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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-04-24
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hello oh bearded Sage how are you okay all right you gotta do all the usual little stuff here um how's it going good good anything exciting happening in Sacramento so no nothing no no summer riots no no nobody's breaking into stores like everything everything's boring you know nothing into exciting is happening all right all right well it's over like still Springtime yes all right so just to remind everybody especially if you were new there is a question function a little q a at the bottom and you can go up um and uh you can upvote questions and you can also comment on questions so that helps sort of guide us as to what question we're going to hit next although we're we we follow our Whimsy all right so I don't see any now um if you post in the chat we might see it but we also might not so um oh they're saying the younger the the uh your facial hair makes you look younger what the heck yeah I know you yeah you're getting a lot a lot of positive feedback on the on the beard in case people are not aware the purpose the beard has a purpose the beard serves a higher a higher goal in life uh this is his this is his book beard yes this is the book there yeah yeah I got I got one chapter finished another one started I'm gonna be working on it today and tomorrow and so hopefully I'll have another chapter done soon but hey we're getting there Jen we are getting there we're getting there I probably want hard clay but it's but it's yielding to the shovel ironically I also have very hard clay on my farm so I'm taking hard clay in many dimensions in life I was out there with a chainsaw today I feel very productive we we have this invasive vine called Bittersweet any any uh gardeners in our midst might know about it it's truly evil um and it like it basically girdles the tree it strangles the tree um and and it and it out you know it sort of hogs the canopy so it it drowns out the understory it's just a total pain in the ass so I was out there just just chopping it down yes very exciting yeah it's very productive all right I think so I think so okay um okay so uh we have okay now they're coming in um okay we have a couple of short ones well I don't know they're never short but why don't we want to send our book out to the wide world um and why are we why are we just publishing it in-house that's an interesting question yeah um I'm not uh uh I'm trying to think that thing through I think the number one issue is that that um we are we're obviously publishing it ourselves because we want 100 control over all of it the uh well you've had experience with Publishers basically telling you what you can do and what you can't do yeah um so that's one thing that that's the that's the first thing um the second thing is uh uh yeah I think there's some I think there's there's some other uh details in here that were uh were were certainly also going to be be looking at you know probably the first the first 2000 the first printing uh we're gonna we're gonna do this in a way that um that a lot of people aren't able to do and that is that we will certainly have our readers but we will also uh when we print our first edition that may be a small first edition and then we're going to be listening for feedback and seeing where uh things are clear or not clear and uh and so that that's we would just Ascend not have 15 000 books published and uh and sent out to the world at once we wouldn't we don't mind making a little making it a little bit problematic and having to dribble them out while we take our time and making sure that you know this is uh this book is let me let me describe this a little bit to you we're not going to describe it very much but this is a this is a very complex uh algorithm uh that's being presented here in a in a very interesting form so it's not it's not a typical way that you you write that you write effectively non-fiction it's being written as fiction the uh but this is a complicated algorithm that we are defending uh we're looking at essentially a revolution in the way that one would attack the the whole problem of of counseling uh other people in it really in any way it's certainly psychotherapeutically about any kind of life coaching any kind of self-help in other words any any way that you would try to improve your existence or anyone else's this is a this is a complicated argument and it's a principled argument and it goes in uh but this is where we're building a Swiss watch here so this is not a matter of throwing a few interesting opinions out here collectively and then having it be interesting this is the uh we we are thinking in I guess what I'm saying is there are more original ideas about the nature of of how it is to make decisions in your life and how one would act as a counselor to your or your son your daughter your mom your you know your your charges your therapy patients in other words there's more uh novel ideas about how one would go about that and not only about how you would go about it but why you would do it the way that you would do it so in effect this is the invention of a new calculus and so we're not too interested in saying okay here we are we're going to throw this at the world we're going to throw it at the world uh in bits and then we're going to have you know a couple of thousand really smart people that are super motivated I.E you guys that are here on the living with some Library you're going to be the first people to look at this now believe me this isn't going to be some first draft this is going to be the very very best that we can do um that we're very likely to find out that okay we're not you know this Jen and I are really good checks on each other and so are our good friends that are that are going to be editing this we're very good checks we're also very confident of our position because it's integrated into evolutionary biology in a way that no other system of thought in Psychotherapy ever has been but that doesn't mean it's infallible and that doesn't mean that we aren't making some extrapolations and that I haven't that I that I haven't over generalized a principle uh into places where it doesn't quite fit because human nature and human life can be pretty complicated so as a result of that uh that's why that's a big reason why we're keeping control uh the book's release uh because we we may have changes that we make six months in uh they're I'm not saying that they will never be released to the big public it very well probably will but it may be a while uh so the people that are here or the people that are going to see are our very best work first but completely acknowledging that uh this is um but this thing itself will may very well evolve over the next three years and it may be a better book or a more accurate book from our purposes three years from now than it is the one that you get it won't be a largely different I don't expect that but it could be a little bit different so that's that's one thing that's rattling around the back of our heads I think mm-hmm okay yeah I mean we might there could be we're less likely to have big conceptual missteps and more likely just to not explain things optimally or you know make assumptions about you know people kind of making the journey from concept to concept with us the book really Builds on itself so it really is this sort of Socratic thing where you're you're starting off at you know the ground floor and you're working up and you're and you're building these layers up and we were in the middle of it so to us it looks like we've caught every step and you know this is a very systematic approach to this curriculum essentially um but there could very well be a consensus around how the hell did you get from this to this I don't get it and if we hear a lot of I don't get it like this doesn't make sense then we revisit that and we just you know we do a better job of explaining yes I had a great question this morning uh young man was talking to me this morning and he um he said can the internal audience ever be wrong and the answer to that question is yes but he you know he's been paying attention to he's a very bright young guy and he's like well isn't you know how can the higher sense the higher self or whatever it is ever be wrong any good what this is an important