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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-02-06
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we have one here that Dan was quick on the draw so he says hi am I my internal audience's [ __ ] do I need to do what it wants or I'll suffer the punishment of a self-esteem dip I often feel like telling them to chill out it's not that important but we don't always seem to agree on that I see myself as a nicer guy and a more relaxed supervisor than my internal audience is and I often try to give myself a break and be lazy would you recommend that I try the experiment for a few weeks of deliberately avoiding giving myself passes to see if my self-esteem improves by treating the internal audience as a tough external boss that I need to satisfy um the I mean I think that I think that what you're really reporting on this is that you've got you've got uh an internal audiences in speaking in unison so you've got a complicated virtual reality program that can observe your behavior from a variety of perspectives it's uh it's simple enough to call it an audience as if it speaks in one voice but audiences have individual members and it would be sensible for your internal audience mechanism to actually have have multiple opinions about what it's observing so I think that that's what you're looking at and I think that um the the concept of running an experiment to see if you can actually detect a pattern that might yield a decision rule that would actually change your behavior um that is it's unlikely that that you would pull that off but you might and it's uh you might learn something now I specifically um I think that that a lot of people that battle with self-disciplinary issues specifically are on the pleasure trap um are are well uh well served by understanding the value of of the discipline and how it's going to change the internal feeling pretty quickly much quicker than the ultimate outcome of losing 80 pounds or whatever it is that you've got your eye on uh that that's the esteem that you're going to be seeking at the end of the goal Victory but actually all that you can do at any given day is assess the fundamentals of sub goals uh you don't get to lose 80 pounds today you can only lose two or three ounces today and the way you're going to do that is you're going to do that by doing a diligent um essentially ascetic um uh Behavior pattern that is not following the instinctual self-indulgent processes of the plush drop so the uh and your your internal audience will be aware of this and so it it's going to give you some feedback that feedback is not meant to be loud that's what's so interesting about it you can be pretty self-indulgent in reasonably self-destructive and not not suffer that much okay you can you're suffering it's a malaise uh but you're not suffering that much and when you do it right you're not exhilarated you are you're it's it's kind of like it can be varying degrees of well you know do I really need to take a shower before I go to bed you know yeah I got a little sticky out there chopping the wood but not too bad and yeah I only take a shower in the morning I think it's fine okay we know that feeling versus the feeling if you went ahead and took a shower it's like okay now I'm clean all right I feel better so that's what the internal audience that's what the playing to the internal audience and having the self-discipline to honor their their higher expectations uh that's what it feels like it feels like you did it right and you get that feeling it's not immeasurably different than the other feeling but it's worth it so the question's a good one um uh but I would say that uh that that depends upon how you're speaking possibly somewhat differently than someone who's in the pleasure trap uh pleasure trap probably doesn't have an internal audience that is that is uh chill what they have is that they've got an internal audience that's disgusted to varying degrees and so uh I think that that's probably the case you're speaking about something that's a little bit different where there's there's a legitimate differences of opinion as to what's the best use of your next hour um you know should I watch the game or should I clean my desk off and the internal audience will be more respectful of you cleaning the desk off but it will also not not be particularly punishing if you don't unless there was something critical on that desk that you really needed to get to so yeah can you run an experiment and learn sort of uh should we i i e should we should we be essentially like soldiers that are that are listening for the order from the internal audience I would say um you you could try it but I don't think you'll buy it I don't think their their reinforcement that comes from the internal audience is so acute and valuable that that it washes over legitimate conflicts of how it is to best optimize your time which includes a variety of things that are that are that are not you know productive towards some long-term goal but yet they're consumptive of the good life and the present so yeah the absurdity is if all you're doing is investing for the future then you're dead then what happened okay the the purpose of all production is consumption and so if we are not having a balance of production and consumption uh then then that's called our life is out of balance if you consume too much and don't aren't productive enough you go broke then you have no abilities and you're in trouble if you do nothing but produce but do not consume you are uh hyper conscientious in that case caught in a hill climbing trap and you're going to miss out on a great deal of emotional uh nourishment from very pleasant events uh because you are because you are cornered by a conscientious chip that's out of control or competitive chip that's out of control so balance makes sense and of course makes sense to to experiment with that balance but I don't believe you're going to find a clear-cut answer to this question uh my life always in a constant oscillation between okay now I need to put the thumb on the scale and be more productive and then I do that for a while and my CB says okay now it's time for me to legitimately be more consumptive and it's a pendulum that swings and I think that that's how it really is that mail all makes sense yeah I think sometimes for the the hyper conscientious Nut Cases Among Us that that you can for certain personalities this can be a useful exercise I don't think it works for everybody but if you if you're sort of a more creative type who visualizes easily um it can be uh productive to sit down and have like a committee meeting with the internal audience to like imagine little personalities because often what Dan is sort of conveying here is uh I I share this experience and I think a lot of people do too where there there are conflicts of interest among the committee members so you can almost identify them by personality and sometimes they're real people in your life or sometimes they're like an amalgam of of teachers and ex-boyfriends and it's like a combination of people up there um and you kind of can predict what they're