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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-07-01
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hello are you doing where are you my sister's house oh it's your sister's place got a nice little fireplace back there looks like it looks like a Harvard reading room yeah it's more or less what it is it's basically what you would expect oh well that's awesome I'm on the beach there I like that what what beach is that by the way oh I don't know it's a it's a zoom preset background so it comes with you could be on the same Beach if you if you chose to and zoom so yeah it's a it's an AI dream Beach yes I like yes yes all right let me go through all of the little stuff here so as uh as always you guys can ask questions in the Q a and there's um you can vote on them and you can also respond to them if you like so uh let me just make sure that the settings actually reflect that okay all good so should we jump in do we have anything else to establish I don't think so here comes a Here Comes an extreme hold on a second do we have guest cats we we have a we have a an extremely friendly dog oh it's a dog but now but now he just laid out my fear it's gonna be too much trouble when he gets back up and what's his name Hydrox that's the they named him because he looks like the cheap uh oh the Oreo yeah oh that's funny that's funny one of our one of our guinea pigs was named Oreo when we got her and we renamed her Turtle Bean yeah all right Oreo is apparently a very common name for sort of black and white dogs and guinea pigs and such so yes Hydrox is much more creative yes not hydroxychloroquine but you know yeah it's good to clarify oh all right oh boy this is it this is a doozy um can you talk about a potential arms race between governments or other institutions employing the latest methods to control and manipulate citizens consumers on one hand and people learning about and resisting these manipulative tactics on the other who do you see coming out ahead is the future to be free or to tell or totalitarian oops I just lost the question it went away uh but there was something about China is China gonna yeah what about China specifically yeah an arms race for analytics I think that's absolutely underway um let's see I think we uh I don't think it's unreasonable to say that that what you're watching is you're you're watching um something close to the end game now of uh of a process that's been going on for 10 000 years which is consolidation of power and so um this this started with the first little village that started to farm um actually I read in semi-credible sources and I could be way off here that there may be evidence of significant civilizations far far earlier than 10 000 years ago you sometimes see people making that you know uh that hypothesis is out there I don't know what the evidence is like but there are definitely people who believe that yeah yeah so uh it's it's possible it goes back 25 000 years but but uh we know it's ten thousand so you know we've got you know Hebrew text or whatever it is for six thousand years for goodness sake so um so the point is is that that um that what what happens is that Villages get bigger and so uh a village with 30 Warriors pretty soon absorbs or kills off a village with ten and then then that Village either has 40 or it has 30 and then it run into something that has 50 and it either gets absorbed into the 50 and it becomes 80 or they get killed off and now we're back to 20. but one way or the other what you'll wind up with it's like ink blots on wax paper they're going to coagulate okay and so uh the world has been coagulating and coagulating and coagulating um it reached the limits of coagulation and coordination Etc at different times for example into Rome so the Roman Empire went all the way out to Scotland and Ireland uh and it got overextended and you don't have communication back to the Mothership and and then you get local corruption and then you get the the the uh the hordes coming down from from northern Europe and you know you get sacked a bunch of times whatever point is is that what you still get is a Relentless coagulation of power uh the reason why that's true is that and it's when we say power we mean military power so military is uh power is going to be effectively the the tip of the spear with respect to how it is that you can get Resources with the least amount of trouble so the uh you know an animal can can either steal something force it out of your hand get it itself or if it's a human it can trade for it so there's effectively a very limited amount of ways that you can get resources but Force has always been um you know a Chief Architect of animal survival and reproductive success that that's why a wolf has fangs for goodness sakes so it's no surprise that people would be using force in order to extract resources from other people uh you know we might say oh my God what a terrible thing oh my God it's like this is the law of the Jungle and human beings came out of the Jungle uh and their psychologies live in the jungle for goodness sakes and so it's no surprise that essentially trying to get military control over other people so that you can extract resources from them rather than having to trade with them if you trade with them you've got competitors and you actually have to get off your ass and try to come up with a better product or service for a cheaper price it's like God if you're president XI you don't want to do that you just want to take the resources for God's sakes okay that's what our