understanding that the internal audience is your brain's virtual reality program is to the best guess of what other people would think of you and expect of you and so they can absolutely that uh you can make inferences about what other people think uh and those inferences about what it is that they would think can absolutely be wrong oh totally they're likely to be wrong you're likely to have bad information you're likely to have uh personality Distortion with high conscientiousness or high neuroticism or any of them any any this is why we talk so much about personality because personality Distortion will contribute to you misinterpreting the objective reality of the environment that that is like what life is and so your cost benefit analysis and and the feedback from your internal audience is only as good as the information that you put into it so it doesn't get it wrong based on the information it has um but the information itself could be lousy and so that's that's what we're mostly trying to do is is like are you getting bad information is there is there are you misstepping somewhere in your interpretation of of what reality actually is yeah one uh and the ego trap comes quite easily to a lot of people um uh and and the internal audience is oftentimes the is the generator of the ego trap in other words it might not be other people ego trap can uh as an example of this um let's suppose that you were uh uh a recording artist as some of our friends are yeah a few of them yeah and so let's suppose that that were true and suppose that that you know you're 32 years old and that at 29 you had your second album and your first album was a big learning curve and wasn't very good your second album was really good and so now you're 32 you've been on a little tour and and you've got an audience and you have people thousands of people many thousands of people know your work and now you um you now have a an agent and a publisher that says okay well you gotta have another album out next year now what can happen here is that you can listen to album Number Two and you recognize that it is really good and and now that your internal audience can expect you to be able to sit down and do that again it's extremely reasonable that your Journal audience would expect that because you in fact did it but what's your internal audience is not going to remember is the three years of grit that it took to get it okay and so the world doesn't see the three years of grit that it took you to get it and you can forget the three years of grip that it took to get it and so now when you start to sit down and start to just sit down in your studio it's going to turn out that the genius just doesn't arrive on on schedule and so you can start to get afraid of actually even entering that domain and quote really giving your best because you've got a haunting fear as the self realizes that you know what we may not have be able to do this meanwhile the internal audience which is a different set of data analysis basically says well we know you could do it and of course you can do it and we expect you to do it and so now we have uh you know there isn't a specific individual in the environment that is actually causing this this is now an internalized set of expectations that are actually very reasonable except that they're not fully informed because you forget what a chance Serpentine Meandering path that it took for you to get to the first set of accomplishments and so the so the way out is the way out of all ego traps is sort of systematized effort where the intra audience becomes educated into your limitations uh but you have to face it uh some by the way an interesting an interesting way for people to uh to get out of this problem by the way is to have a circumscribed but systematic effort so that's why I originated this thing with starch Targets in the slow fast way lecture in other words here's what you do I don't want you thinking about anything else you're just looking at these targets and we're going to take your score at the end of the week and I don't want you even paying attention to any other thing that's why I called it tortoise myopia there's one blade of grass at a time you can't even see any further than that that's what we want to do the same thing would be with a writer with writer's block or an artist or anything or a student who's intimidated about anything the idea what would be for example you're going to go to that studio between 9 and 11 every morning and at 11 01 you're out of there okay why do we do that because we are giving the the self and out is an explanation of the internal audience why the genius didn't all take place why it seems to be moving at a slow rate and the answer is we're self-handicapping to some way it's not some degree while we also have a enough time being dedicated to the problem that in two hours you can activate an awful lot of creative structures um to the point where you start to have the adjacent possible start banging things together and starting to have things starting to gel okay then of course when you do that and you give that concerted effort for a couple hours then you get out what will then happen is the next 22 hours of your life both awakened sleeping the Adaptive unconscious is going to be working on the problem you can't stop it from doing that you've primed the pump you've opened Loops okay so now you get out of way you come back the next morning at 9am and you go down at 9 to 11. and now you are beginning with a whole bunch of new dendritic spines have been coagulating and you are ahead of where you were yesterday but you still may not come up with the solution but you're still banging around you're still working on the adjacent possible you're still putting combinations together five weeks from now is when something happens okay I mean the famous thing from from Jen's brother is they're just they're just screwing around right and boom it just comments well it didn't just come because it didn't come for any other 5 000 garage bands these guys aren't a garage band it's like their seventh album they're professionals oh at least yeah yeah the point is is that that it that came about of years and years and years of adjacent possibles and solutions Etc I was reading about um um uh John Cougar Mellencamp when he when he's sort of at the height of his powers he had his band he made them go back and listen to like a thousand hits from the 1960s and 70s and he made sure that they did that and he wanted them for months to just listen to these hits over and over and over again uh he knew that he understood that what they needed was they needed all these elements collecting in their unconscious and that's where they got some of the riffs that they got for what was ultimately his best creative work so that that's a uh but the point of all this is that by circumscribing the time making it very diligent and regular then then what will happen is is that the the self-esteem the horror that that the self has of the internal audience discovering that we're actually dog [ __ ] compared to what it is that our PR people think that we are we find out that okay it's for It's A Familiar grind I'm now feeling like now I remember what it was like four years ago when I was in the middle of the Sun we're back in the familiar grind we have the frustration of not being able to produce you know we're trying to let the right brain find its way while the left brain is trying to direct the process the uh you know we're having a song about Jane or maroon 5. all right so we're we're trying to we're trying to direct this process the right brain is working like crazy um uh but as the process goes on two things happen the the internal audience starts to find out that we're not a genius after all it however respects our diligence and therefore the haunting feeling of procrastinating and not trying and not putting our best effort we have effectively faced the music okay second of all eventually if we're diligent connections start to form and progress starts to be made and the confidence of the individual starts to rise so this now Stokes the potential of what we're going to call the achievement cycle so in other words this is this is how large complicated and difficult achievements get done is they get done in this fashion so uh so the young man's question this morning very brightly on God very interesting uh character