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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-06-08
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green I didn't I haven't seen it oh man you've got to see we every time I use this background or we talk about it it's you really are missing a very important and very relevant classic that is set in 2022 in fact so yeah yes this is this is the scene where Charlton Heston is after dogged pursuit of the truth is discovering starting to discover um the true horrors of what's going on oh hello hello beautiful Charlotte Smith she's looking extra beautiful today coming in for some coming in for her she's ready for her close-up yeah she's like she's always ready for a close-up that's true she was born ready and get this all set up as usual everybody you can um upvote and comment on questions to kind of guide us here um although we reserve the right to ignore it completely which we do half the time um all right we've already got one in there is there any other sort of housekeeping or anything else to to talk about look out okay oh well he'll eventually what's going on he went sorry it's uh breaking up oh well that's I'm sure that's welcome yeah she'll eventually uh all right he's always welcome yeah all right so this is a question we've talked about this um in the uh in the Virtual Village that I do but it's coming up here too um for the male perspective um why do women do so spectacularly well in the modern job market despite having much lower incentives at least in theory after all they're standing than data dating arena is mostly determined by other factors while the pool of potential dateable mates actually shrinks considerably as women climb along the career ladder um yeah one thing that not to slap this question around okay because I don't I don't mean to to be disagreeable but I'm inherently disagreeable so it just happens one thing that I'm not wild about is are questions that assume big categorical truths that are not true okay so in other words this we we start out on a false assumption why do women do spectacularly well who says they do there's no evidence for that okay so uh women are individual humans individual humans do well or poorly in the job market so um maybe what this person is trying to say if we're to translate their thinking um why do women have high IQ and high conscientiousness invest a lot in highbrow educations that result in them having fancy jobs if it isn't going to make them any more attractive in The Mating Market okay that's an interesting question um there there would be multiple reasons for that number one there are there are speaking of beautiful women she's the most beautiful yeah yeah um so the the first the first issue is is that material wealth is extremely useful the the entire purpose of life on Earth is the acquisition of resources obviously in order to turn to turn that into DNA so it's no surprise that whether or not you ever decide to have children or not or ever have children or not the Machinery that's inside of your head is basically a cost-benefit analytic engine that's designed by Nature as a resource acquisition device so uh so it turns out that that resources just in principle uh resources are valuable and there's nothing else that is uh in other words it's uh those resources come in the forms of uh if I'm if I'm wealthier I'm likelier to have more confident friends because I could live in a fancier neighborhood and go to go to fancier cool stuff and you know spend five thousand dollars to have some fancy seminar on and uh you know telescopes you know they're going to tell me all about Saturns because some cool you know week-long thing it's like well what is that about and why would we care answer you're going to be hanging around higher class DNA and so the uh so the point is is that resources are valuable and therefore uh some young lady with a big IQ and a lot of conscientiousness and a lot of emotional stability I.E a bunch of things that are not common so we start saying okay well what would a uh what would a a young woman with a lot of brains a lot of conscientiousness and a lot of emotional stability why would she you know get herself a really good high paying job well why shouldn't she the truth of the matter is is that um it's it's what else is she going to be doing with her time and energy and it's going to turn out that a whole lot of them won't there's a lot of women with high IQs and conscientiousness and intelligence excuse me and uh emotional stability that in fact remarkably do not do that actually the more interesting and obvious question from evolutionary psychology is how come there's an awful lot of high IQ women with a lot of conscientiousness and emotional stability that don't do nearly as well in the job market as their corresponding males and I will submit that they don't okay they don't because those men are angling for the resources and they are they are absolutely going to take no prisoners to get there and you might say well you know there's a lot of women there that are doing that yeah well let's find out who's in fact the head of the law firm 20 years from now okay let's see if it's George or whether it's Janet I put my money on George okay this is America bias who's going to be who is going to be the head of the surgical team at Johns Hopkins okay let's figure out who that's going to be it's not going to be the most talented surgeon but it's going to be the one that worked the hardest and we're going to find out that that's going to be George it's not going to be Janet it's going to be also the more disagreeable one all things equal the the one who is willing to sort of elbow people out of the way and climb that dominance hierarchy no question okay but the point of all this is that the men are more motivated to get a handle those resources because nobody's going to give it to him but if you're a female somebody's going to give it to you why because that was how that was their stocking trade to try to get your 20 better looks than he had okay so yeah the question uh to me uh somebody has made a few casual observations about a few individuals that have surprised them what is this 28 year old nice looking young woman doing in our in our in our surgical residency why the hell is she here okay the answer is oh well she's spectacularly bright she's very conscientious she's very emotionally uh uh uh stable and so she has dominance hierarchy climbing genes that she inherited through both of her parents uh uh no no doubt her dad is something fancy he's the president of the Chase Manhattan and so as a result of that she's got unusual chips in there that are causing her to be you know spectacularly successful at a young age why isn't she just out being a debutante okay answer yeah she's an unusual constellation of genes so I think that's the that's the uh answer the question it's perfectly reasonable that she would run the cost benefit that way I would also argue something really interesting that um that that you don't hear argued very often or I don't think people think about this very often um you and I have a friend Jen who has a lot of testosterone in her yes I know who we're talking about okay that that friend uh uh you wouldn't know that she has a lot of testosterone or by looking at her okay but she does in fact she has carried an m616 around for instance the the f-bombs tell the tale yes that that creature has a sister that sister is even more testosteronized than she is okay both of them are really actually Uber athletic and um