um yeah we're not uh and and then it's so uh context dependent and so gerrymandered with respect to how it is that you would ever Define it that it it starts to have no meaning past a fairly General description of an individual yeah yeah that's good that's a very getting getting down into it if you looked at certain things between Alan and I Alan would be considered vastly more conscientious than I am okay but if it would be like worrying about other people's feelings and making sure that we took it not even close I think I'm tough I mean she knows the difference like I I I'm a saint compared to Alan when it comes to that yeah but but when it comes to like meticulously making sure that this or that gets done so that the gold flows into the little funnel properly as it should Alan is going to be massively more conscientious about all kinds of things like that okay so but this is also I mean that that reveals another principle here when when we talk about personality which is that you know any single measurement does not tell you the whole story of the person at all kind of going back to what you've been talking about so the two of you could actually occupy exactly the same percentile On Any Given instrument you know if you were okay where X percentage conscientiousness X percentage stable um but he is by any measure more considerably more disagreeable than you are um and and uh so that is going to that's going to enter into any cost benefit analysis he does is sort of like okay holding conscientiousness steady now we we have to sort of add this disagreeableness into our regression equation to to predict the behavior and he he is considerably more disagreeable and so he's going to run a different analysis of what's important for him to be conscientious about in his own self-interest because his self-interest sits at a different level than yours does yeah to put it diplomatically yeah I'll bear the argument uh all right well I have this I'm just scanning the chat here so I actually had a question um somebody emailed me through patreon asking for the link to the Discord because you've you guys have mentioned it here and up elsewhere and I uh I didn't make a note of it I know you've put it in the chat but if somebody knows it and could put it in the chat again I will grab it this time and I can share it with at least my patreon people um so we'll go ahead and do that um let's see what else okay so we have a question another one in the queue uh there was one where did it go this one was this one amused me there are people are continuing to submit to the like the online tool on the website so I want to make sure we don't totally neglect that too so um my boyfriend a PhD in well-regarded researcher in his field swears that he is not aware that he is being flirtatious with other women in Social settings he's 40. I'm 42. yeah I need like this one [ __ ] no he wants he wants to change but he doesn't know how so he's approaching this as a math problem he's very charming and I feel broken when he does it especially to my friends or his friends what can we do we're both high C and high a uh he's a little more agreeable than I am I am higher in neuroticism than he is but he's higher in openness and more sexually adventurous can we find a way to be happy well we don't know about the answer to the last question but we know the answer the question that we started with okay he knows exactly what he's doing okay he is not unconscious of this process at all there's no way that that is adaptive unconscious is managing to actually do thousands of computations uh and actually contract a whole Suites of muscles to make to perform this Behavior which will statistically increase the likelihood of getting laid by somebody that's attractive okay there is no chance that he doesn't know what he's doing now that uh the fact that he is going to put ink in the water and claim you know uh like oh it's you know I I don't know what the dog ate my homework I I didn't flirt with her my my my self that I'm not aware of did it so we can add embarrassment and dishonesty uh along with the list of the descriptions uh does that mean that your relationship is doomed no we we hear that he's more sexually adventurous uh so we say his little uh novelty seeking Chip is going to get dinged if not this is that would be no surprise uh the fact that you have a lot of difficulties with this is you know not surprising either it doesn't mean that he's wrong or the relationship is doomed uh I have a friend of mine who will Larry I'll be right there with Cheryl with his wife at a table and then Shameless yeah she's absolutely Shameless yeah I've seen him do it a hundred times and that Cheryl happens to be like unmoved by this you know it means it just so happens that she's got a unusual nervous system that thinks it's mildly amusing so such is life you know so uh what this builds for the two of you is is more about how well you uh essentially what's the sum total of the signals in the sense of security and also the value of the relationship to you all of that thing is a it's an ongoing computed process uh that you get feedback for uh that that you know the one piece that I can answer is he does know what he's doing so that that's total BS yeah I wonder it's not stated in the question but I wonder how long they've been together um and if she's feeling a little insecure in the relationship and and part maybe because it's new and and possibly she's more over rewarded than he is or or perceives herself to be um just what those Dynamics are because you sorry for upside down age-wise yeah an upside down age-wise which is which is always not too terribly yeah not nothing though yeah so all of those things might might play into it but if it's a relatively new relationship I have seen in myself and also in friends and clients where you sort of um habituate to some degree