basically asking me hey is the internal audience ever wrong the answer is yeah and it not only is it wrong it's exceedingly important to understand why it's wrong and how it can be destructive if it is okay what we have in the world and he was also concerned about all the quote negative self-talk and everything what we wind up with in conventional thinking is the the best thinking we're going to get is going to be a mark Leary Duke University very outstanding so psychologist basically coming back with the the a lot of the implications that come out of cognitive therapy I.E the selfless curse all the self-criticism is the curse this is where we part ways so dramatically even with our most respected colleagues in Academia and that is that no that negative self-talk is actually extremely interesting those are those are biologically adaptive signals okay so we need to understand them it's not a matter of trying to shove them into a box and try to discredit them uh which is typically the notion from cognitive therapy uh that that would be that the general notion of the notion is let's understand biologically why it is that we would have such a fascinatingly critical internal dialogue and the answer is going to be that when you lose when you have a poor performance uh where there was real esteem on the line and therefore survival and reproductive chips on the line and you find your internal audience criticizing you bitterly for it the thing is it's basically saying where the hell were we when there was work to be done this is what you get for not being prepared okay this is this is what the internal audience is there for it's like hey you are capable of better than this and now there was the girl of your dreams just walked by and you didn't have a beard in other words you this was I Allah John Wooden failing for to prepare us preparing to fail and so you don't necessarily feeling it at the time but you'll feel it at the moment of the esteem loss of opportunity and now suddenly we will get a brutal internal audience basically castigation as is appropriate okay but modern cognitive therapy forgets psychodynamic therapy I mean we can't even figure out what hallucinogenic drug those people have been on for 100 years we're talking about the reasonable people even the reasonable people have not integrated their thinking with evolutionary biology even though they think that they sort of have at times Mark Leary sees himself as a quasi-evolutionary thinker but he is not by the way and yeah go ahead Jen I think they're oh they they do better with the actual moment of esteem loss you know that that moment you the good reasons for bad feelings you you like there's a big esteem loss you screwed up you could have done better you feel bad this is understandable you know let's let's work through that where where they're missing is the the sort of simmering you know the the internal audience kind of like tapping you on the shoulder in the process leading up to that saying you know you you should be doing right now to prepare yourself to to protect yourself against that potential esteem loss so that's when people will feel you know the sort of low level bad feeling the the sort of General depression the general anxiety the general um I you know I'm stuck in life I I feel like I'm not going anywhere these sorts of things and so that because it's not linked to an actual good reason for the bad feeling even the best CBT types have trouble kind of figuring out exactly what's going on there because they're not thinking in terms of social process and they're not thinking about esteem yeah not thinking about competitive processes right at all yeah exactly so anyway that's uh as you can see these are these are interesting and important details into how it is that we think that is different uh and so we're that's why we're we're being careful as we put together these explanations okay all right what else we got yeah there are follow-up questions in the chat about so so when is the first edition available [Laughter] my phrase that I've adopted is that this is a Jack Nicholas Golf Course over budget late and Drop dead beautiful it's the Sydney Opera House so as we learned incredibly over budget and you know decades later you know nobody's mad about it nobody's not about it it's you know totally just fine all right yeah that whole process that you've described there is actually I know there's a lot of kind of cross you know there's a lot of people in here who are um you know have come to us from Chef AJ and uh this all applies to the pleasure trap as well so when we talk about the I.E starch targets so that's sort of um we just had this conversation in my pleasure trap group the other night so um it's it's very it's all the same process it doesn't really matter kind of what competitive domain you're talking about um it's it could be the girl of your dreams or it could be you know the the girl of your dreams because you haven't gotten your act together with your health and all of these things are related so just putting that out there to help people make that connection so all right we have uh next up this is another one that I thought would be short maybe it's just because they're short questions what do you think about Elon Musk buying Twitter we did talk about this on hot Glock this week a little bit yeah I'm I'm not sure I have a whole bunch of different sort of open Loops about that that I can't resolve and I wouldn't tend to be an expert so so I I my first thought is I don't know how important Twitter is okay so I I could people could argue and the arguments being made that this is a major in effect public utility that has tremendous such tremendous reach into uh world and public opinion that that it would be super important for this to have a wide open Free Speech basically uh DNA and so I don't I don't know that that's true because I don't know how much public opinion and how much therefore political force or whatever is at the Reddit Twitter I I I'm not I don't know the analytics on that but if if we were to assume that that is true let's just suppose that it is um and let's suppose that because of non-free market-oriented government intervention and and uh uh essentially favors you can't get an effective competitor off the ground okay so in other words if you have the these uh I I'm not very quick to be wanting anybody to intervene on any substantial scale with what would be free market processes except that we may not and I don't think we do have free market free market processes involved now I believe that that major Tech has warmed its way into Washington and elsewhere into uh into a place of unfair competition uh and so therefore they are therefore potentially effectively dangerous if they become sensors okay so I'm not going to swear up and down that I know that's true I'm just going to say that it's a a strong argument can be made for that so a strong argument can be made for the fact that Twitter uh being effectively taken over by by whoa capital is is potentially dangerous and so if you make that argument and you say okay well here's a white knight who's saying it's going to be wide open okay it's like okay in principle uh remember though remember the the steps of what it is that I'm saying do I know that it's even true that it's important no do I know that it's true that you can't have open competition and have a competitor come up if somebody's willing to come up with a better platform and put some money behind it uh and people put their money where their mouth is no I don't know if that's possible or not do I then we go to the third supposition which is um uh you know which will would they do themselves in uh with a with a woke agenda anyway okay in other words will they would they put themselves in a position where where they they will are will have self-inflicted wins to the point where they will give rise to a competitor would seem reasonable but that would be true but it isn't necessarily true if you've got basically Monopoly Capital uh wired into the world's government regulation systems so now now therefore how valuable would be a white knight who says screw it if the government won't do it I'll do it okay well on first blush that sounds like uh an extremely attractive way for the quote free market to have settled the problem in other words want one guy with a a mean enough streak that says I'm not going to put up