going to be wanting you to do and and they're going to sit there and they it's like okay Carol we know what you want like we've we've heard what you have to say now let's let everybody else talk and to kind of bring it out into the open and let them talk it out and then have you know you you're taking the position of being an authority and setting expectations like all right so we're agreed that the the expectations for this next set of of parameters for this goal that we're trying to achieve this is a reasonable standard and this is what we're going to be proud of ourselves for accomplishing and we're not going to go too far outside of that and try to be a crazy perfectionist who winds up self-sabotaging or or whatever the consequences are so if you have that sort of personality and that would be a productive exercise I I think when you're in this kind of situation you can kind of visualize that or Journal it um and it can reveal some sort of subtleties of of uh the voices in your head so oh good and and get straight on those expectations so those are not excessively distorted relative to what you want to accomplish yeah yeah I would yeah let me uh these there's a there's a point being made here that and it's the one that I that I try to make so I'm going to make it again uh they're the value in in running experiments and paying attention to them is that you're in your life as you wander around and answer to different uh opportunities and threats in your behavior you may miss out on discovering something about yourself um that could be discovered if we had a set of situations that actually allowed for that Discovery to take place and so uh and so the discovery that I think is important for people is to understand the mechanical nature of their emotional life with respect to self-discipline in the face of the pleasure trial and so that's why I don't tell people well today's the day where we're going to run this experiment but really we're trying to trick you it's just like getting out of the pleasure trap so that you'll be this healthy Alan goldhammer type eater for the rest of your life no that is not what I'm trying to accomplish I'm trying to accomplish something akin to what Dan's talking about I actually want the person to run an experiment on saying okay for 14 days I'm going to be extremely disciplined with nothing that bends nothing I don't care what my husband says and that it's his birthday for 14 days we're gonna circle the wagons on the pleasure trap and we are going to absolutely not not budge after that we can not a problem we wouldn't ask ourselves to to do this we're not even sure it's worth it the point is that's that's the reason why we have problems with things like the pleasure graph is because we have confusion as to whether or not it's worth the hassle trying to take it on but it's certainly worth the hassle of finding out whether your emotional life Works differently than you knew that is super important to understand okay and a lot of people that have had spectacular successes through periods of great discipline they achieve things and then they never get back and experience that again and they lament the loss of that what happened early in life when they were working so diligently for a goal um you know it's uh it's oh I don't know The Hungry Years or or uh uh I don't know where are the clouds or sending the clowns in other words it's the story of you are you you're working like hell and there's nothing like the excitement about achievement and you think that it's the magic of that time that actually a big part of it was the extraordinary process of the internal audience it was as watching you hit your limit for your ability to achieve and that can that can be ignited again the CB may not worth it because you may be too busy consuming all the the the the the byproducts of your previous success but that would kind of be a shame wouldn't it okay and so if you misattributed the excitement to the fact that it was the success that was the exclamation point at the end of the championship you actually missed out on something important which was that a big part of the journey was the internal audience watching you do something to the very best of your ability okay testing your ability to see what you could accomplish so that that I want people to know that there may be value in self-discipline that they are unaware of they may find out that there isn't okay I'm not saying oh well I've got the secret sauce here but there's you know hidden greatness and go to the Tony Robbins seminar and then work really hard and then get rich then you can celebrate like the cool people now I'm telling you that you may discover um that there is an adventure in the achievement process that you were actually intimidated by ego trapped about you know uh had cost benefit confusion particularly rained on by things like the pleasure trap uh Etc there could be numerous reasons which would stop you from ever sharpening your pen and giving it your extremely best effort for a limited period of time and seeing what that feels like so that's that's what I want people to do I want them that I this is particularly important to me with weight loss and women and their 50 pounds and their frustration and they're starting and stopping and starting and stopping because they discover after day one or day two you know their their determination goes down their drain and they're discussed with themselves and they don't care and then the self-indulgent thing just seems so worth it and I literally hear those in the other end of my phone I hear that confusion of gee but I just can't and it's like oh well yes you can you're just not sufficiently excited about getting rid of the psychological malaise you know that's what you're not excited enough about that if you knew that you might be able to get rid of the psychological malaise and pay this price you might be very interested in discovering whether that's true is that malaise may have been following you around like a dark cloud for the last 35 years wouldn't it be nice to see it gone okay so the uh anyway great question and that's why you know it's a super rich and important area to to think about and I'm not just the last word freak I just really you know but you are you contain multitudes one of them is being a last word for you all right here we have I was recently fired from a job that I did not love but I worked really hard at I am disagreeable introverted but very hard working and loyal I have no idea what I'm doing wrong I have a pretty good understanding of my personality and I make a lot of accommodations to make up for it but I'm seeing a pattern in feedback from bosses I.E being fired yeah I mean you're you you can ask them i i people don't take advantage of this as often as they should but you know you can you can definitely send an email saying hey you know I I I I understand that the deal is done and I'm not trying to get my job back here I just it would be really helpful for my personal and professional growth to kind of have a sense of what went wrong here and what can I improve the next time and uh I I'm very interested in improving my position