military might is for that's why we got control of this Inc plot and so we can continue to squeeze the other little ink Lots they either absorb them or kill them okay but that that is you know Adolf Hitler that's Mal uh it's whatever it is that you you want to look at and um so what you're now watching is that in times past of course you couldn't rule if you're the Romans you can't rule a little village in in modern day Colombia it's like you can't do it you can't get to control the resources that they they grow their own local stuff they've got their own local Warlords what are you gonna do ship you know a bunch of ships over there and Conquer that little village it's like impossible so it's no longer impossible it's no longer possible because with enough surveillance and enough military force you can now control every transaction taking place between people in the world and so this is 1984. uh this was these were you know prophecies uh have been written about exactly this kind of thing by by people like Ted Kaczynski and and George Orwell let me I just ran across a quote from him from the manifesto and while you're talking I'll dig it up because it's just an incredible it's just it's really an amazing quote um you know he really he was a Visionary had some questionable tactics that we certainly don't endorse that the manifesto is well worth reading because the future that he predicted is really here yeah so the point is is what you're watching is now something that has been long predicted but the technological capability of pulling it off has not really existed in other words so and it's certainly not been so cheap it gets Cheaper by the day it gets cheaper and easier you get more analytic power um and you have a bigger dossier on every human uh you know from from Cradle to grave and that those bits of information have never been cheaper and they get Cheaper by the second you know it's just it's an incredible logic to to acquisition of information to better control and manipulate people yeah so um so anyway what what you're watching is is that you're watching the end game for what I actually thought was sort of 200 years off so I I believe that 200 years from now uh you weren't going to have something like the modern Sudan uh you weren't going to have um you know Nicaragua I didn't believe that you were going to have things to look like that for the following reason and that is that in a century uh human beings are well typically at this point under reaction uh under the force of free trade that causes innovation uh in order to meet with your competitors the human brain has to keep working at making things better faster and cheaper uh than it did before it does have Choice under free trade and so under free trade the human ability to to um rearrange atoms in a way that's useful for human beings goes up by a factor of 16 every 100 years so 200 years from now human beings uh the left left relatively unfettered uh if the idiot communist you know brutalized slaving governments are off to the side and you have anything that remotely resembles a free Society anywhere then what you're going to find is that 200 years from now the capabilities of humans to get what they need and want for their own comfort and safety will be 256 times what it is today so that means that the equivalent of a of a uh thirty thousand dollar car in other words the this is six months that it would take the average human being to earn thirty thousand dollars in the United States and remember that isn't that's what that person can make that's at thirty dollars an hour so that's it if you if you kept every cent and didn't even buy a bottle of water it would take you six months to have enough economic activity to have generated the value of that thirty thousand dollar automobile okay the um if you divide that by 300 or 256 whatever you want to do uh that now is a hundred bucks so now now you realize oh okay so it's going to take about a day's work to get a brand new camera now that seems impossible but it is actually inevitable in other words that is precisely where the world is going so the it can't it couldn't stop itself uh under a free enterprise system that is precisely where it's come in the last 200 years okay so you are vastly wealthier you are literally 300 times wealthier than than people that were that were here 200 years ago okay and you're 16 times wealthier than people at the dawn of the of the 20th century so that is true just look in your closet you see 16 pairs of shoes I do embarrassingly you're not even a shoe person I'm not even a shoot person there's more than 16 pairs of shoes in my closet okay so the point is is that you are 16 times better off uh than anybody that you know than the average uh wage earner 100 years ago and 200 years from now people will be 256 times better off than they are now which means everybody will be more or less as well wealthy as the Sultan of Brunei okay you will be in insanely wealthy you're you're literally 200 if you're earning you know ten dollars an hour now you would be earning twenty five hundred dollars an hour or twenty thousand dollars a day for a decent day's work you that that seems impossible but it's not impossible and so the I I've watched this thing with my own eyes I've watched uh in America I've watched this go out four to one since I've been watching it since I was 10 years old okay so the point of all this is that I don't even know what that's what I thought was going to happen the 200 years from now with an incredibly wealthy set of human beings of which it would have been capped out