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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-04-10
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there we go I gave you the wrong promotion the first time I just allowed you to talk I didn't uh I didn't promote you to panelists but I think we're all we're all official now so I've got to fix the uh all the usual stuff how are you doing good how about yourself good good just a dog wrangling right up until the right until the edge wow you look like you have tremendous wind yeah well this is barely I mean this is It's always windy here um and this is I don't know on a one to ten scale of how windy it has gotten since I've been here is probably a four so wow this is like a noteworthy windy day where I have to make sure stuff is buttoned up but it's not like I have to worry about the greenhouse blowing away that wasn't true in Charlottesville well I'm on a mountain up here so like I'm yeah yeah it's definitely it's and I'm at elevation you know it's all yeah yeah um if I go into town it's never quite as significant so yeah it it makes it very interesting um okay so I am fixing these things yeah I think there have been um there have definitely been days where there have been like at least 50 mile an hour guests if not if not 60 and the greenhouse is held you know I'm very I'm proud of my workmanship for a bunch of PVC and and uh plastic it's held together well so yeah that's our apocalypse I know that's my apocalypse it's a provisional like my winter crops are in there where else am I going to grow my spinach all right okay so let's see how all right we've got several anonymous questions which I always I I those have always come in before I can reset that so oh wow we have a lot to a lot already so just a reminder to everybody that you can upvote to kind of guide which ones we tackle although we we may or may not wander around according to our sort of whimsical uh desires at the time um and you can also comment on the questions if you'd like to sort of chime in so uh and we mostly look at the Q a if you if you put a question in the chat we we won't necessarily see it so um all right any other housekeeping stuff for nope are you ready are you ready to retreat yes I am ready to retreat Doug had to do this at this time today because he is going into the writing Zone going into to work on the books so for all of you book questioners progress is being made yes all right okay uh all right I think we actually had this this one was in the queue last week and we didn't get to it so we can start with this so having listened to your thoughts on trauma I was wondering what you think about PTSD and wartime trauma specifically are narratives of people being lost in life after returning from war true or does it simply tend to be a rougher period of deconditioning and readjusting do you think institutional psychology handles wartime trauma well we can answer that one quickly with no um and uh this might be an area where they don't trudge around this might actually be an area where they don't trudge around in childhoods um oh I see in as far as treatment protocol yeah well you were the you were the proper wartime PTSD expert here so take it away yeah uh I'm not I'm not up to date on on uh whatever research has been done in in you know the past 10 years and what it is that anybody thinks they found um but I will tell you that the uh I'm gonna instead the person this person's asking about trauma and what do we think about wartime PTSD uh as opposed to other trauma the um I I would say that the correct way to think about things is that get rid of the word trauma for just a minute and use the word experience okay so let's talk about whether experiences wreck people's lives Etc et cetera derail them the uh let's uh and a big question that comes to mind for people is in other words are people somehow changed permanently for the worse as a result of having been through what's called traumatic experiences so let's first before we look at any intuition about what people think let's let's look through the lens of evolutionary biology and see what it is that we would reasonably expect okay so we would reasonably expect that traumatic events uh the result of traumatic events would be an improvement in the neurological functioning of the of the individual animal why because a traumatic event what it did was it likely changed the uh that animal's estimate of the environment so the animal you know was not particularly anxious wasn't particularly upset about something so it's a rabbit you know out mosing around in a carrot in a carrot area and then suddenly it looks to its left and it's almost dead as a result of a fox that's coming coming at it from the Swale that the rabbit didn't know was there so it had a it had an incomplete assessment of the environment and now that thing's running for its life and it survives gets back to the rabbit hole and it survives now uh to in the minds of our Freudian friends this poor thing's been damaged and now it's going to not be able to leave the rabbit hole and it's not going to be able to mate and it's going to argue with the other rabbits and then it's going to go to therapy and it's going to be in rehab for for the rest of its life as it will have been erect by this terrible experience okay all right let's instead look at what we think Evolution would do we believe that there's going to be changes in that animal's brain oh oh everybody thinks there's a big change in the brain so you go to a Meditation Retreat and it showed by a pet scan Dr Wilde that there's changes in the brain well your brain's changing every second people okay and so what's happening is is that of course there's changes in the brain so it turns out that this rabbit escapes with its life when you can better believe there's changes in its friend and the changes its brain are going to be specifically uh oriented towards a very very narrow um a very very narrow slice of of uh sensory evidence has now shown to be associated with potential death okay so notice that the rabbit is no it doesn't get very anxious for example when uh when the sun's out and the sun was out that day okay when it almost died the rabbit isn't uh it isn't going to be particularly anxious in the spring okay he's scared of carrots no the scent of care like none of that what there's going to be is there's going to be a particularly there's two things that that may code one of them is uh could be time of day possibly another is definitely going to be location okay so there's no doubt that the rabbit's brain will map the most important evolutionary feature of what was uh predictive of its uh almost death which was the location okay so the brain the the rabbit has a map of that landscape inside of its head it now has marked a little red X about that location so including locations where there might be a Swale that it can't see right so there's like it's not just that specific spot it's sort of the circumstances around the spot where it had kind of a blind spot but thought it was okay now it's going to be hypersensitive to a similar setting with that kind of blind spot exactly in other words this thing this now comes to the notion of generality and specificity which is going to be extremely important in trying to understand trauma PTSD and everything else you would expect that the animal in other words it doesn't do any good for the animal to become generally anxious because it's map of the environment in terms of the costs and benefits about how it should be assigning risk reward ratios to different uh Targets in the environment has not substantially changed it's going to turn out that it learns something extremely important and that that it was actually under sensitive to the possibility of of swales so that now as Jen is saying it's going to be looking for features in the environment that uh that look like they could be similar to the place where you damn near died okay so that's how it would work and this is not a damage to the brain this is an improvement to the frame okay so traumatic events cause improvements obviously that's why the brain changes okay if if the traumatic events cause damage to the brain's future functioning then why on Earth would Evolution code any change at all