and I don't want to repeat mistakes and so can you educate me um I think most most bosses and supervisors would be happy to do that if they if there wasn't some kind of exit interview um which I would hope that there would be in most jobs but if you did not have that kind of situation you can always follow up and ask yeah but it probably is the disagreeableness is more distorted than you know you might have like a certain bluntness um especially if there's a customer service like front-facing interaction going on um that that you know the the level to which uh you you would be fired would be more offensive than you're realizing that it is would be my initial hypothesis of what it is but you you can launch an investigation yeah yeah or ask your friends you know sort of ask your friends what do you think my biggest liabilities in my job are um you know why do you think I was fired I don't know but based on your your sort of uh outside perspective on what I was complaining about and what I was reporting to you what do you deduce yeah and let's assume that it's the disagreeable so let's like it let's suppose it were what would such an individual do well the um you can't change personality characteristics but you can under specify conditions change the execution of the behavior okay if you understand the cost benefit that's involved you you can um you can absolutely do that the uh now people might say well if I can do that why can't I do the whole thing the answer is no personality is generating a a um is coloring the cost benefit processes that are happening unconsciously and literally every second of your life so you're not going to be able to change that that's not possible but under certain moments of your existence you can absolutely say okay here's one of those moments and I desperately want to tell them everything that they did wrong because that would be fair okay but I'm not going to do it what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that they understand that we begin with agreement okay so if you're a disagreeable person when you start getting negative feedback the right thing is to say I understand where you're coming from that makes sense I would have to agree like you learn to say those words practice okay so then you say okay I think I think there's a bit more to it than that that I want to put my two cents in about this and that but but what we just did was we uh made it possible for us to survive uh rather than immediately contradict so that's generally what discreable people do they immediately contradict and they don't make sure that they they walk in other words they make this thing a a war between two individuals you are making a mistake you're a mistaken you're wrong and you've cost the team no I haven't you're wrong you're mistaken let me tell you more otherwise we've now it's who's right and who's wrong and it's it's uh it's mono Amano where instead what we need to do is we learn to walk over on the other side of the table and sit right next to them conceptually okay and be on their team that's what we have to do now they can relax okay now so we agree first always agree a little guy who's the number two salesman for the Hoover vacuum cleaner company in the 1950s and 60s a little guy named Al tomsey who then became a national sales Trader he said always agree always agree oh that humor's not as good as the Kirby you're you know you're right about that you've got a point you know I can understand what you're saying that makes sense however it turns out that the Hoover has some advantages let's look at what those are always agree okay so if you're disagreeable and you've been fired more than once that may be something that you want to pay particular attention to particularly that mood they contradict you and hit you your instinct is to disagree and contradict them the right move is what always agree find a way to agree you can Master a few little sentences that will help you do that you spit those out first and by the time you've done it a few times it's like wow I can actually do it it doesn't kill me to do it I'm joking it's choking in my throat my adaptive unconscious is trying to stop the air from passing from my lungs up to my voice box but it can actually do it you can do it and then suddenly you put yourself in a way better position and much less likely to get fired so that that's what I would say about that that's funny I mean that is such second nature to a high agreeable like no matter what sort of criticism a boss has come at me with I've always just like well okay yeah well sure okay but but then it's sort of like if I can manage to defend myself it follows the kind of the codependent you know the the agreement like yes I'm I'm complicit in my own my own Devastation here but it is I mean it greases the wheels of of those interactions so if you're in a situation where your your boss has you know given you feedback to improve your performance a couple of times and you've been very disagreeable in response and and not not sort of agreed and and shown that um you know that Baseline ability to kind of receive that criticism and improve then that's going to be a deal breaker for a lot of employers so um but yeah it's it's funny to me to have the the high egocentric bias is like oh of course you know the more the angrier they are the more you agree you're in more trouble evolutionarily speaking so um it's like very strong Instinct and agreeables yeah yeah you gotta check out something even if it's no I I see your point I see your point yeah got a point I understand where you're coming from yeah that makes sense you can say that without saying they're right if you can say they're right that's great if you can't because they're just so wrong and you can't get yourself to do it you simply say I see your point you've totally got a point I see what you're saying it makes complete sense okay you just walked over to their side of the table Yeah okay and that now now you're okay but there's a little bit more to it I want to if I tell you my where how it is that I see it slightly differently okay that's you know 15 seconds to save your job so just sold the Hoover yeah we were always we were always a Kirby family yeah yeah all right this is a fun one this is uh what is happening and on-again off-again relationships from an evolutionary psychology perspective is there any hope in a case like this how might one fix it if they want it to work or how might one stick to the decision to cut and not be tempted to return and then the follow-up is it just feels like the highs are amazing and they make me forget about the lows this reminds me very much of a conversation I had with my brother once where we ran into one of his crazy exes uh walking around Seattle and I was like Eric why why do you go for these crazy women and he took a moment and he said they're just they're just so alive and this is he's saying here that this is uh Los he's low C below average on neuroticism she is really high neuroticism low agreeableness and low extroversion so it's this unstable woman trap it's the hot crazy Matrix yeah what what can we say that the hot case crazy Matrix they really