at about 9 billion in the mid 21st century which is where it's headed um that you you would have it would be an amazing bizarre life that we can't imagine um I don't know how oft long people would be working they probably worked three four hours a day which is what they would consider Pleasant and then they'd go they'd be on beaches all over the world there'd be Swanky condos as big as people wanted over the best beautiful beaches and it wouldn't be everything would be pristine as hell because they know how to recycle sewage and waste and get water out of the ocean anywhere you want it in other words unbelievable you can't even imagine I.E just as science fiction and space age as we are until people 200 years ago you were to talking to Thomas Jefferson and say oh a guy that works a lonely guy could save this money for a few months and then take a two-week trip to Paris from a place called Los Angeles Thomas Jefferson would say what what tobacco have you been smoking for absolutely out of your mind yeah okay and so this is the this is where the world was headed the world turns out to have had a very dark sentence where it looks like it was heading in our naivete it's not as if the dark Sinister Cloud came out of nowhere it's been there the whole time but we were card carry members of the rational Optimist Club and you know we we clutched our copies close to our chest and we were we're you know we're with Matt Ridley we're with Stephen Pinker things are getting better poverty is being reduced everything all Trends are on track for the Improvement of The Human Condition um and we just we had no idea what was going on behind the scenes or or we if we had a sense of it we had no sense of how encompassing it could become and how quickly I learned recently and I don't I don't I can't speak to the truth of this but it was logically coherent and very you know credible and intelligent and that is that apparently this all went down in the 1990s that uh but what took place is that the United States a General Corporate and political greed out of the United States allowed China into the World Trade Organization brought it in yeah yeah yeah so this this was a catastrophic mistake on the part of the West so what happened is is that we went over to China and started building things and showing them how to do our Electronics which they had no idea how to do it then what they did as a government was that they actually then went and targeted American Industries by using State money in order to basically bankrupt major American technology companies so the big companies that you know of Lucent you know all these big fancy uh uh cellular companies they said they're all they all went broke they all went broke because the communist government of China essentially backed a horse that is now the backbone of the 5G Network that you see around the world okay this was done so that they can have their uh surveillance all over the world the Chinese uh leadership not the Chinese people they're just a bunch of a billion slaves the the Chinese leadership um their polit Bureau I don't even know what you call them CCP yeah this is this is a long-standing history of testosterone in the world looking to control everybody and extract resources to the point of a gun or in this case a point of a nuclear warhead so these people are which is not unique to the Chinese leadership I mean that's sort of you know absolute power corrupts it's sort of like if you get you get enough power you want more you want to manipulate you and control your population like this the logic of why people get into politics Emperor Japan and his and his Justino generals were in the same place you know 60 70 years ago the Adolf Hitler was in the same place Mussolini is in the same place in other words you're watching human nature that uh you're watching the the energy conserving natural derivative of if I'm bigger and stronger than you uh and I have better Weaponry than you then you're gonna have to give me what I want or I'll kill you that's all it is so this is uh and now it's just they've gotten incredibly tricky about it uh so now they're they're figuring out how to use you know uh American leftist ideology and all the against us and so and Incredibly like I didn't know it was Don Rumsfeld but so some naive uh and potentially greedy American pop politicians and leaders have not actually been understanding the magnitude of the threat and they literally let let the let the hyena under the fence the chicken coop and so we're in trouble okay and so now the questioner is asking what's the nature of this arms race what is it and it's really right now by far the biggest threat in the world is is that the totalitarians in Davos and the totalitarians that are in in Beijing these people are after worldwide dominance and you know military control so I'm not worried about the Russians okay the uh the Russians which we've been worried about for a long time ironically the reason that we we got in bed with China to begin with I mean I think it really goes back to the 70s it's really what you know Kissinger's big Summit you know it's and this is actually what we were talking about with the the pivot of the world economic forum and Schwab's move toward um you know population concern and all of this that we talked about on the last talk blocked but the when we first started to make these overtures to China in in the 70s it it was to as a bulwark against Russia you know Russia is the great existential threat and so we we partner over here with China we show them our ways um and we imagine the sort of