because you're getting you you're getting the feedback consistently over time that okay he's flirtatious with these other women and that's just sort of his nature but he's not leaving me for them so I.E I have watched him 9 10 15 27 times flirt with a woman who I think is a better option than I am and nothing has happened and so every time that happens it actually could have the effect of calming down your response and feeling more secure in the relationship um so if it's if it's new-ish that might be one of the things that's going on and this could shift over time is the two of you kind of um become just more ensconced in your little universe so yeah yeah oh well yep but it's interesting not a typical dude that would do that when you're you're right there in plain sight so that's a no that's not real typical that that's a fairly significant sign of trouble and uh and it like I'm saying it's not was not true for Larry and Cheryl uh in other words that it was not a significant it truly is Larry's nature rock and roll drummer movie producer like what the hell do we expect right right but uh but the and he didn't mean business okay you're just looking for feedback that he still had it okay so the uh that's remains True to this day seriously he's a menace but the point is the point is is that so we're not saying that it's definitively a threatening situation but I would say statistically that it is a it's notable that a male would be willing to cross the females uh uh psychology in in white you know right out in open that's showing you an interesting way he's running that CD which is not flattening so and again personality has to be uh computed into this but I have no doubt that that Cheryl's personalities was computed and Larry's displays like having this upsetting then Larry would have had the freaking you know uh stones to like dial it back so anyway that's all we know from here well there's also the I mean being aware the questioner's own Distortion in her neuroticism and her overestimate of what constitutes flirtatious Behavior so there is sort of a little bit of a they might be comparing the same behavior and she sees it as flirtatious and he genuinely does not so so he he realizes that he's being friendly and smiling and perhaps looking for a little bit of positive feedback from an attractive server at a restaurant but he doesn't consider that to be flirtatious he just considers it to be social and friendly and he's getting a little like he feels good when he does it but this is not rising to his definition mathematically of what constitutes flirting with her so that might be where the sort of the the failure to communicate is happening um and because she is really wanting him to not interact with them at all you know to or to just be completely stone-faced and you know thank you very much you know not not to have any of that that um Dynamic signaling that goes on just socially particularly if it's somebody that she sees is threatening or more attractive than or or younger anything that could be going on there so so when he says you know he swears he's not flirting or he's not aware he's flirting that's what that could be yeah you have you have uh depends on what the definition of is is [Laughter] a very comprehensive uh examination of that I think that's on break the chat is demanding for a Larry appearance not for the first time you guys you don't you don't want to let that Pandora out of the box it's better for him just to be an instructive example right exactly yeah uh he would love it though all right let's see here so we have this kind of this question goes I'm skipping around um even though it's going against the law of the up voting because the second question here dovetails with the first question this is the Lawless environment of the Q a that we have here um my daughter hires people to work in three retail stores she's noticed that when she meets people many people feel neutral but sometimes before the person even speaks she has a feeling either positive or negative when I came across these people I have the same type of feelings about these particular people I've noticed others reacting this way do you understand what I mean is this a thing is this personality somehow being advertised so this is this very much ties in with what we were talking about a few minutes ago um with big five so of course it is yeah that's that's what that's what all of I mean we we learned this from Jeffrey Miller if nowhere else that everything that we're wearing everything that we're buying everything certainly every way that we communicate and and present ourselves and comport ourselves it's all just personality it's it's we are showing other people our genes and Sam would you would you like to would you like to make an offer like open offer to highest bidder you know that's what we're doing and so any way that you can express that um you're doing it all the time and you're picking up on disagreeableness and instability low conscientiousness uh High mutations all sorts of things are going to kind of come across and give you this vague impressionistic feeling that you know that's that's a negative person and those impressions are widely shared among if you if you introduce that same person to a thousand people there would be a real bell curve of reactions that would mostly congregate around your reaction I'll never forget I got a 100 agreement check the uh I'll never forget my the a little opening party at the Chairman's uh house uh chairman of the Department's house at UVA of my second year and uh so my girlfriend was with me and she was uh I would later marry her the um so we're both clinical students and we there's a guy in the department who was uh two couple years older than me handsome athletic really cool name is Jeff it's actually become a a fairly reasonably prominent developmental psychologist at this