it's all there the uh but sort of from a from a technical view uh what we're looking at is that all behavior is a result of cost benefit analysis so the and that that's all you're watching and the I.E hot crazy hot being the high value crazy being the the the cost and so there's the Matrix obviously the bill in highlight between those two things and so the um so that's why on again and off again is that it's simply that people are running a cross benefit analysis on and all knowable behavioral options so that's that's how your mind works so you might be thinking you know where can we go to dinner and you're thinking you're thinking through six targets and then you realize oh I forgot about the seven okay and that's like you weren't planning to go there and you wouldn't have gone there except that suddenly some cue reminded you or some some the other person said it but the point is is that oh now there's a seventh option in the in the equation so now what your mind is doing is it's running a cost benefit analysis on multiple options for behavior all at the same time it's doing them at the same time and it's selecting the option that has the greatest biological efficiency I.E the best payoff relative to cost so it's not just it has the most benefit it's the best cost benefit ratio yeah that's how it is so the um so that's how the nervous system would have to be constructed so it's going to often be the case with somebody who is a pretty exciting pretty interesting pretty decent partner then uh in the in the process of that relationship moving forward the the there are all kinds of values are shifting around okay so maybe uh uh maybe you're you're a guy that hasn't it hasn't actually experienced the hot crazy Matrix so you are as we are aware of experimental evidence indicating that males will trade just about everything to get to get hot they're they're biological computer tells them that it's an extraordinary value in reproduction success why would that be it's Game Theory so because your your genes are seeing through to the Next Generation and if you pass on highly attractive genes to the Next Generation then they are having a decided Advantage so even though the this the crazy uh check May bankrupt you okay and and may actually you know it may actually cause you to get you know a fatal gunshot wound in the middle of a of a lover's quarrel with her other lover okay bottom line is that your kid might be pretty hot and therefore yeah that your Stone Age brain reads this as a viable option uh with respect to optimizing your Gene survival and therefore it feels like it's a viable thing to be considered so this isn't really the story of the on and off again relationship but it's an extreme version of it so you can see okay I'm in this thing I'm in this thing for you know four or five weeks or five days and then it's like oh God that's right that's why I left before I can't put up with this [ __ ] this is crazy I'm miserable so then you leave and you're like huh what a relief and then you go test the landscape and can't find anything half as hot that isn't twice as crazy and it's like okay well this seems boring you know what's what's Sarah's number what what is there or her name actually rainbow yeah yeah whatever it is okay so that that very same uh anybody that says that the new part is amazing is somebody that's in something that looks like the hot crazy Matrix if the if the reconnection of the two people doesn't have that amazing then it just feels like somebody finally settled and it's like well it's a little too cold out there and I could really use another paycheck in the house and a lot of responsibilities and oh well I didn't find anything exciting out there anyway and I don't think my aud's planning anything deciding her very good anyway so I might as well wind up with Bill okay you can see that happening too that's something that went apart and came to you know was was together came apart and then went back together that could happen but this person's question indicates that they're talking about the quote Oh it's exciting again well that tells us that that uh that if it's that exciting again after you already know the person this is the second time around it tells you that there's the hot crazy Matrix is tickling this entire system it's an important ways in other words um a non-comprehensive evaluation of the person's genetic code is clearly evident here and it turns out that his sin as all five senses gather a bunch of evidence sensory evidence over their behavior patterns over the next few weeks we're going to be right back to where we were at the end of the last cycle which is huh not such a good deal I'm looking for the exit again that's all it's uh it's CD reminds me of the video of the uh the male black widow spider uh advancing and retreating and you know the the the female doing her little pulsating dance and and he just I mean in the video you can see it you can kind of you can watch his little circuits like I know I shouldn't do it I know I shouldn't do it I know I it's not gonna go well for me um but he is willing to self-sacrifice him his own life uh to pass on those genes with that hot little number who is Lauren him in so the hot the hot crazy web another name I'm just trying to come up with oh crazy check names Rainbow's pretty good rainbows yeah Paradise you know oh god oh no I don't know that's that's that's moving into like a whole other sort of dimension of crazy when they have when they have place names and yeah no not good not good not good River uh yeah yeah River could be could be yeah it's it's a balance I you know there's sweet hippies out there too with with sweet hippie names we're family sweet heavy names all right um I feel like I've heard a lot about disagreeableness and conscientiousness high and low and unstable personalities uh can you discuss the position of someone with a very high stability what are their strengths and or drawbacks I'm wondering if people who are highly stable are so unfazed by social signals that they act weird uh some what someone called the autistic Spectrum or they become socially awkward just curious to hear more about this part of the big five yeah definitely that's somebody who is extremely stable to the to the point of an Alan goldhammer has this almost kind of flat affect you know they they they're not um it's it's more difficult to get that mirroring with somebody who is extremely stable and it can be a little more difficult to communicate effectively with them because of that um and yeah totally I mean Doug and I are both on the higher stability end of the spectrum so maybe we don't talk about it often for that reason I don't know but I think people the high neuroticism high conscientiousness high disagreeableness distortions are the most costly distortions it seems like high stability um brings its own problems but they're not as high cost in The Game of Life in in my experience yeah they're more they're more lost opportunity exactly yeah you're not getting yourself actively into trouble I think you're just yeah yeah but the you know I always think of my dogs when I when we come to the stability question which is