just let it go and don't don't code any memory so the freudians came are coming through uh which incidentally permeates a lot of thinking about PTSD trauma the sequela I associated with it Etc the um the the Freudian thinking Freud believed that little children in their infancy would you know Dad might accidentally Touch Your Penis for example okay as a result that that would be traumatic for some reason now as a result of that Freud believed that that created a tiny little fissure in the structure of the personality and a hairline crack in a in what would otherwise be fine china okay and he this is what he believed based on no evidence and no reasonable Theory anymore in biology however it wasn't completely cockamami for the thinking of the time so the uh as a result of that then he thinks that that fissure grows it gets worse okay and so it's like a a little a little river that gets bigger and bigger and then pretty soon the whole damn thing is going to break be breaking apart when they're in his office at 28. and uh somehow I don't know by talking about it and and being hypnotized and going back and try to remember your earliest childhood which people think they can do and you can't um so that we that we're going to somehow repair this this is the notion of psychodynamic therapy okay there's 50 other angles a dynamic therapists could talk about but that's fundamentally where thing goes wrong things goes wrong in in the fact that you had unpleasant quote traumatic things happen to you in early childhood those put little dishes in your psychology and now you're in trouble okay that is the idea the exact opposite is true first of all in other words that the if it turns out that something that happened to you was traumatic at the time but is no longer relevant you won't even remember it okay and then you go to you know so your Uncle Louie felt you up when you were seven or eight years old and you didn't like it by 28 you don't even remember it okay it's really not very accessible to memory however you're having trouble at work for trouble with your boyfriend or trouble having an orgasm or trouble with this or trouble with that and you're sort of a disagreeable neurotic okay why genetic you bet your therapist doesn't know this he doesn't know that your personality is genetic so he or she then does what starts talking about your childhood and it turns out guess what those memories are in there we can poke around and poke around by God you weren't repressing them they just weren't important okay they weren't important because Uncle Louie didn't actually do any particular damage to your ability to survive a Rupert is therefore it wasn't coded as particularly dangerous it was coded as unpleasant in this case okay you know it could be worse you could have a worse trauma but but most of the time this is exactly what we're talking about and as a result at 28 nothing that happened there is particularly relevant okay you actually might remember or don't even remember and then when Uncle Louie dies you're got a vague feeling of disgust and uh it's Etc but this is not something that has altered your life experience in any significant way gotta hang out why because it doesn't have any evolutionary calculus of any importance now you can have unpleasant memories from all kinds of things but those unpleasant memories are not like termites that are eating away at your soul and disrupting your current functioning no traumatic events in their memories are there to improve your brain's decision-making capacity so why would we think that only Pleasant things are things that would be recorded and the things should that should be happening the world is full of threats to your survival and threats to your reproductive capabilities so as a result you should be you should have memories associated with negative things that were there they themselves associated with statistical decrease likelihood of survival reproduction I.E getting turned down by Billie Jean at the dance okay in front of everybody else I don't know why I came up with Billie Jean dancing she's not your lover so I don't know why you [Laughter] know nobody ever is all right so the point is is that that so the we we turn this thing upside down and see it from the proper perspective the proper perspective is traumatic events improve brain's functioning of the ability to essentially do what calculate the risks and reward ratios in the environment which is the job of the brain to do okay now Grant's basic job is as follows calculate the risk and reward for alternative actions in the environment and then execute the actions associated with the most valuable goal then that's it that is in fact what animal brands do where in there is there anything about all hell breaking laws from a bunch of negative events it isn't okay now so uh so as a result it turns out people don't repress bad memories as Elizabeth Loftus is very carefully documented and uh it turns out some other things are bizarre but we won't get into that now so now we're going to talk about wartime Trump so now wartime trauma um is is pretty significant that we can see that there are going to be specific sensory events that are definitely going to be associated with a high probability of death that's pretty well different than anything that any child growing up in the United States goes through ever okay so the uh or any anybody in the United States ever experiences do they sometimes sure you know what I mean so some police officer gets shot up three times that's suppose weapon he's adrenalized as hell he's 47 years old three years from retirement and he goes through a hell of a experience and he really doesn't want to go out on the on the job or death okay I you know this of course uh people can have traumatic events and they can be very significant why because they were extremely significant traumatic events with respect to your survival reproductive capabilities and so your brain codes you know as best it can for the set of situations that were involved in that loss and notice that if that person got shot at uh that is a loss people it is not a loss that we actually we we see in other words he didn't die or he didn't die 20 but he had a great statistical likelihood of dying as a result that is from the stand point of evolution and statistics in other words it's a loss you've experienced loss okay now so the uh so therefore because a loss was experienced the brain is going to code that and it's going to put anxiety and avoid circuits around the situations that are associated with that that could be putting on the uniform and being in the car okay so you can imagine wartime trauma that somebody's in a foxhole in Vietnam you know in and out for 11 months on their tour and they witness a tremendous amount of death okay and they they are you know they they know a lot of people that died and were maimed and screaming okay so what should that do a lot of that should code into that nervous system uh as a lot you know it should be essentially incorporating as much as necessary but as little as possible in order to give that individual the best possible chance of surviving indefinitely so that's going to mean that a lot of your Vietnam Vets are uncomfortable in restaurants and for example or uh now I work with Vietnam Vets now we could talk with about other people so the PTSD associated with uh Warfare in the desert is going to be somewhat different so I can I can see that uh the possibility that guys that are driving around when there's a bump you know uh they're a little uncomfortable okay they're having a little jolt of anxiety like they're worried that they just may have gone over a landline so there's going to be changes now the question is is this catastrophic for the individual's life um well there there may be some evidence that looks like that's true except we have to incorporate some other things and that is that when people come back and get treatment for their PTSD which is can be legitimate they can be having a lot of anxiety reactions uh and difficulty sleeping as a result of the brain essentially being hyper Vigilant uh and it's it needs to have a bunch of experiences indicating that that the new it needs to recalibrate so another important critical issue about the misunderstanding of