point the um and there was a sleazy dude that was coming in and for as a first year student his name is and actually that in uh in uh what do you call it in history now I've actually learned that if you share people's names you've got an affinity form uh strangely enough there's been even like even like if you if you're if your last name has the first letter of their last name there's like little little tiny God knows what it is uh there's there can be a potential bias I bet there's diminishing returns after something like Jennifer in the 80s where everybody is named Jennifer you actually have higher bias very small facts okay that's interesting yeah but but it just occurred to me to say that because it turns out both their names were Jeff so anyway this guy this incoming student sat next to uh Dolores and I and this was the sleaziest dude I have like almost until I met until I met the the murder of the Manson Murders at Mill Creek State Prison uh Tex Watson this is the sleaziest dude I I mean there's been a few really sleazy salesmen I've been into in my time but this guy was the sneeziest person I had interpersonally ever interacted with up to that time in my life I was 23. oh and he wants to be a psychologist that's terrific he wasn't going to be a clinician okay this guy you just he was just name-dropping and sleazing just sleazy as [ __ ] okay so it turns out so Dolores and I are both like holy smokes both of us are having this reaction like that's the sleaziest slimy dominant cyber climbing backstage foosball we've ever seen right and so like half an hour later we bumped into Jeff who's actually a friend of mine and he goes yeah I met I met Jeff so-and-so nice guy oh man well that's why that's why it's a bell curve of reaction you know you gotta control for Ikea and and just you know a little chip in there like so yeah and the shared name yeah by the way our our intuition was totally played out like by the end of year one you know the faculty some of them didn't get it figured out for a while but by the end of the year one it was well understood uh that we had a sleazy used car salesman you know uh dude in the in the hen house you know that's yeah so anyway yes her are the intuitions of everybody here have a lot of Merit and and uh you're not always going to be right but you were designed by nature to be more right more often than you are wrong and and right in the sense that you and Dolores are sharing sort of a tribal affiliation on any number of Dimensions you've got your in-group and he is not in group you're perceiving whatever it is you're picking up about him um whether you know whatever that divide is whether you just don't like his microbiome by the smell of it or you don't like you don't like just the cut of his gym you know it's just not pleasing to you the two of you having an affinity for each other it makes sense that you would have this sort of repulsion to him whereas the other Jeff is a little a little closer has a little more overlap with those shared qualities and yeah um and potential uh you know collaboration so yeah but I think many many it's it's rare for you and your best friend to meet somebody new and to have totally different opinions and and some of that is the computer checking and the fish trick that people do when they're you know in close quarters with each other are they um already you know they're they are trying to assess whether their evaluation is correct or not but usually I mean any this is how the villain is readily identified on every reality show it doesn't take long for everybody to kind of coalesce around oh that guy is a douchebag you know it's like that's really agreed upon pretty early most of the time so if that's not scientific I don't know what it is 450 Grand oh sure well that was I think that got uh you have it in front of you I don't know if I have it written in front of me what we think about the concept that the children were separated from their parents in the last Administration down at the border when there was illegal Crossings and that now there's there looks to be checks are trying to be kept uh uh in order to make up for the terrible trauma that these families and the child went through okay this is totally bogus people this is a big flashing green sign saying please come to America illegally across the border we will take care of you this is uh this is what this is because the the concept that there's been damage to these uh families or these children is ludicrous and uh but but it is has plausible it's an excuse to put out this big sign is what it is like nobody in their right mind well maybe a few uh really Oddities mid-level social science scientists that don't read anything and can't compute anything might actually believe that there's some real damage done but how but there isn't any evidence that any damage would be done by such a thing it's unpleasant so the kids and their parents went through yeah let's be let's be clear about what we mean by this just in case people haven't heard us before I mean we're not saying that there's not profound disruption and dislocation and and um you know really a great unhappy happiness and and disruption for a long time short-term medium term but the the long-term consequences on that person's ability I anyone in that family to achieve long-term life goals and and to follow sort of the trajectory that we would have expected for them if this thing had not happened there's no very little to Zero Effect for that um so it's not to say that they're not experiencing you know a terrible event right now and that it's causing a lot of you know just just great distress to all of these people involved um but to Define that as TR lifelong trauma is where that's where the leap becomes into the realm of just making [ __ ] up yes big [ __ ] up and this clearly to me as the stamp of political motivation uh yeah