that Mellie over here on the couch disagreeable very emotionally stable Motown very neurotic low low stability High agreeableness I love Motown more he's got more mirror neurons his Highs are higher his lows are lower um I I have more opportunity to kind of connect deeply with him when he's in this emotional state of turmoil and Mellie it's just like she's like it's fine it's all fine it's kind of kind of shitty or it's kind of cool but it's it doesn't depart much from this fine sort of Baseline and it's just harder to have that like active empathetic kind of thing with her um than than it is with Mo so that is a liability of high stability it's harder for people to connect with you it's harder to connect with people um you're a robot in in you know you're an ice queen in romantic interactions um these are the kinds of like don't you have feelings doesn't anything bother you um those are the kinds of things that will come up with high stability personalities I I've had all those info turreled at me at various points so yeah yeah but it's it's definitely distinct from um you know the the costs that come along with high neuroticism and high disagreeableness for sure yeah good other other thoughts as a high stability life form once told that there's I have no soul [Laughter] that that was a feedback from from somebody that was there was puzzled by my stability you have no soul and you kill everything with science yeah you wreck it you wreck it with science yep no it's very true um all right so okay what do you think of Jack trimpy's rational recovery and the the higher brain lower brain kind of dichotomy that they talk about in that in that sort of world I'm a big fan of trimpy and rational recovery in general I think the higher brain lower brain you know this is sort of um uh I don't know simple model simple simple yeah it's the the Neuroscience is cartoonish um but uh but I think the point is well taken so this idea that you can kind of separate out the addictive Voice or the Beast that lives within you that is that you know is trying to get you to act on something and that by setting yourself apart from that the through the high brain process um is a useful exercise because you you start to witness um the the what I find most useful and rational recovery was a big part of my recovery from alcohol process um more more so than 12 step was I used both of them and sort of took what was useful and left the left the rest but with rational recovery this technique of sort of again kind of sitting down with the Beast and and being like okay why exactly do you need to have a drink right now like Give Me Your Best Shot tell tell me exactly what's going on and and witnessing that the Beast never has anything better than because it's going to to feel really good because we're really going to like it because it's because we just have to well why not tomorrow why why does it have to be the second because because it feels good it sort of exposes the the The Emptiness of this animalistic claim that that the brain is trying to make the the all of the kind of sophisticated rationalizations that travel with that when you actually strip it down and you interrogate The Addictive voice it has no ground to stand on and so getting into that relationship with it whether it's with food or with alcohol or with anything cigarettes um it for for some people who were on this journey can be a really effective strategy because it's like oh you're that's just sad like that's that there's there's no there there like I don't have to do your bidding like you don't you're not even making a good case for it um so I'm a big fan of it for that reason but yeah I think the the cartoon Neuroscience is a little silly yeah yeah a lot of Neuroscience is cartoonish uh including including the way that that uh we try to conceptualize uh some of these major working parts of the brain so a neuroscientist would cringe however they my attitude would be well I can't point to those structures in the brain and neither can you the thing is is that the brain can have functions and that we can recognize functions and have no idea how they're wired together and we might vaguely know by looking at a pet scan by putting a given circuit under activation you're like well looks like that's where jealousy winds up a bunch of those neurons fire how they fire Etc is and how it's wired up isn't really that important actually at all you wouldn't need to know anything about Neuroscience to be an extremely effective evolutionary psychologist you could know nothing actually you what the what counts is the values judgment in which the fact that the information is being processed in order to come up with integrated value judgments and when I say integrated it's because every value you ever pursue is integrated with every other value option that you have on the table so the analysis that's going on is in parallel processes in your brain and you're selecting the optimum uh the optimum apparently Optimum Solution that's what your brain is doing um so I don't have to know how it does it and it's not particularly useful to know so but but you're going to find all over Neuroscience most people and most people speculating in Psychology are trying to speculate about neural structures that that we don't understand their their Neuroscience process at all so it may be cartoonish but it actually may accurately be describing some functions of how the brain works and it can be useful [Music] yeah yeah just separating out that that craving voice whether you call it the Beast or you call it you know you give it you give it a name you give it a character um it's been really helpful for a lot of people particularly with high high addictive stuff so this is a little different um with food food is food is on a different part of the Continuum and and sort of rationalizes itself in different ways and um is is necessary for life on in an ongoing way that cigarettes and alcohol or not um so it's very easy when you're dealing with an addictive process with something that you're walking away from entirely um that you're really cutting out of your life to eat to say okay any craving for this destructive substance is by definition the the Beast it's the craving voice where food it's Messier because it's like oh well we need to eat something um but when it's alcohol or cigarette it's sort of like nope that's the Beast that is the Beast talking if it's chirping up then I know that it's not me because I have made a commitment to not consuming this this substance um so yeah yeah I'm a big fan all good all good yeah I think unbalanced rational recovery is a more useful tool than Trump than 12-step um but 12-step has its benefits too so all right a question about bariatric surgery I understand surge this surgery does not actually solve the problem which is poor lifestyle habits but do you think there's any benefit when someone sees the needle move in a meaningful way making them feel like they have a chance to succeed do you feel that someone who has failed their whole life just needs a a layout win to muster up any amount of motivation to keep trying basically are there any potential benefits