trauma is that it only would go one way in other words oh the brains change so now it's going to get worse or it's going to stir around in a stew pot of crap now you have a traumatic event I.E Billie Jean turns you down for the dance and it's embarrassing you'll go away and think about that and you will process that and the next time you're in similar circumstances you're going to have anxiety but you what you're going to do is if there's opportunity in that environment which there never was for me by the way but if there was opportunity in that department that individual is going to run a cost benefit on taking those risks and they will start to take risks that are with a strategy that's going to mitigate those risks and what's going to happen is is that there are the nervous system now effectively after a traumatic event it's going to over statistically it's going to be a course correction statistically about how bad it thinks this threat is okay and then what we're going to find is that the the worst case scenario what it's which it's going to LEAP to for a short period of time is going to then get mitigated by what future experience you can't have a situation where you can learn One Direction and you can't unlearn it when it's a mistake okay we have a phrase for that in in America get back on the horse so some kid that gets thrown off the horse doesn't say that's it I'm never going to go on a horse again now he probably should but the point is is that a couple though some do so this is where personality comes into the mix where there there is the the rabbit who becomes totally paranoid and never wants to leave the rabbit hole ever again and it gets selected out by Evolution because that's not the proper the the the sort of correct level of response to the situation and there are humans like that there are humans who miscalibrate the the risk and so yeah it's in the case of getting thrown off a horse as you say it might be the right thing to do because that is yeah particularly dangerous but um but you're going to see variation in individual response to the same trauma the same experience you you subject 100 people to it there's going to be huge variation in how they calibrate that experience and and integrate it into their nervous system moving forward and how quickly they're willing to go back out there and try again and that's apparently what exactly we get out of the PTSD wartime data right that the best predictor of how Haywire a person's life is is how Haywire they were before and the twin studies I mean there's there's that's some of the first twin studies was the Vietnam combat vets you know the sort of and so you you can only say that wartime experience is responsible for their alcoholism at age 55. if if you you can only make that claim if you've got the the twin who didn't go to war right and the twin who didn't go to war also has is is an alcoholic living on skid row at age 55. um didn't have the combat experience had other traumatic experiences in life um and and so this is how it all gets all messy but then it's sort of this there's this this you know these personality traits that um raw people into risky situations there is a certain personality that is more willing to put itself in a combat situation um there is some selection bias in terms of who chooses who who chooses to go to war in the first place and even if drafted who finds themselves in the riskiest situations yeah apparently the best way is no surprise to treat PTSD aside from I'm sure the new patented drug is going to fix it there's always a new drug there's always a new drug that they're going to trot out that they think is going to fix PTSD and really you have a social responsibility to take it because your your PTSD has high social cost and so if you're a good person you'll take the patented drug in fact you should be required to do so right exactly so the uh however yeah I actually am concerned that probably a lot of your uh war war bets have been damaged by the psychiatric medications oh totally so that's a that that's a whole thing that of course the world isn't allowed to even hypothesize could be true and your average VA department psychiatrist says no idea that's true so they don't have any idea that the stuff that the pills that they're rolling are problematic so the um anyway I can't remember where I was going but I think we've I think that there's so there's a few things to be considered here to synthesize all life experience not just traumatic experiences and number one is that um all experiences that are being coded are there to improve the brain's functioning I.E um hey when I dressed better I got better feedback back from the girls so therefore I'm going to dress better okay be it uh or when I change my my hair or I got compliments or what so those things too are significant or you know I thought I was an ugly duckling but but Jimmy so-so came on to me when I worked tighter clothes or whatever the Hell in other words people adapt learn have victories they have losses and the things that are particularly significant are are well remembered uh both positive and negative and um and so that that is going on so the brain is constantly changing as it's attempting to increase its precision and running cost benefit analysis that's definitely going to include essentially confidence and excitement with respect to positive things and it's going to uh so for example I can remember not to tell Great War Stories on myself but I mean certainly I can remember the first few times when I did public speaking I was anxious to live in hell okay super anxious and I could I could manage it I mean little do getting a little presentation in a grad school class and then I can remember early in front of the big audiences being very anxious but managing to get through I can then remember doing a ground rounds at a hospital system in Michigan about 10 years ago and um everything was wrong about it in other words it's early in the morning which is not not my big at all I'm gonna be in front of a bunch of positions it's actually being televised to their whole 26 hospital system and I'm gonna go up there and I can remember thinking God Doug you have absolutely no anxiety none it was actually weird all I wanted to do is just go sleep and you know I don't know have a whole wheat waffle that's all I was like I'm just gonna get out of here I just barely had enough anxiety to get awake I remember taking two or three steps after they introduced me and I had a tiny tiny little moment of anxiety and that was it it's like wow we've come a long way by age 50 from where I was at 20 you know to be in 30 years of experiences why because I knew I had a presentation that was going to blow them away and I walked out there and said oh I'm psychologist was my first choice and that's sadly the whole place is cracking up which I've only done that 700 times so I knew so my map of the situation was dramatically different than it was 30 years earlier and my map was very very accurate it happened just like I thought it would happen and and these docks are falling all over themselves coming up to me congratulating me and oh my God how amazing is that yeah just what I thought there's also that element of that I've experienced of of knowing that you're on Solid ground with the contents and the material that there's no there's no element of kind of salesmanship or Charlotte military you're just like no this is the way it is sorry like that that that blunts a lot of the anxiety because you're just not vulnerable to people being shitty and and critique in the same way that you are if you're on shakier ground If you're sort of like yeah I I ran the regressions once and I kind of cooked the data a little bit and I'm not really sure of my conclusions but I'm gonna go present it anyway that's a whole different scenario than when you're like okay no this is this is the code to the universe here and it's salable because that particular content they don't know anything about never thought of it right right that's it yeah and so the the other thing I mean this is why I'm so confident singles For Worse these days [Music] all right so where were we so traumatic events and good events changed the brain to varying degrees depending upon the importance evolutionarily