and it's going to turn out that the sister is is more determinedly athletic than our girl okay and it turns out that there it was an e an interesting reason why and that is that the sister uh explained she needed to get big and strong and athletic as hell because that's what men are are attracted to aren't they wow that's some interesting Distortion egocentric bias yeah okay yeah so it's gonna turn out in the same way I believe some of your young hard-working highly intelligent females that are trying to achieve and the economic professional Arena have an egocentric bias because that's what they value oh one trillion percent I mean I I think if you're to interrogate those women they believe oh well I'm looking for my equal and he's not going to be interested in or respect me if I'm if I'm not you know competitive in the same job market that he is and plus this is where I'm going to find him you know where else am I going to find him so that's you know absolutely it's a desire for resources and there's also the um inferred display that goes along with that which most of these women are really truly subjectively believing is a very important asset on The Dating Market within those circles because it's it is so much for them yes yeah and I think and I think that they're just some extent they're wrong okay to some extent yeah to some extent they are and they're probably wrong because of the egocentric biases limitation so that that's that's probably a reason we see that later and then they wind up getting frustrated when when their fiance the doctor falls in love with the hot secretary after they've been there through residency and they've they've put in the hard time and they've supported him and yes as soon as he gets established it's the secretary yes um yeah I think there's also some of what is inferred by this question and I I know because I know the questioner we've talked about this in the in the other group is that there are a lot of these [ __ ] jobs right there's a lot of these so if we kind of move from looking at that that socioeconomic status especelon of humans that we've been talking about and we look Instead at the at the midwits um and you know all we do know that there are more women who are graduating from college there are more women in grad school in most programs not not still in stem or you know where where we need to get better representation according to all the Deans but um certainly across the social sciences and the humanities um uh many more women than men at every level of education and and doing better in general um and they tend to translate that into you know success in the workplace um and so a lot of those jobs are program managers of non-profits or um you know know assistant director of blah blah blah and it's it's this kind of um you know middle middle of the of the bell curve not really doing anything terribly significant significant um helping the whole machine contribute to its own existence and perpetuate itself um there's not a huge amount of responsibility associated with the job there's there's not a huge amount of status either although you do have a nice little title usually and you get to feel like you've got your little team or whatever it is that you have so there are women are having great success in that Realm so you know he might be inquiring about what is the motivation there why why are you you spending 50 hours a week at your mid-level non-profit job or at your administrative school job or you know something something like this that is um not trying to make that big status signal for the potential mate that um we're inferring that you would be in this other scenario right got it yeah the uh yeah I think there's I'm not I'm not ultimately sure what the question is that the that that people people work hard to try to achieve things to get resources and I think really relations as I shut up and not interrupted okay no I think I I started to interrupt you and then it's fine we're just yeah I think it's basically the same story essentially is what we're both trying to say is that there's nothing dramatically different about that you're just marketing to a different tier of potential mates um so there's nothing special about the high IQ High conscientious High stable female um that is that different from any female who is you know really trying to prove her value in the job market um I think it's an important place for females to get uh have a social life as well once they're out of school um their female co-workers are a big source of social sustenance for a lot of women at least they were pre-pandemic so um that's a piece of it too yeah I was gonna say what I was trying to get said was um as the world has big strong heavy machine equipment doing what used to be the labor of of the species okay it's going to turn out that that social organizational processes become increasingly useful okay uh economically in other words can we have eight little people all get together pretty well while we sell socks at Sears the truth of the matter is that that's not that now has some value to it by God it has 17 an hour worth of value to it and you know can you get in Susie to come in and cut cover for Kerry's shift and you know the person that can you know smooth those little feathers and have that arranged that's actually a useful process and then meet with a customer and smile whereas as my dad used to send my mother on little social psychological errands when there was conflicts you know in the business they were in he would say I'm not going over there to talk because men snarl at each other okay and she's right in other words we you know so there's a there's a utility in the female who's not seeking to get dominance over a situation that can be a very useful thing in the world meanwhile well men are more designed for systems and quasi-engineering and you know that that sort of a process that are very uh keep your mouth shut and don't say a word and just focus on the thing I.E be a diesel mechanic okay so the you you can see the nature of capital the rules um uh all kinds of of different things could conspire in any given economy to have the check that has the Sox girls get along making as much as a diesel account um which is actually wasn't possible 80 years ago there there wasn't sufficient capital in the world that you could have fancy stores and such incredibly cheap and Manufacturing to have these Goods so that literally the social process by which we do this well winds up being valuable it used to be you're on the factory floor and when the whistle blows that's when you leave mm-hmm you know what I mean but we no longer are in that we're in that situation if you're in 70 percent of the world or 50 of the world if you're in India and China that's still your reality but but in the United States in the western uh democracies where things are wealthier that is no longer the reality the reality is having the girls get along winds up being he actually economically valuable and part of the advertisement because it's really it's a function of choice right so you can think of like early early you know uh little uh Town stores for example so there was a little Marketplace owner who you know a little shop owner who sat there behind the counter and it's like oh I need some flour or I need some you know some fabric or whatever it is that I need but it's not like you're choosing among a bunch of different things or you need somebody to help you with that choice process it's you take it or leave it there's there's no real sales going on here