to bariatric surgery thanks yeah well here's my opinion about this um and I'm not going to say that it's super well informed opinion it's not it has some I have some experience with this uh um I've you know had many patients who had bariatric surgery I've watched bariatric surgeries from before they happen to after they happened and then watched the aftermath so um I personally I understand what the person is saying in other words I'm so defeated and so miserable and I feel so so impossible mountain to climb um isn't it is there value in just going ahead and you know trying to uh hack and Sheet this system apart by cutting my stomach out or whatever the hell it is that they're going to do in order to then then I will be thinner then I'll feel better about myself then I won't feel so helpless and I'll feel better about life is there any value in that well we know that there's value in the aftermath of the of the process once you heal up and you can manage to choose some food and keep it down and we we can imagine the exhilaration of the person losing weight without going hungry and without actually having to eat nothing but healthy food so they can even chocolate this and that and still uh if they don't throw it up or get acute illness uh abdominal pain they can wind up uh surviving this thing and then it turns out that lo and behold six months later they're down 100 pounds and they look better and everybody's like wow you look so great and they experience a lot of positive steam cues and those those days and those hours are real hours and real days of that person's existence so you know you only have so many hours and how many of them did we get so now the question is is it worth the price and the uh and the answer would be well you know this is going to depend on some things how much of the weight is going to stay off and the answer is boy that's highly variable right now I don't think that they can anticipate for you how much the weight will sell so I have seen a number of bariatric surgeries that utterly failed in other words the person might have lost 150 pounds but two years later they'd gain 110 of them back like you know what was the point of that they lost their stomach over 40 pounds the um and you know and a lot of pain and disability and vitamin pills and everything else that I'd go along with it so the um so the answer is I've definitely seen the bariatric surgery not worth it I've seen the bariatric surgery short-term post-surgery people swearing up and down but it was unbelievably worth it and that they were exhilarated and relieved beyond beyond all reason in other words they were on cloud nine I have observed some of those people I I've never observed anybody in my practice and that doesn't I'm not going to say that they don't exist I've never observed somebody eight years later still slender and saying oh my God this was the best thing I ever did what a miracle I have to just tell you I have no doubt those people exist I just never met one of them okay so uh the people I've met are telling me the the aftermath of their cognitive dissonance and their Chagrin particularly when they find out that uh if they eat a high fiber low you know high water content plant-oriented diet they can lose more weight than they lost ultimately out of the bariatric surgery and they still have their stomach and they're not a basically a victim of a you know of a major injury so that is how that's how I see it so in other words can't can I definitively say that there's nobody out there that it's not an absolute Big Win net benefit I actually wouldn't be surprised uh if that were true and I'd be surprised if that weren't true that in three percent of the cases you know what I mean it was actually a big win the um what about just generally what's the general overall cost benefit boy I think in most cases it's negative that's my sense that I could be wrong I could ever buy a sample the uh the i i relative to what I would think would be relatively Modest non-draconian non-gold hammerian Behavior changes with respect to the diet could take a person so far that it would be like wow that would be the way to go in other words improve your diet a citizenship amount rather than keep a 28 of the shitty diet that you have now and have a weird stomach and then you'll wind up in a place that's not actually as good as if you adopt 50 of this diet and improve it substantially I don't know that there's I know one the in in all my career probably 10 000 patients but um I I know one who was a very unusual biological specimen so that uh that she was five four and 360 pounds and when she did everything perfectly she was twofold okay so and that's really good okay that that's that is what we would consider a plus she had such incredible self-discipline that she actually then very carefully weighed and measured her perfect diet and got down to 165. okay now that that was that was a stunning achievement I have to tell you watching that thing from the sideline um that that and then It ultimately wasn't worth it and she wound up in the 250s or whatever just what we would expect in other words she wound up on a reasonable diet eating to reasonable society and was essentially a solid 120 pounds overweight that is the most unusual genotype I personally ever saw okay so uh most people if you would do a pretty good job you're going to get a pretty big benefit in this department and that is what I would All Because unless you had done that and tried that I would say bariatric surgery is insane okay if you have done that and tried that and it turned out that you just can't do it because the pleasure trap is too hard for you and you can't even get halfway out with some reasonable alterations then I would say spin the wheel and let's hope for the best because it's a that's a pretty dramatic thing to do yeah and I think those numbers would probably be the same for that individual or most to do the surgery and then you know get to kind of their lowest weight with with you know perfect compliance and um doing everything right and then and then creep back to some equilibrium whether they've had the surgery or not so yeah people doing sort of a B plus Whole Food plant-based diet it's going to be a similar often often you'll hear with the bariatric surgery stories you know someone was a a size 24 and now they're a size 16 and that's good enough you know they're they're sort of normal normal women sizes and they feel like they can they can pass as you know a average American woman and that's like that was so it was all worth it basically so I've heard that story many many many times but they probably almost certainly could have gotten to size 16 or 14 doing sort of an okay imperfect Whole Food plant-based diet and that would would have been where they kind of the equilibrium stops and then it's like now you gotta tighten the screws a little more if you want to get to a size 12 or size 10 or lower than that so that that whole process is almost certainly very similar to the success and the the regression of the bariatric surgery route um but people don't they sort of are like oh I can't get to you know a size four with the diet and