economic uh you know this this Unstoppable economic Union essentially yes uh and and did not realize what we were actually selling yep yeah you just took a medicine that gives you cancer yeah so that that's where we are and we're in trouble and the the thing is is that what Jen and I are talking about is not unknown so there are you know with every day more little lights go on uh the question is you know how much territory have they taken how many people have they corrupted and how much force do they have and can they possibly can you now have a distributed power Society actually act in a coordinated intelligent enough fashion to stop it okay well you don't know now Jen says no I say I don't know okay so the um and so that's that's where I'm I'm sitting right now and fortunately you know in a major decision that was handed down yesterday about Supreme Court on limiting the power of the EPA this is exactly the kind of thing that is uh super useful in combating this kind of problem so yeah that is a a very interesting in other words you don't want National Powers being able to dictate all kinds of Economic Policy within your country that is dangerous okay that's how you wind up with totalitarian dictatorship uh writing in is exactly through that kind of a process so Supreme Court mints no words and decision written by Roberts who's the obviously the head of the thing they've lost control of his court you know if you if the anal analysis of this week's um decisions are to be believed that Roberts has been marginalized in his own Court he's cornered by these radical conservatives he has no control of his own institution that's that's the narrative actually the truth is is that I think he probably is exactly what he looks like an extremely shrewd very careful Centrist okay so John Roberts is no revolutionary and he's disappointed me you know a few times particularly with the vaccine issues but the point is he is this is this guy is I think understands where this court now stands which is right yeah you know the last wall to fall and uh if the courts can possibly support the American government from uh becoming fundamentally corrupted uh uh worse than it already is then then the freedom the free Society of America and Western democracies has a chance the uh so there's there's a chance there and you're seeing Supreme Court Barrett's teeth and uh we'll find out you know the we've got years now you know it's not hopefully all going to fall by 2030 which is what I'm sure the Chinese want Chinese are probably planning on it all coming down in 2029 because they got to beat Davos to the punch [Laughter] the uh so this all sounds bizarre and alarmist but the questionnaire was obviously bright and quite well informed and understands that things are not even remotely normal and people uh in positions of Power are not debating in the way that they were debating things 20 years ago we're now you know we are now up to our uh we're up to our neck in trouble and so uh we'll see you know we'll see what's going to happen so anyway what what do we think we think that that you're in a major League's arms race but it's not the it's not arms race of an individual consumer against a jaggernaut you know data mining anything no this these These are power has already been coagulated so you're talking about three major axes of power in the world right now there's Chinese there's the Western democracies that are under tremendous control uh by by corrupt uh by essentially a whole corrupt bunch of uh you know globalist Elites uh is who it is that they are and this sounds conspiratorial and uh but it's not this is absolutely dead straight real and they are they are after seizing control of the western democracies and formulating with that those democracies a essentially a um they are seeking to be the World Cup okay and then Russia is inclined so they they can they can you know throw a few bombs at Ukraine and God knows what the truth is is that Russia is a receding power without any doubt the dangerous one sitting on a bunch of nuclear weapons but they are in fact a receding uh superpower so it's it's Davis against the Chinese and uh and underneath it what's being crushed no matter which way this goes is freedom so the uh if Devas uh does not succeed in seizing the Western Democratic Freedom if the United States manages to to uh hold its place as a legitimate-free democracy then it will be an interesting long-term extraction between our economies and Chinese and and whether or not we can essentially have a stalemate and they can have their slaves over there and uh and that we can do nothing about and that we have three societies on the other side of the globe I don't know about that there's an awful lot of Chinese corrupt money all over the NBA okay and all over everything else that you can see think or feel or hear so they are big trouble they are dangerous and they are they are we are looking at a cataclysmic next 30 years as the as the freedom of human beings on Earth is now threatened in total in a way that it has never been threatened so that's that's where we are and that's why Jen is living on a farm [Applause] not a specificity we she and I sit at different places on this and we'll talk about this in the next few days yeah that uh but we are both looking at the problem from 15 degrees different perspective and um and but we're pretty sure that neither one of us is off by 90 degrees Yeah right otherwise there's too much evidence to uh to support the fact that this is you know we live in well I I think something legitimately like uh in the 1950s