so as soon as we get into more choice and and more people have a little more flexible a little more disposable income to spend um then it becomes part of the competitive sales process and you and you do need those um those skills that women tend to specialize more in on average across the bell curve um that becomes more valuable than it was even you know 150 years ago so oh yeah yeah all good all right all right let's see here so oh we had are there different statistical distributions of personality types by country so this is this is the ghost of Nicholas Wade here in this question [Laughter] they are by country but that's not the most useful way of looking at it it's by gene pool okay so uh these are our genetic variations and and the the most gross obvious way to look at this is to look at it in continents uh but the truth of the matter is is that the Germans are reliably different than the English okay that those spell curves are different uh the the Germans are more reserved uh interestingly enough and the uh so and yet they share a great deal a great deal of genetic uh codes so you would expect those overlaps to be pretty tight uh what will be interesting uh in in the post Nicholas Wade world of the future of Sociology uh which which may someday arrive or may not you know may not not at the rate we're going their way we may never get to find out the truth but the truth of the matter is is that we there are going to be very significant differences between Italians and Germans and French much less the Continental Europeans versus versus you know uh Native Americans versus Africans versus Asians for God's sakes there's going to be a big difference between cambodians and Chinese okay and so these are these are all absolutely legitimate and the differences are going to where we would predict that the differences are going to be um uh they're going to be somewhat unpredictable about how large the differences are going to be but certainly how far apart the breeding pools have been in for how long should dictate wider and wider differences between two bell curves on any characteristic including just straight physical characteristics okay so that's how that's going to work and so personality is absolutely uh going to be different from the correct way to look at it is gene pool logical this reminds me of a joke I heard recently about comparing Europeans so this is this illustrates this principle so um this is the difference between heaven and hell is that in heaven the police I just looked it up to make sure I get it right the police are British the cooks are French the engineers are German the administrators are Swiss and the lovers are Italian and Hell the police are German the cooks are British the engineers are Italian the administrators are French and the lovers are Swiss so it's like there's enough true thing culturally that it makes that amusing right it's like inevitable it's absolutely beautiful I love that it's just speaking to just general population differences obviously there are there are you know Wonderful uh um sort of British Cooks they're they're a wonderful Italian Engineers it's like it says nothing about individuals like any velker of description of Personality or anything else but these observations who just put that uh post up that the Italians or the lovers Sandy is Italian there we go yeah that joke is if if nothing else probably a little unfair to the Swiss yeah that's the only bad thing I can say about that job all right all right so um but yeah Nicholas Wade uh and um uh is is probably there are a couple of books that kind of addressed this and look at this but um a Troublesome inheritance is definitely the place to start for people if they're if they're interested in this question so fantastic book yes yeah yeah um all right and Charles Murray's work of course too I mean if you're interested in the sort of U.S context um but uh yeah these are both lightning rods yes all right my wife has a massive extended family 7D cousins each with kids that is a that is a how is that that that's a math problem awesome we're back to Cindy and monkeys for me man I thought I had a lot of cousins but that's that's a lot um and the family events on her side are endless I'm sure birthdays anniversaries Etc that results in four to six events per month usually on weekends I try to attend most of them about three and four but the few I miss usually results in some resentment from my wife because everyone else attends and she infers that I don't value her where do we draw the line we're both about 60 disagreeable and higher conscientious if that helps oh my God my friend if you're going to three and four of those three weekends out of four a month I I think you're eight percentile agreeable you're doing great yeah you're getting run over by the wife you're doing way more than than what is required in this trade that's that sounds horrendous maybe you're more extroverted than both Doug and I are and so this doesn't this isn't as costly for you as it would be for us that the idea of this just totally gives me hives yeah um I would say that you know it's such a deep interesting complicated question because the the question begins how how should you be running a relationship really what it is and so relationships in principle have conflicts of interest in relationships in principle have areas of trade that are mutually profitable and obviously so all right otherwise we wouldn't be there so now the question is you know what what's the nature of the trade and to to my to my way of looking at life yeah if some if if I can make an individualized trade with somebody over something where it's mutually profitable great so and then I mean if we can make a second one great we can make a third one great but if you say well in order to get the fourth one you need to do this thing that you really don't want to do it's like well now wait a second maybe I'll just stick with the first three okay and and we'll have the relationship based on the first three trades and we're going to leave any trades out of it that come with some negative thing that I have to do all right so the in a romantic relationship what we want to do that this uh we don't own the other person's life and they don't own ours what we're here to do is we're here to enhance our own life experience that is the purpose of this stuff so that means uh what we want to do is we want to achieve what we call the optimal overlap so the optimal overlap is where are we engaging in exchanges over time and energy okay so hopefully in the bedroom there's an exchange of time and energy hopefully and some other things there's an exchange of time and energy that means some of that is in mutual processes that we're doing at the same time because we like to play backgammon together and sometimes it's I'm going to do the Law lawn while you cook okay in other words that can also be a trade the um but where where it's like well I really hate doing I hate doing the lawn but you really like cooking we need to make some other trade involved here because I'm going to hire somebody to do it and that's going to come out of essentially our mutual budgets in some fashion so this starts to be uh in order to do this really well we have to have some clarity about what the what that what does the optimal trade process look like for me okay and so like I have a friend named Larry who is way more social than I am and Larry would have me hanging out with him three four times a week for three or four hours and watch movies with him and talk about this and