so I might as well do the surgery and that's going to be the only way to get there when it's you're winding up in the same place either way yeah and what people don't know I think we have to look at the data I actually haven't looked at the evidence all I have is 28 anecdotes running through my head over 30 years and so the um a lot of times when people get very thin post-surgery and they're accelerated uh it isn't because of their compliance it's because they've been badly injured yeah that's very true you've actually gone through an organ loss and there's incredible tissue damage you have great sensitivity that thing is in trouble and so for months the person is being forced by pain and Circumstance to eat a hell of a lot less and because they've got so much weight on them the body's saying fine no problem go ahead and eat 700 calories a day see if we care and so they can they all through that process they can now get very low and they're like oh my God I'm five four and 128 pounds look at me and uh but what they don't realize is that no what's in the offing for for you is five four and two hundred pounds two years ago after your stomach and your digestive system heals uh and you can start and it starts to accommodate in fact it was an incredible injury so you do an incredible injury and the system survives and then what it starts to do is it starts to do what what we see the body do it starts warming its way around the edge uh entry attempting to restore the previous homeostatic mechanisms as best they can and then we wind up we don't wind up at 260 we wind up at 200 but it's like man that's one hell of a hard way to get 200 pounds when I'm pretty sure I can get to 175 if you'll just eat some potatoes or rice or some oatmeal even if you're still eating chocolate and Cheetos I mean you just have to get halfway reasonable and we're going to get you to a much better place so that's what I believe to be the case on bariatric surgery yeah all right this is a quick one I've heard that as a person gets older they need more protein even animal protein is this true no next all right all right that's done yeah I would I would direct people uh to Garth Davis's proteinaholic book for that for the sort of you know the grand statement on uh Declarations of how much protein people need at any at any point in their life Journey um all right so hello dynamic duo and dream esteem team would it be possible to create a simple set of questions that we could have on hand to help people with the esteem process it would be for your devoted groupies to have on hand it could be called esteem processes for dummies maybe it could include a mind map printed out as opposed to drawn by the resident artist I write that with the utmost reference I'm not actually sure I have no idea for what they're asking I'm not I'm not entirely sure either I'm not sure what like perhaps to help somebody out of the ego trap or something like that that's the only the only thing I could kind of gauge such a thing would be for um all of that's going to be in the book I don't know if it'll be in handy dandy uh map form oh well oh are you gonna want the show oh yeah well okay so I've got my mine as well yes you're churning away yeah yeah Doug made good on his promise to send it to me so I have my copy now so yeah yeah it's it's it's not a simple matter to move people out of the ego trap yeah I mean it's relatively simple um if you understand what to do and if you understand uh uh it's the Wego we go through that particular problem in the book in in very fine detail because it it's it's a great example of a completely a revolutionary view of psychology explaining an incredibly problematic clinical phenomenon and there and what falls out of it then is the is rather obvious Mechanics for how it is that we defuse the problem okay so uh but but there's there's it's enough to it that you know you'd have to listen to one of my my pontifications about this uh the the stories that I told about Harry Steinway and and some brilliant student and Etc in other words there's some tricky business it can be relatively tricky depending upon what the situation is sometimes it involves a little bit of acting uh it involves a little bit of surprising misdirection shock therapy sometimes it doesn't sometimes we we attack it with an intelligent adult absolutely straight on by describing how the how the how the ego trap works and describe the mechanics of the eight go drop in its evolutionary rationale that can be extremely useful for people to actually understand this so that they understand that oh this is a mechanical way that my mind is built to make motivational decisions on how to protect my status because the expectations are too high and the cost benefit is telling me that it's not worth facing that potential loss and I'm better off sticking my tail between my legs and pretending that I don't want to try and don't care and so uh facing that and understanding why that is not a shameful uh result of your dilemma that is a automated result of the Stone Age brain calculating the particulars of your situation as it filters through your particular personality and and now we wind up with in a thing that we call the ego trap where we recognize that it's playing what would have been a short-term strategy in the Stone Age that would optimize your Gene survival but in a longer cycle as you have in human life here uh in a more socially disconnected it can be very self-destructive very punishing and extremely expensive for the individual's life and so a fairly detailed understanding of that is can be extremely important in maintaining motivation to work against it okay a superficial little bit might work but it might not work at all okay this is why I have found in my clinical work for now now informed clinical work for 30 years for that I didn't know what the hell I was doing I was just like every other cognitive therapist but since this you know now I understand boy is it valuable just like it is for me like you want me to do this weird thing why do you want me to do it that way I'm not just going to do it that way you have to tell me oh you make an incredibly logical integrated convincing case as to why I want to go 30 degrees left but I need to go 10 degrees right that that makes now I understand how that's going to work okay so a fairly deep understanding um of how something works and then how we present it with examples that can be the freeing thing that takes people out so yeah I wish I wish that everything that Jen and I did was in seven easy questions yeah yeah we make it easier to advertise so yeah it just turns out that the human mind is everybody likes to talk about how complex it is but they actually don't understand the nature of the complexity so the neuroscientists think it has to all these amazing neurons and reference frames and neurotransmitter concentrations and I I look at all that and I understand that that that is all interesting and almost entirely useless what counts is to understand that it is that what the human mind is a value system it's a system for analyzing the biological values of all the opportunities and all the threats that