with this and this is how we're going to do this okay that sounds good except that doesn't necessarily solve the problem okay it it is uh it may it may be important it it may never have been important because of the other suppositions that are that we that we made even to get to this point uh but it isn't necessarily the case that the White Knight that you put in place the I.E you meet the new boss just like the old boss if that power exists and it's unnatural into the market and it's been wired into Washington and it naturally is defended against Natural competitors emerging then just because you have somebody that is more liberal in their attitude towards Free Speech doesn't mean that the problem has been solved it just means it's been put on hold and maybe uh and maybe the solution that needed to be actually happened will that now not take place so now we've got the we've got something on autopilot and everybody goes to sleep again and a bigger problem emerges later so I don't know what to think that's that's that's my thinking on this whole thing and so uh I think like maybe many people I'm I'm kind of hopeful and and I I see a little Sun people speaking up over that like maybe that would be a good thing but I also have a I check my my own thinking there as I realized wait a second how did we get into this mess are we in a mess so it's how big is the mess and is this actually the solution that should be taking place that I should be happy about and I'm very uncertain about essentially all steps in that chain so I don't know what you think about that John but oh I probably have a more paranoid darker View foreign I think Twitter is very important I think a tiny percentage of actual people use Twitter you know it's something I've seen the stats it's like five percent of you know American voters are actually have Twitter accounts and of the active users you know people who tweet or reply or it's just a tiny percentage of even politically active people but it's it is the most politically active people and I know if you're in an American Newsroom Twitter is your life you know your public opinion is is made and broken and the Twitter sphere um and yeah it's not as if I mean my first Twitter account was back in 2008 or seven or whenever it came on board because I was friends with all of these nerds who insisted that I sign up and back in those days I mean even even Jack was very pro-free speech you know it was he was more Pro uh open uh ideas than Elon purports to be now um what really gives me pause I mean I was already a little suspicious I mean I want to believe I want to be hopeful I want to see this white knight thing um as somebody who's been Shadow banned and suspended and blocked on various platforms for all kinds of reasons um but uh and I and I like Elon you know provisionally I think he's he's a he's an interesting character we've talked about him before he's he's definitely hard to pin down um but what really sort of brought the hammer down for me the other day is is he he was tweeting about it and he said something like um oh I forget what the the I sent it to you there was a there was sort of a preview where he said um we're gonna bring back everybody that's been suspended or something like that or no we're going to get rid of all of the troll the bot accounts we're going to destroy all the bot accounts that was what he said and then followed that with another tweet that said and we're going to verify all the real people and so it's like oh okay so here's what's really going on you're you're actually repping this whole driver's license for the internet kind of notion where you you you can no longer we're taking anonymity out of free speech which is a really interesting sideways direction to to attack this problem and so most people are uh on its face totally okay with that you know like oh yeah trolls Bots bullies you know if you're gonna say something say it you know out loud but but this you know it's ignoring the whole Rich history of speaking truth to power behind a pseudonym or publishing your pamphlet and the state doesn't know who you are but the ideas speak for themselves and people are able to access them but you're not putting yourself at you know tremendous personal risk and so we're taking that away as as a way to beat the Bots um and everyone's like yes beat butts and and Elon is our is our Knight who will do that and I just saw that and I I felt like okay well this is this is the real story I don't really trust him anyway he's do I mean the guy does a ton of business in China for one thing um he's you know he's obviously serves many Masters has has many many little business many irons and many fires right um and uh unclear who he answers to if if himself it's nice to think that nice to think oh he's so rich and so successful that he's just a total Wild Card who has no Masters but I think he he probably serves in that name just like you know we as we would know from House of Cards so another player in House of Cards he's he's a you know very interesting you know he's he's useful when he's useful but he can also betray you in a in a second if you're not aligned with his interest so yeah I think going to your point it's it's tempting to be like oh what this person is saying right now aligns with my my convictions about how things should be and and so let's hand all the power to that person I mean this is the problem that we're facing in a nutshell with free speech where it's like oh well I you know I don't like what those that those evil nasty people say um and you know that's not reflective of my politics so I see no problem suspending them and banning them from platforms for their for their hate speech never mind that hate speech is protected speech hate speech it's protected speech I need a t-shirt um and uh and so it's very tempting when it's confirming your biases to to just hand the reins over and and institutionalize that power in that person who in this moment is aligned with what you want and that is such a tremendous mistake um so yeah I'm suspicious we have we have similar the hair went right up on the back of your neck yeah oh I was I was I was like oh this is what I've been waiting to see I knew there was something like this and here he is just putting it out there and it's not like he's thoughtless about what he tweets he doesn't tweet that often um he tweeted uh yesterday he there's this new emoji of a pregnant man this is a thing now that the Apple has come out with the pregnant man emoji and he juxtaposed it next to a picture of Bill Gates with his with his belly and he said in the Tweet with something like in case anyone needs to lose their boner okay it's like what Twitter is supposed to be so it's perfect so but that you know you he's not just firing that off as an afterthought that you know he's thinking about that that's part of the brand building and everything so right right yeah yeah controlled opposition uh is completely or semi-controlled opposition yeah who who knows but it's if if we haven't been made a little more suspicious and paranoid of power in the last couple of years I don't know what it would take to make us a little more suspicious of power it's uh yeah all right so that's that's that um okay all right this one has two votes I've just been reading Oliver brookman's books on happiness and time management his ideas on having 4 000 weeks available to us all to use in life reminded me of some things that you've talked about the hundred thousand hours um do you have any ideas to share on optimizing our experience of our remaining weeks um of life within the busyness of work and all the other have to's giving our need given our needs for esteem health and relaxation that's pretty much everything we talk about um I just have a few ideas that come out and I don't know if they're useful for this particular questioner but but one of the things that um is useful to to realize is that depending on your age I mean your age your you you are uh it is rational calculus to look at your life differently if you're 25 than if you're 55 okay the um the 25 you you can take bigger gambles you can you can quote waste more time um you don't have to worry about being old and decrepit or or uh injured or compromised or unable to fend for yourself financially uh at 25 in a way that you should be thinking about that when you're 55. the um behind all that what I like to I use