that the other if Larry had his way he'd be talking to me for 12 or 15 hours a week okay that should be 12 or 15 hours a year that's actually the right trade for me so that means Larry gets to pound sand and for all those other 165 hours a year that he would rather be talking to me than anybody else in other words he's always already going to talk to his wife enough that's it but he would push that other 15 hours you know a week he'll take me as a backup too if if you don't answer the phone he'll call me that's beautiful okay that's right well the thing is amazingly it winds up at Allen of course because you know that's the so he works his way down the queue that's the point is that the Peter S doctor who has to answer because he's so conscientious he can't not answer quite of all this is that what where the relationship is at is it the optimal overlap which means the amount that is good for me and then after that if if he asks for one more hour then he owes and it's not money but in other words I I signal to him that okay you can't in essence you owe me a chip because I'm rolling over for you right now okay in other words this is not cheap time and how do you signal that by saying hey you know what I gotta get going okay and if he's like well listen I really okay well then if you really have something that's really important to you but if my wife it was really important to her signal to her freaking Clan but I show up four times a month for a bunch of social stuff I don't want to do sorry price is too high this is way out of wine okay oh well what is she going to do because that the implied contract in the marriage was that I was going to do this and protect her social standing with her family over what her husband is no she's got some education to do with those people about what the heck her marriage looks like right okay so that's that's where the rubber hits the road here my answer is I'm not giving her anything NADA okay if she desperately needs me to show up to some wedding that I don't want to go to a couple two three times a year then it's like okay that's big chips and I won't argue and fuss about it okay that's that's when it's like oh I'll come through for you when the chips are big I will definitely do that and I won't whine about it and I won't be looking at the basket you know God forbid it's during the NBA Playoffs you would totally be looking at the basketball you you you're you're on your phone over in the corner you're going out to the car every every 10 minutes people think you're smoking laughs really just out there like what's the score got a bladder something going on with my hair right no IBS you know it was Char it's embarrassing to say it's embarrassing to say but I've got a little IBS problem going on okay but the bottom line is is that she's calling in a chip and that's part of being a partner who's to come through when when somebody's calling in a chip no must no fuss I pay the price but she knows that I she I am bad as that that's because that's very important to her I'm willing to do that how often I'm willing to do that rarely rarely certainly not repetitively you only have so much free time in this life you only got a hundred thousand hours left conscious activity you better be careful about throwing away 25 20 hours a week if you're free or 20 hours a month of your free time for God's sakes so yeah I would say that that this relationship on this issue needs a major reorientation about the realities of what this trade should look like because this is badly out of balance well we we do have our own egocentric bias here where we would just hate this so much and so we don't know if the questioner is like in principle totally cool with twice of twice a month or even you know yeah maybe maybe that's where the really it's like yo you know I like to see the family and it's nice to see so and so and I can do it once or twice a month no problem and you know that's fair but then you start to get into three or four times a month and then you start the trading process because now it's becoming the cost of each additional event is getting higher I would imagine it's also you know there are some events you'd like to go to more than others there's some cousins you like better than others and so you know in my extended family I I wouldn't mind going to some sorts of things I would really mind going to other kinds of things and so it's not not all of these are created equal in terms of oh well this is the third one this month well it's like I really like them and so no problem um and so this just has to be an active negotiation going on um and the fact that you both have you know are are plotting yourselves at 60th for disagreeable um although if you're if you're going along with this as much as you are we question whether you're really that disagreeable um but if she's pretty disagreeable it is going to be um it's going to be a tough conversation she's she's not going to like this um but uh as to Doug's point it's your time it's your hundred thousand hours the the follow-up here in the chat says I'm the questioner in fact one of our debates was me not making this Friday's event which conflict conflicts with the NBA Finals game so there you go you have you have Doug's every sympathy hahaha yeah not even remotely a contest yeah so these are these are all what that what the mind is doing folks all that what its job is is to run parametric estimates so it's just estimating parameters about how valuable different kinds of outcomes could be for you how much time and energy would take to achieve those different outcomes and the brain brain is running simulations on alternative courses of action one of the the problems is is that when we make when we've made a bad deal it can be expensive to actually retrench it okay yes very much that's the thing but it can be absolutely incredibly worth it we're trenching it is gee I you know I waited till I was 35 years old then I married this girl and now 18 months later I'm freaking miserable what should I do answer get a divorce that is the answer it's like oh well it's so embarrassing oh well so it's embarrassing who the hell cares who the hell cares what anybody else thinks our process is taking place between the two of you that's where your life is if you made a mistake you made a mistake there's no tragedy in a divorce it's just an error for God's sakes okay and errors happen all the time they're an inevitable part of computing and making estimates and and taking your chances with life for God's sakes if you invest in some loser stock and it's lost 80 percent of its value in the last three months which I did by the way oh no do I want to know yeah it's a long story it's not that you know the uh we'll talk later better not have been company money I know trust me the uh the point is is that you're going to make mistakes and so and it is a mistake to have a tacit or explicit agreement that you're going to be you know that you're going to be spending significant portions of your existence doing things that you don't want to do that that is no place is in any relationship unless you work for Allen and that's the only way to get paid oh man oh man oh man yeah yeah all right very cool there was something I was going to add but it flew away so I think I got so distracted by what your stock misinvestment is I'm very curious we we must know all right um let's see okay I just had a baby and the OCD I had as a child is back I'm having constant thoughts like if I open and shut the fridge door four times then my baby will be