speaking with respect to what it is that you just went through you're not going to forget things that are important therefore if you go to therapy and they start poking around talking to you about it it's going to come up and you're going to cry you're going to feel the anxiety and you think then that that means that this is a big budget you found it that's been eating away in your soul because that's what the therapist thinks therapist is wrong all they're doing is doing a bunch of unex unnecessary activation of memory files they're they're looking in the wrong place but they're digging up a bunch of memory files that are very unpleasant and it feels very productive to the client because it's like oh I hadn't thought about that like that makes sense when I think about yeah if you know my I had this unpleasant experience in childhood and therefore I suddenly have the the puzzle piece to my adult intimacy issues you know I've been trying to figure this out I've been trying to figure out why I can't lose weight I've been trying to figure out why I can't have a successful relationship and I hadn't considered this and the therapist is mirroring back that this is a big deal um and you know I I just have been repressing it and I need to I need to uncover it and heal it so I need to come see this therapist 75 more times and and uh go a little deeper next week until we until we heal the wound um it's a it's a very intuitive it feels very productive to to both the client and the therapist and and it's validated by the entire cultural context of well obviously if you have issues at all that are you know you're you're anything other than a perfect banana it's something happened to you in childhood that you need to heal yes fascinating and it and it actually is a relatively decent um relatively consistent with both learning theory and Freudian Theory so as a result there's no there's no alternative hypothesis in in academic psychology that says this is just [ __ ] you guys are way off and so of course because they're way off some investigators have discovered that they're way off I.E um these are memory person I just left us I've got her down in my head with uh Elizabeth who is the uh the woman who does the PTSD research it turns out that the best the treatment for PTSD is precisely what you'd expect which is what made Edna foa because it went directly what she would have recently thought it turns out it works very well which is IE to get back on the horse exposure exposure therapy exposure therapy within reasonable balance that don't overwhelm the person's anxiety no problem I.E graded exposure so uh this this is so sometimes the best way to get over Vietnam era related ptsds go back to Vietnam and to go go kick around in Saigon and look at that look at it today update your memory circuits that uh this that this is not some terrifying little thing that has just been put off to the side that is actually brewing and dangerous in your adaptive unconscious I.E update your map is what this is all right so hopefully we oh so a few other things yeah the the map can be updated and in fact will be updated this is extremely important issue so when you when you see somebody whose map apparently is not updating then it's it's uh it's interesting and probably the brain may have been damaged by psychiatric meds they may have secondary gains for complaining about whatever it is or they may have have had enough uh enough trauma in it it would respect to a specific stimulus event that they never change okay in other words it's like they are always hyper Vigilant about people moving around in the background I.E in the jungle like uh they're they're not comfortable in a lot of large crowds because they are they're assuming that they saw Villages where there's a bunch of people that looked like they were completely safe and then suddenly out of nowhere some guy starts opening fire on their Platinum okay so there there could be people that will never say it will never be this uh the same and they will always they'll go to their death bed essentially miscalibrating uh uh situations in the modern environment fairly significantly but it won't be their entire existence it will be specified sensory events will go you know will be resistant towards uh too much recalibration that's fine you just live with that I live with that today in other words I'm uh I had a near-death experience in a car as a result of wearing sunglasses that were too dark and that that happened in about uh about 30 years ago and to this day um I am hypersensitive to getting too close to people that are in front of me okay so that that is permanently changed my nervous system because of the extraordinary anxiety that was it was resulted uh from that no problem I.E the nervous system improved and if it miscalibrated a little bit on the overly safe side so be it uh but that didn't uh the reason for all my problems oh that's a scary enough story that you know I have like secondary like PTSD adjustment by proxy because it's like whoa there will be moments where I'm driving where I remember that story because I'll see sort of a similar situation that could you know it's like okay and it just reminds me I've always been a total fanatic about you know keeping my three to four seconds behind people but but it reminds me to to be you know no it doesn't matter other people can be doing what they want like I'm I'm gonna carry the burden of being the Slowpoke on the road out here so make it six seconds because you can't leave yeah how much safer it is to give yourself a little bit more time the problem is if you if you give yourself too much room you've got lots of people coming in front of you um you're like a you're a magnet for people cutting you off which actually probably increases the risk so I found there's a there's a sweet but it depends on speeds and conditions and everything but yeah but the the point that some of this is adaptive and serves you is super important so you don't have to you know heal the trauma if it's something I I had a um always when I think of situational PTSD I think about the bugs in Hawaii you know yeah um I I the other day I was checking the mail at night and and I went to reach in the mailbox and my nervous system went wait a minute like hold on don't put your hand in a dark mailbox yes like never occurred to me before in Hawaii there's like a cockroach in there at some point when I did that I was coming home and it was you know very unpleasant and it had not circulated through my I've checked the mail here you know 100 times and and suddenly it was the circumstances it was the darkness it was the fact that I you know was coming back and I parked at the top of the driveway and I just went in and it was it was like I completely Got This Hold wait wait wait wait wait wait like someone woke up in there and said wait hold on you're you're in a you're in a potentially risky situation so pay attention and that's like I don't want to unlearn that you know it's a good idea not to be sticking your hand in a dark mailbox all right all right moving on here um I'm an agreeable person who is in a comfortable financial situation from years of hard work and saving my parents have had a lifetime of financial insecurity how do I maintain boundaries of helping them financially as needed without being taken advantage of I don't flaunt money but I feel protective of my situation and find myself leaning toward hiding aspects of my life that would indicate I'm financially comfortable my family is so irresponsible with money that I feel most of the money I have used to support them in the past is wasted and not used wisely sounds like some serious agreeable Distortion Happening Here yeah I would um I would think the same way about this as I think about for example um young people that are in trouble or addicts that are in trouble uh in other words then they're a family member like what do you do okay where do you draw the line and you you uh when I worked in in the probation department in Dallas the uh I I saw over the course of five years I saw something like three or four thousand people uh to be assessed and when we come into my office the very first questions I was asking was where do you live who do you live with how long have you been there okay