the heuristic of that we have a hundred thousand hours left and um and so if you're if you're 50 years old uh when I say 100 000 hours I mean 100 000 waking hours where you're not you know brushing your teeth in other words you're you have um uh you have about four thousand let me think I don't know how much that is no if you've got about 5 000 waking hours a year is about what it is and so most people will work about 2 000 of those hours I.E 40 hours a week or 50 weeks a year so the the rest of that time you've got weekend time you've got time when you go home at night Etc call it 5 000 hours a year uh but you're not sleeping so there's a good guess that if you're 55 you're going to live to 20 more years it's not a bad guess uh you're like well I'm a whole foods natural eater yeah that you could have a car accident a road cancer uh you could have an aneurysm in other words you might easily live to 90 but you might not live past 60. so it's not a bad guess to look at your life like okay 20 years if you're 45 then obviously you'd probably say okay well I've probably got 150 000 hours same principle that the the the notion is that that uh you've only got so many hours on this Earth and it's an important realization to understand that the hour that's in front of you right now is actually the most important hour that there is the uh because one that might happen if we're gonna be investing everything today for the next 10 years so the 10 years after that we can retire and do whatever it is that we want the problem that is that there's a real possibility those 10 years won't happen so you had better uh because people aren't very good at imagining their own death uh and imagining themselves being unable to to do a bunch of things um that somehow they would wind up with constraints they would actually stop things from being possible um they they can be Cavalier about about two a couple of things and one of those things could be that we can get awfully busy with minutia that and we can let actually important um uh potentially important Curiosities and opportunities just get continually kicked down the road the um the so what I do with this and have done with this uh I'm no master at this but I have what I call a taxonomy of happiness and uh taxonomy is a is a organizational chart is what it is so you have a taxonomy of life you know you've got the different kingdoms and the mammals and the reptiles and all the sort of jobs that's what taxonomy is the process of categorization and so um I have a taxonomy of happiness in other words thinking through uh carefully and intelligently really writing down everything that I've ever done that created the midst of happiness and the uh and it turns out it's an astonishingly short list the uh and that that list can be essentially put into uh fairly broad categories and it's going to turn out that in my case in most people's cases it isn't that many things that that your life is uh there's only so many things that this nervous system is designed by nature to cause the needs of Happiness to go offline and so the um another astonishing thing is to find out that uh most of the very best of life's experiences are free and so it's interesting that that's true uh they have to do with esteem gaining and esteem signals I.E finding people that you really care about and then having them care about you uh and so uh there there is a there's a lot of other things that can get in your way dominance hierarchical scheming is one of the most important things they can get into your way so um and so people can uh it feels intuitively important to climb dominance hierarchies uh that's because it was very important in the Stone Age Village so we have an overarching principle that a great deal of problems of life in fact most of the avoidable problems in life come as a result of the juxtaposition of the Modern Life needs to be a stone age brand and so whether it's the pleasure trap uh whether it's this problem here um governance hierarchy climbing Ascension uh that that's what we call hill climbing the um certainly the ego trap was not a problem in the Stone Age it could be a massive problem in today's environment because the Glide that you can try to ride on as a result of uh over overly conferred status could be years as opposed to weeks and so um the the mistake of basically avoiding competition uh uh and trying to hold on to the excess status a lot of the ego trap procrastination problem is can be a disaster for people in the modern environment when it's no problem at all so what are we getting at here it's it's about looking at an intelligently constructed bucket list and looking at that and realizing uh don't blow this thing you know let's make sure that we're that we're reaching out at things that look very interesting or or or or times uh that that we want to repeat that are important because they're super enjoyable and constantly make sure that we are decorating your present with those things um some people are really good at that some people are too good at it and aren't responsible enough looking at the long term yeah but a lot of high Achievers are not good at this and they they can make the mistake of too much hill climbing too much dominance hierarchy Ascension and um too much spectacular altruism where they're spending too much time and energy displaying uh that they get trapped into the fact that in their Village there are there isn't one sad Sac person that needs a little bit of help there's 17 people that are crawling up their sleeves looking for all kinds of help and it always feels like it is valuable or important to collect that status by doing those things so these are these are important problems for human beings to depend upon who you are if you're if you're finding yourself Harry and feeling like you're in a constant treadmill type of a process and you are not doing some things that you really super enjoy doing on a fairly repetitive basis you're in some kind of a priority trial and uh and that's these These are the ways that we try to look at this problem uh in order to try to essentially uh it's not I don't like the word hack it's not it's it's effectively the modern environment has hacked your Stone Age brain it's about us D bragging that that information processing process and trying to get um get essentially light back in a better balance yeah yeah any thoughts on that yeah no it's um I think the it's it's really powerful to frame it in weeks I find weeks is a much more light's a much larger fire under most butts than than ours does um and there there are calendars that you can buy that actually have little boxes or circles for each week and when you see it on a poster in your room um that it's like this is a closed set you know like there's there's not there's really not this because a week is so fast a week just goes by and you just don't even know what happened um and uh so it's it's an important concept to be attuned to and I think the answer is different for everybody there there is a sort of um a sort of a version of moods of happiness for a very highly conscientious driven person you know they're not going to be they're going to be super anxious and feeling like they're missing out and they're not you know being productive if they're on vacation like like let's take goldhammer right you try to take Gold Hammer and put him on a vacation um that's not his moods of Happiness are not sitting on the beach you know watching the fractals he's he's on his phone he's making calls he's wanting to get back to work um and there there is I mean a highly conscientious highly driven person is is going to find some kind of happiness in that it's not where we would find happiness or you know the middle of the velcro finds happiness but I think you have to know your just where do you feel maybe happiness is even sort of a misleading word and you're really looking for feeling alive feeling in present feeling you know uh in in your life um and like you're not wasting your time you're not wasting your life you're not wasting your talents um you know if building an important Legacy is is part of that and and doing good in the world is part of that like those aren't necessarily mistakes um it's it's very individual to every individual person and and as you say we do know some real flake suit are missing they're missing a little bit of balance in that other direction and so it is it's