safe I know this stems from extreme conscientiousness and that the commanding OCD thoughts should just be ignored but it feels difficult to do that I'd like to hear your thoughts on this thank you in advance um you know I'm not going to pretend that I fully understand OCD okay I I think I understand OCD pretty well but I I you know I thought I understood should anorexia pretty well and I understand I understood I understood 12 of it and 88 of it I didn't understand until I until I learned about Shan Geisinger okay so uh OCD seems to me to be um you know a the the essentially perceived probability of risk being very high I miscalibrated in specific brains and therefore um remarkably remarkably insensitive to memory systems okay so the um in other words your brain is essentially a gambling computer that takes in two sources of databases uh it's an existing values data uh essentially machine that calibrates the value of all kinds of stimuli and situations that any human would ever run into that's the genetically built value system and then it has two sources of data that feed into it one of them is your immediate sensory environment and the second is your memory system which is nothing other than a memory of sensory events so if you're a rabbit that got chased out of a rabbit hole Yesterday by a fox and you're 500 yards away in a new Meadow if you go out and wander around this morning and it takes you two hours to find the carrots when you wake up tomorrow you won't wander around two hours you'll go right to the coast that's what your memory system is it's an enhancement over your existing uh your existing estimation of the value proposition based on the direct sensory evidence interacting with the innate value machine now the thing is is that the N8 value machine uh is where anxiety would reside under some perceived threat and so the uh so we recognize that an OCD certain individuals have um have hair Trigger or hyper you know hyper careful responses to different kinds of classes of stimuli they tend to be similar so in other words uh one sense friend is very germaphobic very germaphobic okay uh but he's also phobic about some other things too so he's but he's not phobic about everything under the Sun but he's certainly public in planes and he's phobic about hitting bumps in the road thinking killed somebody who's going to be prosecuted in other words this is pretty pretty remarkably wide it almost reaches the level of General wide risk tolerance it's also extremely careful about analyzing contracts okay and so he is uh so this is all we're seeing that it's hyper conscientiousness with a few little uh tentacles that go out into highly specific sensories experiences that lead to what we would call OCD Behavior okay now one of the things that you know the blank slate thinking upon which everybody believes that personality is drawn would give rise to the inference out of cognitive therapy that what we need is we just need experiences that prove you wrong turns out that isn't true okay so it's going to turn out that cognitive therapy you know in principle and in theory if you were a blank slate organism that your personality was shaped by experience then in principle it would work but the truth of the matter is you are not a blank space explained animal that these are preset mechanisms built by the genetic code so we cannot make you less you know in effect uh uh more risk tolerant and we can't even make you more risk tolerant within specific sensory domains like for example you know in infection threat if it's in your genes it's in your genes now is it somewhat sensitive is it mildly sensitive to environmental feedback yeah it appears to be the case so it appears that if you can muster up some consistent self-discipline and not react in a certain way and it may result in impacting your the inferences that you make about those threats but it may not okay and my my experience in dealing with OCD people is I see them to be remarkably stable over time yeah and so yeah in other words I think that you can get possibly short-term relief if you grind your teeth in it and we're gonna but I think that I think you know maybe you know whenever I've heard anybody brag about how how well good their OCD was doing like turn around the corner and they're counting something yeah that's a really common thing that people are like oh I found this new technique and I'm totally past it and you know it's like I'm never get yeah and then it's a month later it's very very persistent yeah yeah so that's what I think the issues are so do do what you can but probably if you have a new child you are we would expect that brain to be on a red alert sure and so you know all kinds of cockamami OCD like things will be bouncing around until your brain becomes convinced that that little creature is going to survive your that little creature is at vastly more risk in the first year than it is in the second year and it's in vastly more risk in the second year than it is in the third year by by its third birthday children are very hard to kill okay they they are way safer than they are in their first year okay it's not even close so as a result I would expect that a lot of the anxiety would start to fade off as your your quote OCD which is nothing other than hyper conscientiousness should start to Echo the the actual realities that your Stone Age brain will be Computing about the risk analysis as time passes so I think this the acute suffering here is likely to be short-term unless you have another kid yeah yeah it's not coming back because you know it's it's your childhood wounds have been reopened or something like that by you know seeing your your child it's it's the the risk profile has increased so dramatically and so you know everybody is on this Continuum somewhere so so everybody you know at some point will double check to make sure they turn the stove off um or we'll turn around and make sure they lock the house or you know there's there's and some people they're only going to do that if they're really pretty sure that they made a mistake and other people are are very very rarely going to do it if ever just because they don't they really just don't have that um those mechanics in their personality but you you up the stakes around oh well my kid is home alone and I'm not sure if I left the stove off you have a whole movement on that bell curve of that many more people are going to turn around and go back and check and and triple check um and so you just have the the risk analysis is totally different different when you have this incredibly vulnerable little creature that you're responsible for which is one of the remarkable things is some pretty incredibly useful Siemens are actually pretty damn good parents [Music] okay so that that that is a surprising truth yeah that is that is very true yeah it's almost like it's hardwired in there yeah yeah all right we got a monkey pox question so uh I read the Bill Gates and Company engineered the monkey pox scared to vaccinate everyone once again monkey pox has been around for a long time is spread through direct skin contact why why the scare for the general public I now see most people wearing masks again the CDC is now recommending masks again I didn't hear that is that it that is that happening um do you think they will try to lock down again I don't think anybody's I don't know I never heard the CDC saying anything about monkey pox I think I think it's well acknowledged that monkey box is not going to be transmitted you know in any significance in casual contact