yeah I think that's unmistakable inference here the uh so yeah so that's what's going on and it's in total Fiasco but we'll see what happens my understanding of it also I I do not know much about this story I just saw a passing headline about it yesterday and then I saw the question but my sense of it was that this was uh reparations to the families of of separated uh families that were separated during the Trump Administration with the assumption that they're not currently being separated or that that's not an ongoing phenomenon that is you know pretty unchanged given our our general policies so you get the signaling you want politically um without actually having to change the policies at the ground level that are affecting the so-called trauma um so in other words politics probably another another day of politics you know the party in power kind of using the recent history to achieve its short-term goals right yeah so we'll we'll uh we may participate more on this on hot block if we feel like yeah [ __ ] collect is where we [ __ ] at length about all of these things [Laughter] all right yeah uh all right let me see there was another okay well this one uh okay I had this one emailed and it's also here so what is the best way to navigate competitive Dynamics between women in general um and this is a really common question by the way we get we get this a lot uh and so that we've kind of addressed this in past q and A's but it's because it comes up so much we can we can tackle this uh specifically when one woman gains success whether she's lost weight perfected her style getting a male's attention traveling for leisure another woman tries to downplay and dampen these triumphs in general ways I don't like when women get too thin or I don't care for the style or that guy is weird um I don't travel these days traveling isn't worthwhile so what what do I do about this just to give her status flood the circuits how to handle the situation well um my first reaction is to follow but this is this winds out being a litmus test for the quality of the Friendship yeah and so this is an important uh this is important information to pay attention to because this will tell you how much insurance that this person deserves so if they are if they are essentially threatened and essentially attempting to reduce your self-confidence or in any way reduce your status as a result of whatever it is that you've achieved in terms of an increasing academic standing then then you are um you are significantly a competitor uh instead of being a friend and this right people are not Saints okay so I can remember a few times in the last 20 25 years when something particularly good happened to me and I could see it was a little tough on Larry okay but I would say that 19 times out of 20 when something good happened to me Larry was delighted so in final analysis that's a hell of a good friend and the and I I believe the times when he was a little threatened was when his um sale was not doing so well so there was moments when there's a few moments in 20 years when something went particularly well for me and things were not going well for him and I wasn't going to You Can't Hide some things that you may be successful at but obviously public so but it's not like I was gonna go over to his house and throw myself a celebration I was going to be sensitive to it but I can remember um I can remember a few moments I don't remember what they were by the way but I can remember watching him actually not having a good you know 15 minutes with this and and having it be kind of a tough hour okay a tough dinner or whatever that that has been unbelievably rare okay the uh so that's what a friendship should look like that's uh if a friendship if you're if you're in some kind of an of a oscillating competitive process uh where youth then that's something I'm not saying that that relationship might not be a friendship and it might not have value but you better be careful with that for yourself and this is the time for the disagreeable distance to to enter your computations and find out that you know maybe we're better off with half as much of this friendship so that that's how I look at that so I look at these kinds of processes as important litmus tests for finding out really uh getting a better estimation of what the real CB is of the Friendship uh a great friend is someone who's almost always happy with your success um uh not selflessly but actually in a way they see themselves as part of your Coalition and use part of theirs so a win for you is a win for the coalition okay so you can you can but these are personality issues I can remember some famous uh tennis player I don't know whether it was Andre agassay or somebody like that you know back in the day um had a sibling who just did everything to support their the brother's success and um and that they were that person was extremely important they were super tight okay and that was like you know the brother wasn't anything special you know what I mean it was you know just not that by God they loved each other and so the the Superstar's success was uh and it wasn't you didn't get the feeling when you were hearing about the relationship that it looked like this it was like this they were brothers and they were a teen and they were absolutely best friends the fact that one of them was up here that's like hey that's what that's how our team rolls but this this guy was doing everything they could to Aid in a bed and protect and and enhance the brother's success that's a great team okay and so I have that you know in a few places uh but I certainly have it with Larry and so Larry uh uh has has been consistently that way for 25 years and so that's a I know what it feels like to not have it that way I know what it feels like oh it's a little competitive and that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile it just means that it's um it's it's not the same uh so there you pay attention to that mm-hmm yeah I can remember um a famous uh the famous stocks that I deal with uh when when one one of them was getting accolades one one of them wasn't that happy about it that's interesting because I kind of see you guys as a team okay and uh and so some of them see it more as a team than others so that's how that works yeah yeah I I can't tell from the question whether this is you know within a friendship or within just women in general at the workplace and you know sort of the the kind of feeling of cattiness that emerges from women who were in an environment that by definition has contested resources so um you know it's going to be different within a friendship and this is a great test for for a friendship and I have friend fired people over exactly this thing you you've been their friend to clean up the mess yeah yeah I had I had one in particular who just was in Cape not only incapable of being happy for me when things were going well but would like actively just [ __ ] all over it you know like you know just try to make me doubt myself and uh just kind of and that was that was how that Dynamic had been very stably for a very long time and I finally had just had enough of it but if this is if you're more referring to just the ambient Dynamics between women in a contested resource space that's how it's supposed to be that's just kind of how it is and I think often someone who's a little more agreeable feels like there should be something I should do to smooth this over and to and to make everybody happy and to have us not feel conflicts of interest among each other um and it's just it's it's not going to happen so that's again your own Distortion um feeling like you've got to be the little golden retriever running around the office licking everybody's leg trying to get everybody to to be okay with each other when you've got some presence of whether it's between between females or between males in their way or however it looks it's just never gonna be nice it's never going to feel very comfortable for you and that becomes a matter of making your escape plan if that's something that you can escape but I mean I dealt with this consistently throughout grad school I've dealt with it and most jobs that I've had and kind of just had to learn like oh you know this is there you can't uh you can't change people and if you've got kind of a [ __ ] Dynamic it's probably going to remain a [ __ ] Dynamic and so I I have to learn to not take that personally and not feel like it's my responsibility to make the [ __ ] less [ __ ] because it's just never gonna happen and I'm probably sacrificing a lot of my self-interest in that process yeah yeah bitchiness is usually not uh it's usually not being driven by the situations it's usually being driven by personality by personality but it will come it will you will notice it more when they are competitively threatened so you know the the office [ __ ] can be perfectly Pleasant if there's no there's no uh resource scrambled over the boss's accolades or attention um so there will be moments of day taunt but then you know if if things are a little kind of like you're talking about with Larry if Larry's having a bad day um if there's status scarcity um and and the person that you're having this conflict with is feeling a little cornered they're gonna lash out and and use whatever success you're having as their most ready uh foil so yeah all good yep all right all right disagreeables I swear okay this one uh has the has an upvote so is there any evidence for hormonal influence on a woman's stability as a child before 13 I was calm stable personality type from the onset of puberty through menopause I became more on the unstable side of the bell curve now after menopause I've returned to extreme stability if personality intrinsically does not change how can this be hmm um yeah no I think that's uh I think that that's a very interesting thing I I don't think that that would be typical but within a particular individual's endocrine system or whatever it is I could see how that would be possible so um I don't think I don't think this person's intuition about how far they would be moving on the bell curve is probably that good so in other words you may notice it yourself but the truth is you may have moved from you know you may have been an 80th percentile stable kid then you moved to 65th percentile uh stable uh adult Etc and then after menopause you move back to 88 percentile so that would be an unusual amount of movement uh but in an individual case with an individual particular set of biology that would be yeah I I would there's no doubt it would be theoretical possible we know that uh the famous case of Phineas Gage getting uh getting a railroad spike put through his head changed his personality dramatically so the you know physical assaults on the brain through either physical trauma or chemical trauma damage uh or or in this case a relatively unusual relatively turbulent biology could absolutely be expected to have some effects it's just that they are so uncommon that we're not going to typically find them uh making any meaningful changes now I will say that women going through uh menopause incentives will often find fairly significant disruptions in their emotional uh life and they can be confused about what's driving them uh and so that and they often are hormonal so that's uh is that is a and they are temporary you know they're transient so that that is a I'm not going to say that's happening to everybody but it happens to enough people that it's noted uh that that is a that's an effect on human psychology yeah yeah yeah totally someone in the chat is saying add the the um the monthly variance to this question please and I yeah I think a lot of us experience going from the 85th to 