in other words in other words I want to know whether or not is this person on the street somehow in trouble in a completely unstable situation if they had a roof over their head and they knew enough a lot of them might have been mentally [ __ ] or very close and they're living on SSI and Section 8 housing okay the uh this is this is how these people live high percentage of them the as a result I was concerned I was there to to basically address the mentally ill population uh mhmo so it's mental health mental retardation and so the courts recognized that these people shouldn't be held to the same standards as people that were not you know such individuals so they would come to me and I would be telling the judge listen this is a bad apple that could absolutely do this but it's they're they're doing this and they're doing that and so they violated their probation and they deserve to to have the justice system you know basically put put their hand around their neck uh and throw them in jail for a little little reminder of course or I would say hey don't touch this person they're the reason why they didn't do this and they didn't do that is the two feeble and they're actually in very stressful circumstances and they're doing okay all right so that was my job was to assess the survival level competence of the individuals in front of me and we're getting right down to where he's sleeping and what are you eating okay so that's how I view these situations so the uh I would not have a relative or a friend be uh homeless and in trouble and Afraid and cold and hungry that I would not do okay as long as they were relatively safe and for some people that could mean you know where the homeless shelter is because for the last five years you're you're a total flake and you've cost me seventeen thousand dollars over the last five years and I've tried to do all kinds of things uh and it turns out that nothing has worked and that's okay now we know that nothing works but I'm going to make sure that you know where you can go oh I don't like it there to Dallas County you know life whatever that big building was in South Dallas it's like I don't care if you like it or not it's perfectly safe people aren't being murdered there you just don't want to live in a room with three other men that are that are that are smelling like alcohol and they're in trouble and that they might steal your stuff but nobody beats anybody up because if they do they never it's come back okay so that's how I would look at relatives with financial trouble in other words uh what if oh we're going to lose our home oh well okay what would you do then okay so in other words I'm gonna think down through what the consequences would be and whether or not those individuals were competent to survive those well your father and I would have to like move into a room in a house oh well okay if you've got thirteen hundred dollars a month Social Security you know and you can get food stamps I think you're okay in other words that's what I'm thinking so the way I'm thinking is uh that that individuals or those individuals they are living better than 99.99 of all humans who have ever lived so as long as they can live better than 99.99 of all humans that are ever ever lived I don't really care that much about the one part in ten thousand where they're down on the list relative to their other Americans I can live with that okay I've had clients of mine that worked with people who grew up in garbage dumps in Somalia that's where the people lived out their whole lives if those people can live out their whole lives living in a garbage dump in Somalia then you can damn well live in some Section 8 housing in a somewhat seedy area that isn't too great and then you can just make sure you're in at night before the Gun starts avoid the drug dealer okay whatever in other words uh even in some pretty unsafe places in the United States it's actually very safe if you use reasonable judgment um and so this is how I look at these things I don't I'm not trying to be mean uh I'm trying to look at my own resources and my life and realize okay your that's your resources in your life I don't want you uncomfortable but I don't mind if you're unhappy I think that's where that's where the difference is I don't want you physically actually uncomfortable but if you're unhappy with those circumstances okay well that may cause you to make better decisions in the future so that you can increase your happiness as a result of having invested in a better decision-making process and lining up in better circumstances so that's how that's why if I had a drug addicted kid I would let them know this is where you can stay and if you actually get into trouble you can always be there's going to be you know the garage door side garage doors open and there's there's bread in there and peanut butter and you know almond milk in the little refrigerator that's what there is can I have ten dollars nope nope you cannot okay but but there's a but there's a mattress back there and there's a light and there's a shower I.E you've got a place to live uh while you and then oh but it's so uncomfortable now I'm going to leave okay it's fine that doesn't bother me that that you're unhappy I just want to make sure that you're safe that's that's where I draw the line that makes sense yeah that totally makes sense I think it's going to be more difficult for this questioner who is a self-described agreeable you know it's just it's by definition harder to set and maintain those boundaries um when you're a doormat and they're and they're crying and they're whining and they're pushing and they're you know doing going through all of the strategies that people will use on agreeables so I would say you know another aspect of this um whole boundary setting protocol is to you know put it in writing um think about think about other ways that it can be conveyed to them next time they come asking you know have your have your accountants tell them or you know to do something that sort of puts that buffer between you being persuadable um through their persuasion strategies because they've probably honed so several of them on you and they will cycle through everything from being pathetic to um you know being aggressive about it so it's just something when you're when you're trying to beat your genes you need to account for the fact that you have agreeableness Distortion and that this is going to just be naturally harder for you so if you've got a disagreeable spouse um you can you can put them in charge of this uh or if you've got a disagreeable sibling they can be your your agent you know it's sort of like find the most disagreeable person in your inner circle to do the dirty work for you because they'll like it yeah this is also similar to Blaine big Louie yeah exactly there's uh I don't remember how many different strategies I talk about in uh a a video on our website in the free area the website is called success forces um it's an old one that I did for the McDougall program and it it has to do with how we get out of crap that we don't want to do and so this is one of those things and blending big Louie getting buffers up there I wish I could but I can't um Etc also understand that one of the values of this question is for you to actually get moral Clarity on what is appropriate you're getting pulled by a stone age brand who has a political chip in there that is share not share and uh at the Stone Age village and you're being you're feeling like it ought to be part part of you part of you is a capitalist half of you is a capitalist and half of you is a communist okay and it depends upon what circumstances you find yourself in and so uh so there it's no accident that the two major polls in human political life or capitalism and communism the uh I.E we share everything equally or forget it it's every person for themselves and whatever you get is what it is that you deserve those those are those are appropriate moral points on a Continuum depending upon the circumstances of the environment and so if you're uh so that can be shocking for some people on either side communism is absurd in an area where it's completely where all people are capable of earning their own living to varying degrees because the landscape is sufficiently