so right the um yeah I don't know what's going on with the monkey pox I certainly have an eyebrow up um I I have read but I don't I can't verify that they're well no I can't I can't be confident that this is true but I believe that there's serious scientific work already published that indicates that the monkey pox is currently being presented the world looks like it's been artificially altered by humans hi I think there's a lot of people who who believe that there are other people who have looked at it really carefully who who are not so sure about that um so I think yeah that's not that's not totally in the bag this was but first line science group of scientists has said yes it looks like it is interesting okay that was amazing publication okay so the uh so the truth so it's probably but probably the way they couched it was appears you know what I mean in other words we'll we'll find out more it wouldn't surprise us if that were true um and God knows it wouldn't be shock me to find out seven years from now the bottom of the pile was pharmaceutical industry secret working group that did it okay none of this would surprise me um but but uh but I don't think this thing has that much head of steam and and with any luck at all it's not going to be uh Corona too yeah it's been very odd I mean there's there's it's almost sort of aggressively a retread of of so many of the um the coveted conspiracy talking points where you know there was a tabletop exercise where they ran through the stimulation that included um food shortages in the summer of 2022 starting in May you know and sort of like it's it's there are these weird smoking guns associated with it um and at the same time this kind of uh absolute sort of incredible incredulity that's like they couldn't you know just do the same Playbook again you know what what is this is this being used just to root out the the tinfoil hat crew like what's going on there's something about it that's just very off so um yeah I don't think we have great answers um and nobody does but I I hadn't heard that the CDC was taking any proactive recommendations to protect yourself really other other than some sort of you know the usual boilerplate about you know be careful who your close contacts are and wash your hands yeah I think I don't know Jen I don't know what you've you've read if you've read differently but I think this is pretty small potatoes yes it's that's basically what I've seen is that it's it's nothing to be terribly concerned with in terms of you know what the number of cases that we're seeing and also the the spreadability of it right um so but you know who knows who knows we live in a very strange World more with every mutation real imaginator created yes I think there's more conspiracy mining to be done with um with Gates's investment in the in in the bio milk with a Q um and the baby food shortages I think there's probably real if you want to put your tinfoil hat on for Bill Gates's latest acts of stuff you know commercial and sabotage and uh profit I would look in that direction because that looks a lot more likely yeah but who knows again we live in very weird times so we'll we'll who knows what the world looks like by August um all right uh people yeah would like to hear Dr Lyle's story about almost getting in a car accident with sunglasses on you've told this before but yeah you can give the gist of it yeah so um yeah I was uh driving back from Lake Tahoe so I was driving uh West into the sunlight on Fourth of July weekend with about 1993. and uh that uh was married at the time and had wasted a weekend with Alan his wife oh man a scintillating weekend in Lake Tahoe all right so the uh so anyways so I'm coming West and I've got sunglasses on because the sun's going over the hills and so it's bright it's shining right at me and um so then I turn South to because I hit San Francisco and headed south towards Mountain View where we live and as I may as I make that turn I'm on that road the one I won for a couple of couple three miles uh somewhere near the San Francisco Airport and I still have my sunglasses on which are very dark sunglasses and I I miss the fact that somebody has come right in front of me and somebody's come right in front of them on an on-ramp and uh and so I look up I just glance up and the issue is is that because the sunglasses were so dark I was late to pick up the lights and as a result I had to take a chance uh that I continued into them with a break sign it would have been a horrific crash so my my only hope was I'm usually a reasonably aware driver and I believed that there wasn't anything to my left so I took a chance so I jerked the wheel and it wasn't thank God and it's Fourth of July weekend there's quite a bit of traffic headed so the the car did 180 degrees spin little tiny car I didn't have enough money or brains to have a bigger car and I stalled facing oncoming traffic on 4th of July weekend on the 101 freeway the uh about 10 seconds later a police Highway Patrol Cruiser shut the whole freeway down so I'm incredible so I have never bitched about a ticket since okay so all right so uh so the story there is that here we are 30 30 years later and 30 years later I'm sensitive to tailgating uh and that that sensitization definitely took place as a result of that trauma so this is uh what trauma is trauma is a big loss and there was a big loss out day and you might say well what was the loss you didn't have a scratch the loss was theoretical in other words um the loss existed in other words but it I damn near die as a result of that and my nervous system needs to recognize that that's an extraordinarily important incident to be aware of because have things been two percent different or one percent there there was 50 50 chance that I was going to be severely injured or dead out of that that set of circumstances so therefore the nervous system should code for anxiety for circumstances that are similar and the circumstances that are similar are not actually having sunglasses on they are being on top of people and not seeing it in time that that is the set of circumstances that the nervous system remembered and so I also remembered that it was the sunglasses so uh but I'm not afraid of wearing dark sunglasses but I'm just aware uh that that's an additional variable that I should be looking out for so I make sure that I don't have that problem the uh all the sunglasses I own now are light okay so that uh they they Shield a minimum of the Sun and therefore I you know reduce the likelihood of an error of that of that type but the big issue the residual of the trauma is anxiety coded into the system under circumstances that are similar to where the loss took place that is how trauma works so the residual effects on the nervous system or trauma are an improvement in the organism's functioning as a result of having been through the trauma that is how it's designed so uh the improvements that are built in are are generally anxiety okay so anxiety would be an avoidance reaction the set of circumstances that could result in loss so we're going to expect that when people have traumatic events they should code for anxiety reactions or avoidance reactions to situations that are sufficiently similar as to bring the high probability of associated losses that's how it should work it shouldn't cause me to have a drinking problem it shouldn't cause me to get a divorce it shouldn't cause me to have problems with my boss it shouldn't cause me to want to leave California it shouldn't cause me to be emotionally upset