65th percentile within the course of a month um so I think it's rational and reasonable to expect that there would be an influence here there's also the the whole um you know you're the again you have a whole different set of conflicts of interest with mating and reproduction in that time um bookended by those periods of life where there are more thing more important relevant things to get unstable about and so you know if you're prone to if sort of you've got the chip for jealousy it's going to be much more relevant to display and exhibit that jealousy between puberty and menopause than it is before and after it because it has more bearing on your on your survival and reproduction outcomes and so the whole environmental context of the problems that you are are faced with interacting with your biology at that moment would would make some people more expressive and unstable than than others for sure I could see that um yeah but I I mean I I know lots of women uh have quite quite a bit of volatility in their cycle that they are you know very familiar with and prepare for and red tent themselves ahead of time so I think this is an understudied and underappreciated aspect of uh evolutionary psychology for the for for women's lives um and I would like to see better work on it but I'm not aware of too much so I wonder why so mysterious all those all those Leading Light men in the field so right yeah the follow-up I know during menopause I was suddenly angry all the time had to fight being unpleasant to others not my normal personality um I I have definitely heard that from clients um seen it and Friends uh I went through a year of intense rage when I was getting sober at least a year um sort of my first year of sobriety I was super super volatile and it mostly manifested through just I mean everything it felt like a couple of days before my period all the time like this incredible irritation this incredible like people you know road rage people weren't walking raid everything everything was wrong and seen sharp and and was just very irritating uh which is not my normal Baseline whatsoever so there was definitely something going on in my Noggin at that time yeah awesome yeah wow a pretty long sweeping incremental shift in in Biochemistry you know yeah a lot of microbiome impacting that yeah concentrations wow yeah yeah well there are I mean there's a whole literature about microbiome and instability and you know sort of the really you know Chicken and the Egg relationship there um but it was a I tell people about that I share that that anecdote because it was a it was a hindrance to sobriety because I was sitting there six months in like oh [ __ ] I am pissed off all the time like is this what sobriety is like where where'd my pink Cloud go like what's you know what am I doing this for them I've lost all the good stuff and now I'm just you know totally a pissed off [ __ ] all the time and driving everybody out of my life so it's it it was trying to wear on my CB and telling me that it maybe it was a better idea to start drinking again so I don't know how common that is I've definitely heard it in the rooms that other people have this experience but if you were in a process of uh getting sober early recovery it's worth kind of paying attention to that yeah three years three exactly three after three years I felt like I was a different person it was like one day literally I the light came on and something shifted it's it's it was almost overnight um but it was three years three years after you know sort of ten years of of heavy drinking yeah yep yep all right well it's all very cheerful okay this is fine um okay do some people have the inability to pursue social cues yes I'm part of a large close family who are mostly agreeable even though this person has been around for a few years she refuses to adapt to our intelligent fun easy going way of being she's critical no filter says inappropriate things inserts yourself into situations where she doesn't belong all caps she has no clue meanwhile no one in the group can stand her and she just doesn't fit in can she wake up and adapt to the group or is she too far gone no she's she's too far gone yeah woman's best yeah yeah this is It's the lack of perception of social cues is not necessarily the problem that that could be there are those people you know people on the autism spectrum where people you know we could we could Define and describe them in all kinds of ways but they're also people who are perfectly aware of the social cues they just don't give a [ __ ] they just don't care they're just like why I don't feel a need to modulate my behavior in this case like what's the problem like Larry for example Larry is very sensitive Larry is not going to miss any social cue coming his way um he's he's super super attuned to every little Social Security especially if it's coming from a hot female um but most of the time he's he it's not going to stop him from complaining to the waiter uh the the elbow Dragged In The Bread Basket or whatever it is that he's upset about that he feels he can make a big case of that and these are personality factors interacting in a real-time cost-benefit analysis where he's just like no it's it makes more rational sense for me to be an [ __ ] right now um even though I I can see that you're uncomfortable I can see that you don't like it it's just not going to stop him got me a couple of hot dates got you hot dates because he was being so bad you know he just went up to the females just hit on him about me didn't bother me at all yeah he's a great wingman he's Fearless tried to do it for me and I was like I do not want or need your help no no no no no um so yeah I I think the the questions need to be considered separately like is the person picking up on the cues um probably do do they have kind of a crappy personality with this critical