a fine it's a fine balance this is uh this is what I'm gonna call it's a confusing Smorgasbord yeah so your your life uh it's interesting even thinking about those weeks if I look at a good guess who's 20 years 50 weeks I'm a thousand weeks now it's a very very interesting I remember when I told a friend of mine that you know he's got like probably 200 months to live he's like she's 200. I think I know who that was the point is is that that you know however whatever metric works for you um I personally for me the hours I mean I essentially my life has lived in hours right you're very you've got little hour blocks yeah I'm thinking in terms of power so I think you know don't is this the best use of my time for this next hour you know what I mean if it doesn't look really good I that that needs to be sort of consciously reassessed why am I getting bent into this thing some some kind of an interesting little Force as a play probably a miscalculated esteem calculus so uh so in any event those are I'm better I tell you what I'm better now at 62 than I was at 52 because there's less time yeah I know sure yeah you're better even since I've met you you're you're also better at you know if there is a sort of hour a floater hour um between calls or between you've got Zoom here and then you've got a you know an hour and a half before your next console you will feel that you were very good at you know I'm I'm gonna do something I'm gonna I'm gonna go drive and look at something pleasing I'm going to you know do something I I find that harder to do I think it's you know that that's to some degree a learned skill um and so and it also comes with just the you know the CD and the pressure of it um and so I yeah I spend a lot of time being like Oh I need my schedule more I need those blocks you know this is work time this is play time it's like you can't stagger it too much but this is incidentally why you and I are both very bad at email I calculated it once and you know with a sort of estimate of of three minutes per you know an email that sort of Demands a response right like you've got to read it you've got to reply to it even very conservatively three minutes for a couple hundred emails a day you're looking at 10 hours of email it's like not possible to do it and even and if I try then it's rolling over to the next day and it's even worse and so if I haven't replied to you that's why yeah it's um it's it's all everybody's got to find their balance and and yeah pick from the options I guess yeah yeah I uh yeah uh Nathaniel Brandon and other psychologists have had have other little tiny techniques that are sometimes useful which is to um sort of imagine your life gonna end at a specific time right maybe about five years right you got five years okay what what just got really important right right and um and so that that is a you know that that's an also useful heuristic because of the um the essentially the inability for people to really do a good job projecting the concept that they're going to be dead that is oh people are very very bad at that yes so there are always somehow thinking there's going to be a time and and so you know we we want to use this time to have as Rich of an experience at the smarter sport as you can yeah even five years I think is a little too uh abstract and remote for for most nervous systems I think it's like a year you know a year then that's what you've got and what do you how are you using the air yeah this is um it's reminded me there is a very valuable tool that um hate to send people away but Jordan Peterson has this tool called self-authoring which um is essentially it takes you through I recommend this so often I should really be getting a commission for this so it takes you through this process where you you look at your life you look at how you're living those hours you look at your days you look at the sort of structure of your day or week your year um and you project it out five years and you know if I don't change anything what what does life look like in five years what have I accomplished where am I where am I living you know how much money do I have in the bank like how much vacation time am I taking here all of this stuff um and so it's very useful if you've really it I used it when I was getting sober um so it's really if you if you're looking at this you know fork in the road um where if I continue on with this this is where it gets me versus if I if I really summon all of my um ability and courage here and I I take this harder Road this is where it could get me and so just getting very um concrete about what that looks like and and you know really envisioning this abstract time um and watching the inertia of of not being more um Mindful and deliberate about your decisions and your and how you're spending your time and and just kind of riding the wave and and being five years older and nothing really changing that's a that can be a wake-up call too so it's a really I'm sure he's overcharging for it these days but that's like a really if you if you benefit from guided writing um and that kind of exercise very valuable tool yeah yeah I wanna I wanna put this is actually a big and important question so that's why I'm going to stick one more thing in case I didn't get it set already eight different ways and that is that the the most interesting thing that came out of my I've probably done my own taxonomy of Happiness 20 or 30 times over the last 15 years the um and what keeps coming out of it is that there's only a few things that are really worth it yeah yeah those few things have to do almost entirely with esteem processes with a few people that would really matter to you and so it's like wow keep keep that you know way underscored the the amazing thing about this life is that you do not have to be rich or successful all you need to be is esteemed by people that you care about that's it doesn't have to be anything else so some some goofy people playing with their dog and their and their eight-year-old in the park that uh uh how are are not particularly successful or you know one of the beautiful lines out of the uh uh out of the the music from Brooks and Dunn Red Dirt Road was that I learned that happiness on Earth uh ain't just for high achievers what what a beautiful Insight you know uh and beautifully said that is true the most important achievement is to find the people and the things that you love and do those and uh everything else is is is peripheral peripheral to that and uh those things can be important and they can be time consuming but don't don't let them own the show big mistake all right what else we got philosophy hour here in the living wisdom library today it always is all right I think this one is the second part let me find the first part of this question because it got split up with the votes but I think it doesn't make sense just on its own okay I am working on recalibrating my internal audience while saving over 40 years of sobriety and over a decade of Whole Food plant-based eating I've listened to several videos of you guys discussing the steps to take daily to convince my audience that I'm doing the work of beating my jeans every moment I never anticipated being in this place it's almost happening in a fog rather than in deliberate actions so I'm not sure where the question is here and it kind of brings together several things that we've been talking about you know deliberate actions and be mindful of time and and also the you know the self-esteem mechanism and um and internal audience is there anything there that you can pull out to add yeah okay I don't I'm not we don't quite have a question so they'd have to try again I'm just I'm following the up voting here I'm trying to be Democratic yeah Mellie is totally stealing the show back here she's being ridiculous hahaha she is a funny funny girl she's very uh classically conditioned at this point to zoom time zoom time is when she just gets super obnoxious and then runs through her repertoire to try to get my attention um okay we did this one we did this one my adult daughter had a pituitary tumor surgery a couple of weeks ago she had an ovarian tumor removed in July it went well and her recovery has been up and down it seems I might be experiencing a type of depression let down out of it lately is that from the drop in Adrenaline and the heightened emotions uh I am feeling a bit better but any info