and depressed and wind up and shrinks off some Prozac in fact it won't cause any change in my personality the only thing that's going to change is going to change a very very slight extremely narrow coating for circumstances that are highly similar to the circumstances under which I have the loss people then think well what couldn't it be symbolically related to being in any vehicle or being in San Francisco now the nervous system could not have evolved such a widening of the criteria without incredible Damage Done to the ability of the organist to join cost benefit analysis for Gene survival so the coding had to be shaped by Evolution to be extremely narrow so when your sister-in-law has all these problems uh in her life as a result of being abused by her her stepbrother when she was 13 none of it's true okay no the problems that she's having are related to her current circumstances and her personality they are not related to that the only thing that could ever be related to that would probably be some anxiety about being around that guy okay that that's about as far as that goes um it could go as far as having some anxiety but not any pathological funny looking anxiety because having some anxiety and consternation about a creepy guy across the street it seems to be a little too interested in being friends with your daughter yeah yeah that should also code in there and undoubtedly will okay so but that's that's how trauma impacts uh humans and obviously under extraordinary repeated traumas uh you wind up with a hypersensitive nervous system potentially indefinitely in other words combat trauma uh if you have near-death experiences you know 67 times in in 11 months in a tour in Vietnam we're going to expect that you're always going to be a little bit hypervention and a little hypersensitive to sudden sounds uh but it won't otherwise be causing more system-wide damage to the system functioning that that would be evolutionarily absurd hopefully that's useful yeah there's just there's one thing that that I sort of got uh that I just wanted to pull out of there which was interesting because you said you know wouldn't uh cause you to get divorced or Leave California but it could um in the sense that it could you know a near-death experience causes a reevaluation of what you're doing with your 100 000 hours um and so you might see these like short-term kind of like like oh [ __ ] what am I doing you know like that was I nearly I nearly lost my life and and I just spent the weekend you know in a marriage that I don't want to be in and um and I I actually I I don't like my life and I hate California and not that you hate California but these things could happen like that could be sort of a Tipping Point for people if they kind of haven't confronted those things and and now there's a new big piece of information in the spreadsheet which is that I nearly I nearly lost it so um finds that no absolutely [Laughter] but people will say that's because of the traumatic experience when really it's just changed the it changed the information Matrix that you're working with um and uh so yes it's not like you'll be afraid of California for the rest of your life absolutely right on target all right all right we got one more all right uh let's see what we've got have either of you changed your views on any aspect of EP since you began the living wisdom Library that's interesting I would need like specific prompts because probably um Doug says no I don't change my mind about anything I've I've known how the world Works since 1991. no yeah I I I don't I don't think that uh I don't even recall an opinion of mine previously hell of altering yes well anorexia we've already summoned it yeah so that's that was new information we we discovered another evolutionary psychologist who had thought about this in a new um you know sort of a different way than we had considered before and you know has really changed our view yeah actually and so and that's not not only happening it happens daily to me talking to to clients because I my mind is always racing down through logic and then finding something that I never found before so that that that's constant it's also true in my own life so I I race down down uh uh things trying to track down my own reactions to things and then I I see connections that I never saw so yeah the the the the map of both uh evolutionary psychology and the nature of Personality uh in my own head continues to get more refiner and finer detail L uh with every day that passes it's a very disconcerting and somewhat sad and and uh you know facing immortality realizing that I will have put an unbelievable amount of detail in this map and then it's one day it's going to be gone it's like son of a gun you know but I remember Edward O Wilson writing about that in might have been consilience uh he was probably 80 years old at the time and you know still absolutely at the height of his powers and writing about how odd it would be to this incredible journey where he had learned an incredible amount of stuff and then it was going to be gone you know so yeah such as life and it's gone even if people even even if the everybody in the world were to suddenly wake up tomorrow and be like my goodness I've seen the light in an evolutionary psychology is the way um forget all this woke nonsense we're all gonna take you know radical responsibility for our own lives and and uh you know get get to see him in the right way from the people who matter like that could I just I alarmed the guinea pigs because I was slamming the uh slamming the table um I have a guinea pig compost operation upstairs what the whole whole story but but the the sort of the the the idea here is that even if the world were to completely adopt you know what it is that we try to explain all the time and that we manage to communicate it as well as possible in the book and everything else um you do you lose it within a generation you know like we it's it's nobody remembers what Aristotle said you know apart from a very few people who were sitting down and and really like digging into the texts um and we forget basic truisms about politics and and culture and I mean we're back we're back to thinking price controls are a good idea for example you know like we it seems like that was dead and buried yeah you know um like we talked about the other day it seemed like um attachment theory was dead and buried and it's like these things just kind of come back they're they're completely new to new generations um and so that this is the the innate tragedy of the human condition is that you can you can capture as much information and you can try to distill it and communicate it as best as you can to the Village but it's still going to be lost I I probably should just pop off and share this but I just feel like doing it because I'm so interested I just felt like telling you so I'm telling you because it's you and then it turns out we'll have another Heaven people and we've got yeah just people together yeah I figured out for the first time I I believed it was yesterday I figured out oh I know where it was it was a conversation I was having with our with our uh with our Rough and Ready very testoster nice friend yes she's my best friend and um and it turns out that uh it was a discussion about intelligence and mate selection and strangely enough for my whole life that has always been an unbelievable like a a variable of which that there could be no compromise okay and it's like so it is limited my shirt mating search for a narrow number of people