benign uh communism is is the appropriate situation if we're all you know on a desert island and there's seven of us and we're all trying to get off and we need to to share from each organ usability to which according to his need in order in order to increase all of our ability to survive because we're so interdependent so it's a matter of the we have interdependence versus Independence and so in in these certain stances you can be confused uh because we can we can essentially get confused over the notion that well it's not their literal survival it's just how happy they are well tough [ __ ] as far as I'm concerned uh the uh so that that doesn't bother me at all what bothers me is I don't want them they're survival compromise and I would absolutely reduce my personal wealth in order to see to it with some family member or somebody that I cared about survived no question in fact there might there would be I would go to enormous expense to see to it that they would survive okay so the uh but those are getting moral Clarity on this is step one and then after we get moral Clarity then then as Jen says you are you're a weakling with respect to keeping those boundaries up you're probably going to need some help and you're going to need some plotting and uh and that's okay if you've messed it up 27 times before you'll probably mess up 28.29 but you're going to start to get the idea as you listen to some information about how it is that we plot our defenses against this uh essentially uh a personality weakness for weakness for this situation yeah yeah you've reminded me once again of the wonderful meme with the dog uh the side-by-side comparison of the dog who's like got the libertarian God has a don't tread on me flag when it comes to their food yeah and then it's in their leninist Garb with their hammer and sickle when it's your food completely environmentally situational idea ideology reflects environmental constraints for sure incentives and constraints um we have just one that we can knock out really quickly here Joanna's saying she's giving a talk next month on the pleasure trip and wants to mention our Concepts and names is that okay of course I mean yeah no no need to even ask that's all public record and all all good so um and then I had um uh somebody I promised in one of my groups that I would ask the the male perspective on this question so she has a husband who is uh hanging out with his video games rather than spending time with her pretty much constantly so no interest in you know date night or dinner or really anything his his go-to as he comes home and goes straight into the the video game mode and um so uh when we talked about it we talked about sort of the uh you know John Gray Mars and Venus idea that this is really in principle in a lot of ways not any different than men retreating to the garage when they get home you know sort of having their space and doing their thing but there is this super normal component of the video game um which is a little more attractive than tinkering in the garage and so might be capturing a little more of his time and energy um and so the you know some of the suggestions we had were you know try to set regular date nights that you know sort of a little bit of structure around that that gets you what it is that you need from him um but uh allows him to kind of persist but we we wanted to get a you know the male brain perspective if there was anything else to add on that laughs like males being uniquely susceptible to the war games of video games and um sort of why why it's more attractive to the male brain okay yeah but if that's it's the kind of nature of the question all right well Doug is Doug cat's got his tongue so I mean yeah I think that we wanted to ask for the male perspective because I think there is definitely something that is inherently you don't you don't see a lot of women falling into this trap um and it's also uh you know it's worth talking about because I have I have talked to so many women whose whose boyfriends or spouses um get into a video game addiction or an addictive relationship with with video games um and it it really uh puts a big dent in their um their their value and and their their attraction to their male Partners uh it's it's especially when they're choosing it over hustling to get a better job or get a promotion or um you know improving their lives in some way it's this very sort of passive thing that that men will do which is very unattractive active to most of the women I've talked to yeah I guess I would uh I would I would say that that somewhere somewhere in this mix from the 10 000 views the sort of so every every action that any animal is doing is a derivative of an unconscious cost medical analysis and so the it's very difficult to feel highly valued if we can observe the results of that unconscious calculation over and over and over again that our presence uh is not particularly interesting relative to in this case a supernormal stimuli that isn't even heroin so uh you know it's a supernormal stimuli agreed if it's not heroin you know heroin we could understand oh my God you know they're going after the Endorphin circuits with you know fentanyl or whatever in other words did we understand drug addiction this is informational addiction and the person is is seeking the development of warfare skills which is tickling the Instinct of survival uh and there's also within it a bunch of status within male coalitions which is would then be translated into status in with respect to females because the status gained from the gaming would ultimately it's ultimately the same thing as gaining status in a work Warrior Clan which will then come back and be transmitted to the females in the plan as the males would give each other appropriate deference depending upon their their prowess and in hunting and and warfare defense exercises so as a result what the ultimate goal is is Chick admiration that is in fact what that guy is doing when is that not the ultimate that's always the ultimate goal for everything all the time of course it is it's all about the eggs okay for chicks it's the ultimate goal is to be admired so it's all about chick admiration the whole thing yeah so as a result if if you are not sufficient incentive in other words you you or your proxies are the whole end point of the whole thing okay so if if they're gonna blow you off and not be that interested in you your life and your body then that's not such a good feedback and your you can read that and you understand you're looking at their uh unconscious calculations so he doesn't quote he whatever he is he's choosing to go to the garage and go do video games there he's running an unconscious calculation in terms of what he believes this is in his best centers from an evolutionary point of view that is gaining the admiration of these guys it's it's being it's being Sauced up by a bunch of flashing lights and points and hierarchies that are in a little skill development in other words you can you can understand the extraordinary excitement and make a Kill by just moving your hand on a mouse okay this is a lot easier than making a kill against a con specific and a village in the Stone Age for God's sakes so it's very exciting lots of feedback um you know it the person goes up learning curves they go up higher gold dominance hierarchies Etc all of this is sniffing like there's evolutionary payoffs but they are capable of translating you know that that calculus and if I.E it's very difficult to look at that situation and not be thinking what am I not hot enough um okay am I not hot enough for him to come out of his room and try to feel me up and talk to me and coax me into sexual activity in other words that we I don't see how we escape that inference sure okay so now the question is what is the truth of the matter but the truth is that you are hot enough that he's been captured by a supernormal stimuli then the guy needs a freaking cattle prod and he needs to actually face it in other words well guess what if you're going to just play video games all all the time then I'm not rolling over for you sexually you can you know you're going to take a month off for me in the video game department I'm taking a month off from you ciao okay in other words that's