on why and any recommendations for turning it around no I I I don't know to to the extent that that that that that may be the the issue that's been dominating Your Existence which it probably uh is that um it's um that's a strange looking event and outcome in order for your adaptive unconscious to evaluate so unlike you know the Romans hitting your fort and then you either lived or didn't live and beat him back and then it's over it's not over okay so we have all the anxiety and angst and uncertainty and we have a procedure and we have the doctors telling us things look good but we don't know if they're good so so we are we're kind of left with uh with a lingering uncertainty and a sense of incompletion and different neural circuits in our brain keep feeding us different information some of them say well we did the best we could we ought to get on with it and do the best we can other ones are saying uh looks like it looks pretty good let's uh relax and otherwise are saying they they've done everything they can do what if it isn't enough okay so so you've got a swirling cauldron of alternative hypotheses and you really aren't ready to move on with anything because the because the most important thing would be are your genes going to survive I.E is this person that you love and it's an inestimable importance to you you know are they still in in you know essentially life jail so that's where we are so I'm not surprised that all is not well there's too much uncertainty and we would expect that that would be where you'd be mm-hmm yeah yeah okay all right all right we've got quite quite a few that are neck and neck here so this one this one is a different horse of a different color if both of you recommended a business to start purely to make money what do you think would be a good idea I know you've mentioned like Storage Public Storage Public Storage is really an investment strategy I don't think it's a great I I don't think you want to go into the public storage business um but any others yeah um I mean there would be a lot of things the this is a great question for Doug Doug's always scheming I thought of so many things and and the world said you can't do this so um I I some guy did this some guy had a uh a little a little drive-by coffee thing and he had a hot chick in it he had dressed like it's like the place was just lined up all the time oh it's a huge thing in Alaska it's like a shtick it's bikini coffee and so you're you're because it's 40 below outside you've got the the hot chicks and in bikinis and like you know fur hats in the in the coffee hut a lot of that a long time ago before anybody did it why don't you do that at places uh I don't know if there's States now but there used to be where full service gasoline I mean it's Hooters basically it's just the Hooters model in different domains yeah yeah it's amazing that that that hasn't happened I'm astonished that it doesn't happen Okay so anyway that's uh all right so that's one thing um now I had another thing I I that's so dominating my my thing like it's having visions of Bikini Baristas yeah sex suddenly becomes a coffee drinker after a friend of mine said this business doesn't work that's it I'm going to the donut business in other words I.E sell on the pleasure trial so the pleasure trap always going to be yeah yeah if there's one thing that I learned from writing a book called the pleasure drop of trying to sell it is that it's selling against the pleasure trap is the hardest thing you're ever going to do so uh so that so the easiest thing is to sell sell with it just sell it in the pleasure truck yeah yeah the uh so anyway oh oh no this was another thing this is uh interesting and useful thing for people to know that now exists in the world um and that is that a lot of businesses that have had barriers to entry uh about the uh of small Capital so huge amount of of uh historically happened as a result of what we call you know widows and orphans or you're basically what it's been is it's been people barring against their uh equity in their houses so typically when you know John's Pizza Shack got started it got started because John or his dad on his mom had a house and they had some equity in it and they went and got an equity loan and gave them the fifty thousand dollars needed to start the first pizza back and then it succeeded okay that is how actually most businesses have actually ever happened so the um and what has been left out has been the ability for small Pride to get the investor Capital so I was listening on the radio about them bragging about real estate mortgage money that you know you can make eight or nine percent because we do these mortgages and blah blah blah oh but you have to be a qualified investor that's what they say at the end of the app well a qualified investor I think is somebody that has a million dollars in liquid Network I think that's what the bar is so basically we can't you know you can only invest in hundred thousand dollar lots and you can only you're only allowed by the SEC to invest in our company if you have at least a million dollars in liquid Capital well that just ruled out 99 of people in the United States so who gets to have these really cool big opportunities people that are already wealthy well how the hell what does that what sense does that make well you guys get to go buy that company after it's already made a fortune and now it's a big public company and now you can get a little stock shares for it that's how you want to do it because you you've only got 37 000 okay okay fair enough but it's not fair enough it's going to turn out that there's a lot of possibility of small companies that they need a million dollars they need two million dollars they need five million dollars and they can't get it um so there's now as a result of rules changes that took place in 2016 a century old bunch of [ __ ] that stopped the ability or cut or small small company to essentially uh have a stock a small fry stock offering that is now that is now possible so if I were um I can tell you a good business uh that that you don't have to you don't have to uh have a license to do this you just have to find a person with a license or whatever um would be a nursing home so uh it would it wouldn't like if I had to make a bunch of money right now you put a gun to my head and said Doug Wilde you better make 10 million dollars in the next 10 years or you're not going to be able to get that liver transplant you know out of somebody that's that that's in an auto accident in Bavaria that is going to fit you so you have to do that or you have to do it better to do it then I have to do it for somebody I love and myself okay so I take it I got to do this well what am I going to do well I would probably have a chain of of nursing homes why do I know that this is valuable I know it's valuable because I got I'm in nursing home right now with a woman downstairs that's 89 years old and I don't have a reasonable place to put her okay so the uh so as a result I'm aware that this is this is one of many things like this and and so you have little bitty people that scratch out their Equity buy some little house put four people in it and then you know if they're diligent and they work for years they scratch up some more money and then they buy a second one this is very common process by the way in the United States the uh so you got little people little families that own two or three of these things and they could be very successful well you don't have to do it that way anymore you can have this mini crowdfunding where you can raise five million dollars for the dollar to share for five million shares and you're now a little [ __ ] public company that you get to play just like Apple computer does and so you can buy stock in these things I forget the websites that are involved here that you can go to these websites and it's like Robin Hood like that the little the little mini Traders yeah you not only could invest in those and look at them carefully and see if they make sense but you can also um you could you could start your own business and get some Capital behind you uh that would not be expensive because it's a stock issue in your dream okay so if I had to I would I would have some nursing home with 12 beds in some counties subdivision somewhere you know I don't know north of Santa Rosa and I would do that knowing that I would I would