and it's not a quote conscious decision apparatus it's simply feel it's like it's like hey I can't work wonderful person miraculously likes me too bad just and I'm not being elitist here this is just freaking reaction it's like a guy who says sorry gotta be 510 blonde otherwise forget it well good good thing you're Hugh Hefner so that you can have some choices dude but the bottom line is is that this is how this goes like we don't choose these Preference matrixes they they are set by the genetic code and said check with the M16 never occurred to her even though she's very sharp it never entered her mind never mattered to her when it came to her Mason and that always has bothered me for 15 years it has been a source of Fascination and that includes her various dalliances over the last decade it just doesn't seem to configure into her decision making and it's like I've always felt like no this is the right way to do it you should do this is the appropriate way you should need to seek your level that how could you do it otherwise it doesn't you're obviously making a mistake okay and then it dawned on me yesterday Jen in the middle of this conversation literally dawned on me I realized the preferences is selected by the genetic code I happen to have was born with a preference for that because my parents have that preference yeah somebody else's parents who are just as smart as my parents don't happen to have that preference they they are completely like no I just like like you know I like chicks that like to be in canoes and stuff see what I'm saying there is yeah it just so happens statistically that if you happen to have that preference it's going to start concentrating High Intelligence in in you know in other words a significant percentage of people of High Intelligence are going to have high intelligence be an important consideration for them sure sure not because we seek our own level but it's because they were born with a genetic selection preference for that whether they were 40th percentile IQ or 98 of IQ is part of their freaking genetic code yeah I realize now it is obvious to me that that's in my parents oh it's very obviously in your parents oh yeah yeah both of them yeah yeah never that never dawned on me I just thought I was doing it right and I saw other people quote doing it right oh that's funny yeah no that's well of course it would be I mean this is the twin studies mer you know they're marrying people with the same job they they I mean the preferences go all the way down to that uh confronting the ocean by turning around um and so so your preferences for the qualities of your mate that you value the most yeah it's worse than that it just occurred to me of course the next thing that I've noticed that I've identified a long time ago it's not just intelligence it's also deep intellectual curiosity yes yeah yes yeah both of my parents are deeply they're philosophers I mean literal philosophers um yeah my sister has no interest yeah so my sister but my sister I believe absolutely had the maid selection for high intelligence yeah that was in there but she isn't curious about squat but my parents both are were inherently super deeply curious about the finest details of life and here I am thinking this is the way humans are supposed to be while LeBron James's kids have been aiming at the NBA yeah and they were nine okay yeah yeah so this is these are genes and how they play out but this one is a as an issue about what have I changed my mind on nothing of any significance other than a constant update and refinance yeah and and we will both have these every day when we talk to people and we'll text each other like oh my God you know this new insight or whatever it like that happens a lot so I I'm sure if you were to interrogate us on any given topic there are little nuances that have matured um and it just gotten more complex um evolved you might say um and so so that is is doubtless true but as far as like big sort of whoa we we need to rethink this concept um anorexia is the only one that really comes to mind um and that was that was just because we yeah we found somebody who had thought about it better and and more than we had so yes yeah yeah actually I wanted to point out something because I all I had another one that was uh related to it and that is that uh I want to say this to Jen while she's here and everybody else can listen but you know whatever it's really for Jen and that is that as a high concept that becomes some of the most the high concept that should drift its way through our clinical chapters of the book is what are the algorithms that are in the system that are being hidden from conventional psychotherapy that that are actually that are actually key to understanding how it is that we solve a problem so one of the um one of the for example you know uh when I was talking to Robert Whittaker and I said to him depression is failure feedback you know for competitive problem he just about fell out of his chair right that's an amazing story never occurred to him it's like what do you what do you think it is dude like what do you you're so in this problem yeah yeah but even cognitive therapy doesn't see it that way it sees it is somehow irrational negative self-inferences blah blah okay yeah it's like no actually it's failure feedback uh that has been Etc so understanding what the underlying algorithms are how they're working and and that often they are hidden and so therefore it leads us to erroneous Solutions uh the Shan geisingers was a spectacular demonstration of a hidden algorithm and often uh what What's not what's not well understood is that human conscious awareness is only a limited examination of the cost benefit analytics that are in the engine and so as a result the that the the the engine behind anorexia was so fascinating and and complicated and interesting it defied uh personal inspection by people that actually have a condition and so that that is uh so that is sort of the very best demonstrations we will ever come up with are the ones that are actually where we know what the algorithm is and it's not even available to introspection or God knows any other therapeutic school so I don't know that is a new high concept for what belongs in the hidden algorithm all kinds of stuff to put in God knows we have we have all of them the sort of the conflict in relationships being a performance for the village you know the sort of we could go right down the list with all of these so but yes to group them as hidden algorithms hidden algorithms yeah yeah that is actually I think a super useful idea I want to make sure I got it out to you before I forgot all right I'll make a note okay we we had a we had a group book meeting this week awesome all right well yes we we didn't get to everything as usual but um but we'll we'll just press on for next time so all right we'll see and I did want to apologize I got a couple of notes about um people complaining that this is a very European unfriendly time I know I'm sorry um we will try maybe try to do something a little earlier we it's very difficult to get a time that is friendly for both of us in different time zones um and and for Europe and for Australia I'm not sure that that's possible to do um so we do have trade-offs but um we will we'll try to move it around a little all right all right I will see you next time yes as always have a good night say hi to that kitty for me and that and that and that testosterone iced female okay have a good one
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