inappropriate no filter kind of the things you're describing um where it just doesn't matter if they're I mean you could you could point out you know hey that was really rude and they'd be like oh sorry I didn't know like I didn't realize and then tomorrow the same thing happened so so yep yeah it sounds like you're the way the question is phrased is this is not a family member this is maybe a partner of somebody in the family or a friend um and so it yeah they're just whole different different genetic profile just different um not interacting with the same cues in the same way what else do we got that is all of the live questions let me go back to my list what else do I have here uh okay uh this was a and a couple of pleasure trap type things um so is there an argument for weighing and measuring food um Dr Lyle has logically explained why Wayne and measuring food makes no sense however the argument I keep hearing from people who do it is since people ate under the hunger drive and often died of starvation due to scarcity they didn't have the ability to eat to satiety every day which is why I have to portion control how would you respond to this um foreign Ty that out in the tip of the bell curve the the top five or ten percent of the bell curve that uh if you were eating Society at a at a pretty low calorie density diet say five or six hundred thousands a pound uh you could still be you know you might even be 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the way the um that wouldn't be typical they uh that would be however it's not impossible I mean I've seen it so I know that it's very possible so the um at that point um weighing and measuring the I remember talking to server without and uh Alan said well if I had that problem I just need a hell of a lot more walkthrough so that that was that was how he was going to do it um I had a friend of mine who wound up being a an important sort of uh Natural Foods executive and he had been um about six one and about 350 pounds when he was a young man and he solved the problem the same way so he got out his Chopsticks and he ate a phenomenal amount of raw food and steamed vegetables and uh that's what he ate so he's probably eaten an average of 250 or 300 calories a pound and he had you know big volumetric appetite and he wound up coming all the way down to looking like me okay so the uh and stayed there and he stayed there for the last four years so the so the question is would you rather weigh in measure you know your rice and potatoes or would you rather not weigh and measure and be more steamed uh broccoli and asparagus and salad and Etc so that is a that's the question so it isn't the question that uh I would argue that the people that would eat Society on 600 carry a pound food uh that are moderately overweight I'm going to tell you that you may be moderately overweight aesthetically that you are in Hell of good shape physically okay and particularly if you're getting regular moderate exercise those are really good physical specimens they're just sitting out there on the top percentile or their for their fat storage that doesn't make them uh significantly compromised physically so other than that that's our bell curve okay and so that that's what that looks like and so now yeah do you do you want to I don't know how many people that is but it's not more than 10 percent so uh of that 10 there's going to be significant differences between the person that's at the 90th percentile in this versus at the 99. so I've had a client that was a 99.9 actually a 99.99 so I had a 99.99 that was five foot four 350 pounds and then got her act together and got down to five foot four 260 pounds and from 260 down to 160 which she eventually got to that that was a combination of raw food and measuring her rights okay and then it was a sustainable it was just psychologically not sustainable to to eat that way so she wound up 250 pounds so uh that but that is a one in ten thousand dollar so the question is is it possible you've edited of course yeah that's a really unusual Suite of jeans the uh that that for most of us that's what I would tell you that the decision is where are you on the bell curve uh and what's it mean to you and the uh would you rather weigh in measure uh and essentially deal with eating out of the hunger Drive which I think is pretty frustrating uh or would you rather you know essentially be eating a lower calorie density diet so I think that that's It's Tricky I think sometimes the hunger drivers shut off better by occasional amount uh foods that mimic meat like tofu uh will mimic meat and avocados will mimic meat so I think sometimes including some of that stuff actually helps people reach satiety and not actually cause them to gain any weight so this is a this is a there's questions that remain uh in how all this works and all down to an individual model uh people that I talk to that have these issues get winds up being do you have enough fastidiousness to stick with experiments so that we can learn because because the differences between what you're doing and what I might tell you to do are fundamentally so subtle that may be 90 days before we can actually determine so that's kind of where it is that we wind up on that question yeah I think there's there's sort of I don't know this is probably an unpopular position in the in the general uh kind of plant-based world but I don't think there's anything inherently pathological about way into measuring your food so I think if if people want to eat especially a diet that includes some some richer stuff some some tofu some avocados some some you know God forbid processed vegan meats or whatever whatever it is that they want a kind of vegan cheese Etc and weighing and measuring kind of create some structure around that where they're not you know this is again this comes down to don't just don't eat under the