freaking it's it's fair to that that would be the fourth argument the first three are head what's up don't think that you can just you know get into my pants so easily if you if you if we're not in some process where where you we're we're engaged and I have reasons to admire you okay so in other words that's the first level of conversation that we're having the uh the last level of conversation if that doesn't work it's like hey well then check it out dude you you're I'm off limits now if you don't feel if you feel fear that you're not holding any cards then we're starting to triangulate it on an extremely uncomfortable truth okay and that's that's a whole nother kettle of fish there but it is exactly the kettle of fish that would lead someone to be asking these questions of themselves and anybody else to try to figure out what the hell do I do and the answer is if he's not very interested he'd rather play video games that's the problem the problem isn't the video games okay so this is this is how it is that we would unpack this problem and how it is that we would fundamentally attack it right all right and then that that leads to wider questions that may be very uncomfortable okay fair enough that we're we're not going to fix this by saying shame on him he should value me more and put up the video games and then pay attention to me no we shouldn't okay he's sort of doing what it is that he does and he's betraying either a misunderstanding about what's in his best interest in which case we can very easily point that out all we have to do is to uh remind him of you know hit him over the head with what this trade is supposed to look like okay or that isn't where we are we are on a different set of circumstances and the question is whether we confront something a precipitate a communication crisis which is not the crisis itself the crisis itself it's the underlying values process a conflict that we actually have so that's the that's a more comprehensive look at that problem yeah yeah I think that's what motivated the when we first talked about it like you you run some experiments with okay you know weekly date night family dinner twice a week you know and see how much resistance you run into and see how shitty he is about it and that's that's giving you some of this this value feedback yeah yeah [Music] all right we had a yeah yeah we had a kind of a follow-up on the trauma question um but I would be grateful if you could touch upon so-called transgenerational trauma as we're on the topic um uh or inter intergenerational art goes It goes by many names epigenetic yeah zero truth doesn't exist total fantasy 100 [ __ ] yeah that's the that's the answer that's the short answer I mean this is this was the uh sticking point where I sort of started to to come to Jesus on my dissertation because my dissertation is about uh started off conceptually as you know Alaska natives being in in all kinds of trouble in all kinds of ways with you know poverty and crime and alcoholism and you you name it um the conventional wisdom is totally that it's generational trauma that you know this is this is the answer and that's what the literature says no matter where you look um and you know you get into the research process and you start kind of wondering okay uh it's a it's a good story but to explain the mechanism of energy generational trauma to me like how is this working in epigenetically and there's there's some literature that um actually some some interesting research in especially around famines um so you know if your grandmother lives through a famine and she's pregnant with your mother at the time and your mother is building the egg that becomes you later on um there there is some kind of suggestive correlational one generation um evidence that that this sort of there might be an impact on your weight later on or your sort of your relationship to food or there there's there's suggestive stuff out there so that was but that was the best I could find like that you know a couple of studies that were these very limited circumstances um and famine beings you know very significant uh event in the development of that egg otherwise it doesn't it just didn't hold up and so I just kind of kept running into this problem again and again and um you know you find much more practical explanations for all of these problems and much more grounded in not just evolutionary psychology but you know straight up economics and the state's relationship to the communities and and everything else so I was unable despite looking under every rock that I could find and going and doing a great amount of field work in these communities uh any persuasive evidence um in a systematic way and even if there is a tiny little effect size in very specific situations it does not last longer than than one generation and even that you know if we if we were to really rigorously control that with with control for genes basically um I I Think You're Gonna Lose most of that effect as well so um and they they did not control for it because nobody ever controls for it no yeah I don't think there's any evidence that supports that by the way yeah yeah I'm not I'm not convinced by it I'm just trying to Devil's Advocate perfect yeah perfect absolutely perfect the uh the um I can't remember the story but I I had a uh the the finest Professor I ever had I I don't think he's still alive um was uh Ben Williams at UC San Diego and uh Ben Williams I I wanted to be Ben Williams yeah uh tall handsome super smart and unbelievably knowledgeable about the history of psychology he was BF Skinner's final dissertation oh wow oh there you go he was not liked yeah by the students because he was a behaviorist okay but he was uh I I was a little bit that way too like no I I believe in Nathaniel Brandon and the and the disowned self and yeah I mean I I had all kinds of uh young Firebrand uh uh alternative ways of looking at the universe and uh as one is supposed to when they're in their 20s as opposed to and I can remember I was in the basement of the the psych Department um one day and um he he came around the corner and he was in full guard and I'm like oh my God Ben Williams is down there doing you know animal learning experiments this guy's like 50 years old and he's you know it's like oh okay I'm the nobody that really doesn't know anything this guy is really unbelievable scholar all right so uh but Ben Williams would uh would casually dismiss you know basically dead ideas in Psychology uh with uh with stories from history about people fought this and then this is then somebody did this and that was the end of that and one of the stories was I can't remember who it was that did this it um I it might have been Sir Francis Dalton but it probably wasn't but I can't quite remember it's about that time somebody's trying to figure out how Evolution works and Darwin is written the origin and um and Darwin when he wrote The Origin kept in it like possibility of lamarckian processes totally yeah it seems like intergenerational trauma right right uh and so Lamarck by the way uh for folks this is would be the notion of how integration interjectional trauma would work whether it's experiences that you have somehow getting printed in your genetic code and get passed on your kids that's the idea of how that would work and um so Darwin was uh kind of not quite believing it but couldn't quite dismiss it because he wouldn't didn't know how Evolution could work and so um so the and so the the notion from Lamarck this was John John Baptiste Lamarck writing you know a hundred years before Darwin or so uh had thought about how how giraffes could wind up with the draft Yeah uh to the trees and then then you stretch and then you pass on a stretch neck to your kid in other words that's how he thought that at work it was completely reasonable but it just turns out to be not true now we resurrect that in the modern environment with in quote intergenerational trauma that's how you're going to get reparations for slavery okay this is exactly how this kind of nonsense works is the notion that that this could that this could uh be a reality well once somebody I I can't remember who it was in my I think it might have been Galton said okay well I'm gonna take some mice and then I take my thing and