fill it and if I had a million dollars in investor Capital that basically paid for the real estate it would take the pain and stress and 14-year Odyssey that would otherwise take me to pull that Capital together and I could do it in a year okay so that's how if you have the competence and interest if you're some person that has been the manager of a nursing home and you know not a I mean a little Nursing Facility these little I forget what they call Assisted Living if you're somebody that's been doing that for nine years and you've got an RN and you've been working for the man and uh and they've been raking up big time profits while you've been the one rearrange rearranging the bedpan changes for God's sakes if you've got the chops in interest you could probably do one yourself now and they become very well to do in doing so so the entrepreneurial uh a very important barrier to entry in entrepreneurship has been has been lifted and so that it's important for for anybody with any any little fire breathing dragons out there it's useful for you to know that that exists okay all right there's there's always a new scheme it's funny this this little community that I'm in really demands that you participate in the Facebook discussions because it's the only way that you can like find out you know who can plow my driveway or who can you know who do you recommend for an emergency overnight plumber or all this kind of stuff so it's forced me to like get I'm not on Facebook but I like am in the group um and so someone posted the other day this guy uh entrepreneur he's like I see a lot of people looking for help mowing their lawns I'm available for like 125 an hour um and so he's mowing lawns for over a hundred dollars an hour and of course there was a little discussion in the thread being like isn't that a little a little pricey he's like hey that's the that's the market and this is out in the sticks so you can always start a lawn mowing business just you know get yourself a nice ride rider mower and listen to podcasts and that's always been my fallback position Jen because that's where I started as a kid yeah yeah this business so I had a thriving lawn business that I did as many as 17 a week yeah and people people you know once once you're in you're in unless you really screw it up you know there's so much kind of inertia where it's like oh that's the kid who even though he doesn't do an A plus job it's easier to keep him than it is to kind of go back to the drawing board and find someone else he's good enough you know so yeah there's always there's always yard works really good though I'm sure you're a Virgo you're a Virgo mowing the Earth you don't have to be very good I'll turn it over to my friend when I got you know when I became later in high school he screwed it up that can complain there you go there you go the first thing he did was raise their rates are you sure this wasn't Alan your friend cousin to Alan's cousin his second cousin there you go the jeans did not fall far from the tree that's hilarious Allen would have done a good job but he also would have jacked up the prices yeah all right all right well we are well over do you want to do one more we've got I don't know if we have okay let's see this one is potentially long so we should keep it short just so we don't we don't go too far over but uh it's what a little lightning round on it yeah lightning round it's it's in principle fairly simple question hi after listening to all the podcasts all the living wisdom webinars all the patreon shows and reading many of the books that you recommend I now have a high intolerance for most experts and their articles or books as most are inconsistent with evolutionary biology or do not account for it Welcome to our world you have been issued your pair of Chucky Darwin glasses would you say you can never take them off would you say that it's essential to understand evolutionary biology before you could be an expert in almost any aspect of subject matter having to do with humans in the relationships I think you have to have a working you have to understand the basics you have to you have to have a seventh grade understanding of human biology and and what evolution is you don't have to be an expert you just have to ground yourself in natural and sexual selection and extrapolate and have enough IQ and and just enough horsepower to to follow it where it takes you um yeah you don't have to be Dawkins yeah absolutely perfect the the fundamentals of natural selection or and sexual selection are their their uh they're actually quite simple uh selection uh inheritance and variation are the three fundamentals of of uh of natural selection and then then if there's one book that you really want to read to understand sexual selection it's the mating Mind by Miller so you don't you you don't need any detail of anything else uh in in biology to do this so the beauty is Jen just said it all but I'm going to say it again because I'm the last word freak that's really true the uh and that is that that people uh sometimes or have a mistaken notion that in order to to understand human nature you're going to need to understand it down at the level of the neuron and the neuroscienceists are actually the Geniuses uh that are going to explain how this all works that could not be further from the truth the truth is you don't need to know anything about how the brain uh is structured or how it's wired up at all the chibian cosmetes made this argument in the mid-1990s it was uh uh it was a vague question in my mind as I was ignoring Neuroscience uh because I I was so I was learning so much and running so fast at the learning curve in evolutionary psychology I didn't even have time to look sideways but occasionally I would get some smart person um you know basically a peanut gallery uh objection that the real geniuses were in Neuroscience you know dmazzio and people like this and it's like uh no that tubing Cosmetics made the principled argument that in fact you wouldn't have to know anything about how the brain is wired up all you need to understand is its information processing constraints and its objectives in other words the the proper level of analysis in order to understand evolutionary psychology and all the social sciences is to understand what information the brain is working on and what is it attempting to accomplish which is to further its survival and reproductive goals you don't need to know any you don't need to know that there's such a thing as a neurotransmitter you don't need to know that there's such a thing as a neuron you don't have to know that there's such a thing as a myelin sheath you don't have to know that there's a hippocampus you don't have to know anything about how the brain works all you need to know is what is the information that the organism is attempting to process and the answer is it's attempting to process information that is relevant to its survival and its reproductive success and it turns out that you can flowchart that very beautifully and you can read about it and learn an unbelievable amount in one textbook The evolutionary psychology the new science of the Mind by David Buss and if you do that you will know more about psychology and sociology and anthropology and you know economics and it was the underlying basis of all Human Action you will know more than probably almost any professor in the neurosciences in the world literally psych one okay but it's psych one has it has never been taught before and so that is uh so the uh so the answer to the question is no you do not need to know about crossing over meiosis versus mitosis and you know what codon does what no need any of it all you need to know is what do I want what do other people want why is that and how are they going about trying to get what they want and how should I be going about trying to get what I want that's what it is and so that's uh that that's exactly what we talked about here all right all right Doug had the last word so we better shut it down I don't want to add any follow-ups he'll get all angsty it's awesome to see everybody who had a good crowd today so um um yeah all right until next time all right I gotta get back to my chainsaw my moods of Happiness are I need yeah that's that's where my current moods of Happiness are pulling out Bittersweet all right see you soon bye
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