damn hunger Drive you're going to set yourself up for trouble but if you can kind of feel safer with your high conscientiousness and you know that okay it's 1800 calories that I've weighed measured out of of this and this and this and this and that or whatever it is whatever your kind of little Target is um there's there's nothing that's wrong with that necessarily it's just that most people are using Wayne and measuring as a way to do de facto eat under the hunger Drive which then will rebound on them and they're going their body is going to retaliate and they're going to the first time they they have an opportunity they're getting it into super rich food and probably regain everything that they've lost and then some and everybody is you know experienced that whole process so when we're when we're railing against it we're not um I think there's often this misunderstanding of how it can actually be very useful to people or calorie counting by any you know different people watching their macros or just counting the calories in general or counting their points with Weight Watchers and maintenance or whatever it is there's nothing that is um or I don't think it's it's reasonable to tell people that it's like never do that it's it's you're going to be in huge trouble if you do it um particularly for people who kind of don't they're not as in touch with their satiety cues as they might want to be yeah also this is a something that uh Justina freeze and I have cooked up over the last few years and that is that um and Justine is on our website by the way for people that are that deal with food related issues binge eating um eating problems in general that's a really good resource because she does a lot of counseling and added there's a good job at mapping out uh programs for people but the the um one of the things that that we're that we uh a reasonable weighing measuring type of strategy for binge eating is to actually aim at say five meals a day where you know that each one of them is right at 400 calories okay so that way we we never wind up into this restricting situation and then getting voraciously hungry and then going crazy and within that uh we also have reasonable confidence that the system can and probably should be tolerating some reasonably concentrated Foods so uh the concept of eating quote left of the red line at 560 calories a pound or whatever it is that if you eat everything left with the red line your average is going to be 300 calories a pound is the mean that's the average of what it's supposed to be so if you if if you are essentially uh so concerned and defensive that you're reading everything to the left of the red line that that means you're reading a very unnaturally low concentration that calories in your diet and that's going to drive a lot of frustration uh inside of most people and then then we wind up with good people binging on very rich food so we believe that that we need to be judicious and generally individually crafted uh strategies or how it is that would best fit you uh and so anyway yeah more very great question and a complicated one and you're hearing us sort of talk all around this thing because there's individual variation in here like I said I could I can flush 90 of humanity and say down in the bottom like there's no reason for you to be worried about uh about uh trying to weigh in this or your food it's just ludicrous that your your job is to eat a reasonable calorie dense diet and you're going to be completely fine and that's going to be true for 90 percent of humanity for 10 of humanity that may not get you all the way it is that you where it is that you want to go and now we we entered the game that we're talking about here about different strategies that may help you get to where you may want to be aesthetically uh in a way that's more tolerable that's what we're trying to accomplish yep yep yeah well uh just to to I would be remiss if I didn't promote my own thing here too I'm starting next week I'm starting um kind of a women's support group throughout the the next couple of months that goes November 7th through January 2nd and so people who are in my Virtual Village you guys have a kind of separate process to sign up if you're interested but if you're not um and you'd like to sign up you can just go to my website and and find it there but it's we'll talk about this kind of stuff it's gonna there's gonna be a significant pleasure trap you know healthy living kind of focus just because of the seasonality of it um and uh these are these are kind of complicated you know for for on the individual basis when people are trying to run experiments and figure it out there's got to be a kind of a scenario to fit everybody so um we will get into that yeah all right one more I think that is everything that we have as an open question and I think we got through the ones that were emailed so um I I thought I a couple of times I thought I could roll over questions from the previous week but I actually can't find the file in the zoom recordings for the Q a file I can find the chat file but not the Q a file so I I misled you guys so if you do have a question that you've asked that we haven't gotten to in a previous week just resubmit it again and we will we'll do our best so yep oh good all right sounds good well enjoy you went I learned that mean friend fire friend fire yeah fire friend I can't remember what he did whatever it was I I friend fired the person is fired as a friend you know they still are allowed I'm permitting them to exist in the world it's not in my friendship Coalition yeah yep yep all right well have a good weekend everybody and uh and let us know if uh you know there are other stuff that we want us to hit on or or anything else so we're always here so all right all right have a good one all right bye
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