I'm knocking off their tail okay all right then I'm going to bring a little mice needed IRB I didn't need an environment I'm gonna go look at the next generation of mice here they come again cut off their tail again three four generations in the tails are just as long as they always were okay so this is I.E it doesn't work that way and so there's there's no you know whatever anybody thinks of uh tiny as Jen is talking about tiny little perturbations that could take place uh uh that would be they're not exactly the Markey in it but they would be developmental uh developmental embryological changes that could take place depending upon where the mother's at when you're pregnant Etc that that is a that's not lamarkin that's a different situation uh and to the extent that that situation could work that way and undoubtedly does to small degrees you're going to be talking about almost always unbelievably small percentages of the variance of those phenotypes in other words I.E if there was something like your mom goes through a family when she's pregnant then it then and then you are slightly more uh capturing uh fat cells or Etc if that were true which I don't think it is but if it were it would be responsible for probably less than three percent of the variance of the of the variation in in fat problems that people have in the Next Generation in other words it would be unbelievably small effect so uh why is that well that's because that little perturbation and the environment that is happening right now is not nearly as important as the perturbations in the entire history of environment and the genetic selection that went into you being you genetically okay so the uh so in other words it's it's the last 2 000 years of your Evolution with respect to your ancestors is a hell of a lot more important collectively uh than than this one thing that happened to your specific ancestor right your mother so anyway that's the that's why we're going to find that uh that these kinds of Developmental processes are going to be you know almost we're not going to say in all cases because somebody takes thalidomide or whatever you know you can well that's what I'm yeah I think there's a much stronger case to make for for In Utero exposure to to Androgen or to Adrenaline or to whatever like there's I mean that would not hugely surprise me that there's some kind of effect um and and that could manifest in you know yeah whatever whatever sort of uh life circumstance but it's not oh but as you're pointing out some kind of Developmental effect is what what I'm saying yeah yeah um so yeah because you're you're bathing the fetus and and some you know secondary environmental effect that is unexpected essentially so so yeah taking the mother taking drugs you know you're gonna have fetal alcohol syndrome you're gonna have I mean there's nobody's disputing that sort of one-to-one relationship between the in utero environment and potential consequences down the line but the the literature is that the grandmother who is who is carrying your your future mother um as your future mothers is creating the eggs in while still in utero that later become you that there's even an effect there um and and so maybe a tiny one but again it's there's zero controls for for genes there's zero controls for you know let's let's look throughout the the ages here and um and see what those reactions look like over time from generation to generation so yeah you're looking at genetic changes as opposed to development or embryology entirely different things totally different things and they are not that that ain't flying yeah okay so put your hand over your wallet because we're looking at corporations trauma continues I mean I I am I have so much cachet it was it was really having a moment when I you know first started researching you know I don't know over a decade ago um and it continues to really capture increasingly capture imagination for all of these reasons we discuss in the book is this is all swirls together in a very interesting perspective on human nature and of many of its troubles is that uh this is uh this is the this is the reason why Dr Jan Hawk is my colleague has as I was writing my book I I and she starts explaining some of The Facts of Life to me I get hit over the head with what becomes an entire constellation of what she will term perverse attempts so there are there's a whole bunch of perverse incentives for people essentially not not only being dishonest in how it is that they're going to get into other people's uh money I.E time and energy but also not not only conscious manipulative crap but also unconsciously believing in things that are actually in your best interest so this gets to be an extraordinary cauldron of of troublesome uh processes in human relations and it gets worse actually in the modern environment uh than it would in the Stone Age environment because of who it is that's ensuring the process so uh if I can see what trauma you went through and I can see what you were capable of before and I see what you're complaining for and what is it you want and I could see that that when When I'm Not Looking you're perfectly functional then you're not getting any of the meat that I risked my life to get okay whereas if I can't see any of those things and I have uh if I have essentially highly incentivized uh integrated groups of people that coming from different perspectives but all coming to the same end I.E the politician the bureaucrat the the complaining uh you know granddaughter of the warlord the famous warlord there's there's a statue of somewhere this now uh this now starts to look more credible and now I feel more guilty and now I am uh and then I can be out grouped uh from from having a sympathetic uh reaction so this winds up being uh potential unbelievable Harvest or or falsehood okay so this is the Harvest that falsehood and it is uh you know obviously very expensive and potentially socially dangerous instructive and it is the uh so that's the that is the where where trauma has gone and uh and I I believe Jen is probably uh may be the most sophisticated thinker in the world on this topic at this time uh there are other people that know a lot of what it is that we know but there's I don't know that there's anybody that knows all the angles as much as we know so that is why because all the trauma is my childhood the book is in debt [Laughter] that's right we'll just start blaming it on on yeah that's it's very convenient yeah yeah there was um I I uh Instagram I have I have trained Instagram to show me a bunch of psychodynamic trauma crap um because I find it incredibly in instructive and entertaining and just unbelievable and there was one recently where this this account with millions of followers you know which is very very popular mainstream psychology account um it's sort of like it's this Instagram style where the person's having a conversation with themselves with like a slightly like they have a hat on to represent another person and the the sort of other person character is saying but I didn't have anything bad happen in my childhood how could I have trauma and the psychologist says well trauma is not only what happened to you it's sometimes it's what didn't happen to you it's like oh my God we have crossed the Rubicon foreign Target um and the the opportunity structure has just it's gotten out of control so yeah we have lots to say about this in the book and um we'll we'll continue to talk about it but I just I thought you'd appreciate that one in particularly that that is really something that is really something I I if you look hard enough yes you can find some every everyone has some but he's got somebody everybody can uh be at this feeding trough exactly and and come come to me and I will heal you okay you know for a for a fee for a small fee we're we're all good um sorry about all the ones that we didn't get to it's always we try but uh we have a bunch left in the queue so I will actually copy and paste these um because I cannot search them otherwise so all good all good fantastic Jen all right I'll I'll talk to you in a few days I'll let you know what happened enjoy your grindstone let's see what happens all right sounds good everyone okay
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