your nervous system can become aware of and that your mind now makes decisions based on a sophisticated calculus of that of those cost benefit inputs and uh and as a result it's going to turn out that your information is always inherently limited and therefore you are estimating parameters that are leading to the cost benefits that are leading to your feelings and your behavior which means that when those estimates are substantially wrong you are paying the price with your health and your happiness behind those mistakes so the job of psychotherapy is nothing more and nothing less than the improved Precision of your estimate of reality okay that's why what we do is we are triangulating on whatever the problem is and then attempting to understand where is the Miss estimate and it turns out that getting to that missed estimate can be tricky business and it helps to have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the architecture of the Mind seven questions would have been nice but it turns out there's no magic seven questions okay it's it's that that's why that book looks the way it does if I if you could have written a pamphlet we would have all right all right last one here is how does IQ affect all of this the big five do we have any idea of average IQ um well yeah I I think average IQ is a hundred um so just the way that they they've uh sort of done the scale um by the way so people understand it could have done they could have made it 50. sure yeah yeah okay and if you're if you're you know 25 above the normal we're going to call that an 11 and then if you're you know if you're if you're 95th percentile then we're gonna call or we could have called the percentile scores just called it one to a hundred that would have been more accurate than the [ __ ] that you have now the the fact that the [ __ ] that they have now is actually quite a disguise for the whole thing okay like 120 IQ what the hell does that mean well the only meaning that it has is the percentile score so 120 IQ is about 90 I use about 98 percentile so the what was their question I forgot how does it affect the big five oh um yeah it's a d distorter essentially so it's it's just it's just extra I mean if you if you take two people who are high conscientious nut cases and one of them is higher IQ than the other one it's it's sort of the knowledge is half the battle you're you're just more aware of your own distortions you're more present to the way that they are um affecting your life in ways that you don't want them to affect your life you have a little more horsepower to kind of correct and uh observe and tackle the problem than somebody who doesn't so that's that's essentially what's going on there um so it's it's just an overall um an overall additive force that helps you D distort yourself the only reason Jed Hawks alive yeah that's true that's actually really true yeah yeah getting myself out of a lot of self-induced pickles it's uh yeah with respect to almost all demands of domains of human life it's actually the most important variable uh the because of uh because exactly that the personality characteristics As you move away from the midlines you're starting to get distortions as to what the what the likely recurrent social realities or realities are that you're facing the um and then there are prices associated with that so if you're if you're 88 percentile conscientiousness there may be a lot of benefits in some situations but overall over your lifespan with respect to your Gene survival it's gonna it would be costly in other words you were too cautious you didn't ask enough girls out because you were too conscientious about it blah blah blah you didn't two-time somebody when you could have you know what I mean [Music] I didn't keep the 20 you found on the street all that kind of stuff right all kinds of problems associated with that yeah it may make you an extremely attractive friend an employee but it actually didn't uh didn't wasn't ideal for your Gene survival aspect of your life experience the um oh but IQ what IQ does is as Jen says it's going to move the price of that 80th percentile which is some some amount of price and it's going to dial down probably take away half the price something like that you know nobody obviously has any uh we know it's a lot by the way because we know with respect to all kinds of diverse human problems it winds up being the most important variable and very often is more important in predicting positive outcomes than all of the other big five put together yeah so we know that it is a huge thumb on the scale across a wide variety of Human Action so uh but in any given thing we could say oh no well the most important thing here is definitely extroversion because I'm talking about a salesperson you know would I rather have a 100 Ikea average IQ sales person who's at the 95th percentile extra version or would I rather have a 50 percentile extra version in a 95 95 percentile IQ the answer is you're going to want a 95th percentile IQ and a 50th percentile extra version that's what you're going to want that person will almost always if you take a thousand of them they will mop the floor with the other valves that have the reverse uh reversing almost any activity that you can possibly think of so uh but yeah so it's it doesn't uh it's it's not the whole Schmo which is why the big five is still big but it's a lot yeah yeah I think of IQ as you know when when you think of like if you're comparing two dogs and one dog is way smarter than the other dog like what are you actually saying you're saying oh well she picks up on things she makes associations quickly she builds a little correlations faster and then she acts on them so that's really what it is like if you've got higher IQ you're taking the observations and you're integrating them into new little analyzes of of the optimal Behavior going forward so you're better at making those correlations and then applying them to the next scenario and you're faster at that than the next guy and that just makes you more useful in all kinds of different contexts and so it helps you overcome the Distortion that you have in your personality and then it also helps you um move quickly and adjust to changing realities when they they're suited for you so that that lower extroversion sales person can kind of play high extraversion when called for um because they've made more correlations about how to perform in a specific situation or they they just know what's going to work for their personality all kinds of different ways that that could work but that's essentially what we're talking about it's not everything Jen Hawk did suffer yeah I did God got kidnapped on some boats but I got off the boat talked my way into my My Thai visa and I made it home so yeah awesome all right well we better we better wrap up because I've got my ladies group so we can call it a night um but uh all all good all right we'll see you guys what's that nothing I was just saying Grand well Grant we'll see people in a couple weeks yeah sounds good all right everybody have a good night all right everybody see you soon hi
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