if you were aware of what was going on between the United States and the Soviet Union if you were actually aware of the deep process yeah you should have been scared if you if you knew the mechanics of the Cuban Missile Crisis for example if you knew how close things came then yeah you should have been terrified yeah and so that we we are not dissimilar type of circumstances now it's more long-term but all this issue through the data mining and the the the 5G all these issues are are a long Cuban Missile Crisis okay is what this is so that's we'll see we gotta we're gonna watch listen learn and slowly you know prepare yourself as you as you watch things go one way or the other as things go better I get more optimistic and I go I don't know buy a new shirt your pair of shoes things go the other way I go buy a little plant that can make they can make oranges so yeah we will see we'll be watching how things go yeah I think there's you know there's there's kind of if I if I were looking at this from the perspective of you know macro geopolitical forces like you tend to I I think I might have a little more optimism but I I have this methodological individualism that filters through everything that I do and the the sort of inevitability of the Competitive Edge that more data analytics gives every individual actor um so every politician every corporate actor every EV everybody you don't have to be China you don't have to be you don't have to be Cloud Schwab you just have to be somebody who wants to make money in the market and so if if your choice is to have a Competitive Edge that it pushes the envelope on Gathering more analytics about your your potential clientele or your customers versus kind of taking the high road and being like no that's too sketchy and and uh too intrusive of civil liberties and so we're gonna We're not gonna do that so we're gonna take a hit in the market I just think the logic of that over time um is Kaczynski asking thank you you basically that so I found the quote I have a whole page full of quotes from the manifesto because it's it's very quotable um and one of them is technology is a more powerful social Force than the aspiration for Freedom um and that's a that's a very very ominous very ominous statement but the next one is even more so and this speaks to what we talk about so whatever else may be the case it is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically if man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection the former is far more likely than the latter he will be artificially re-engineered so he's this is the presence of this writing in 1992 whenever whenever he wrote this thing um it's really extraordinary and then when you then turn around and hear that lecture by that that criminal crazy in Davos yeah yeah I mean literally that guys this is 30 years later after the statement you just heard yeah that is creepy beyond belief creepy beyond belief yeah yeah so the whole thing is like that those are just a couple of takeaways that the technology being a greater force than the desire for freedom I mean I think you you have just this you just people can't it's it's sort of on multiple levels where anybody who has anything to sell benefits from more information more more information you know it'll be gotten information that people don't know that they necessarily have about them um and then also the the weapons with which the masses could in principle fight back against this are completely captured so you know you you think that you're um you've got your little online community of of people who think like you do and you're fighting the good fight and but it has been completely algorithm algorithmically determined like your friends are you know there's um as Brett Weinstein was just saying in this great interview I sent you yesterday there's a ghost in the machine and you don't know exactly what the ghost is up to and and how it's putting things together and who it's putting you in touch with and and how much of how you think about the world and what you value and and the um the the sort of what possibilities you even perceive are they're being generated for you to a large degree they're not they're not coming from an internal uh process of sitting in your cabin by the pond trying to commune with the truth you know they're they're being fed to you by these algorithms and these these processes so I think there's just a lot of there is no pure resistance against this you're using the weapons of the the overlords to fight the overlords and I think that in in the long term it has to be a a futile process I just don't I don't see how that I I don't see how the good guys win in that scenario yeah yeah that's interesting uh all interesting thinking that's why I'm depressed we're going to go on to another question about boys and girls and we're going to boys and girls we'll talk um yeah if people are more interested hot blocked always sweet we get into all this stuff so okay let's see what well the the next one that has the most votes we can dispatch quickly because we just recorded the podcast last night it's um what we think about the Roe v Wade decision so we talked about this at length um on this week's podcast I don't know if it's up yet I don't think so but we recorded it last night so it should be up or two nights ago um yeah the Aging podcast so that should be up shortly and we also talked about it on hot blocked a month or two ago right shortly after the league so um but we've we've covered that um okay this one I'm lazy it's hard for me to get things done and my husband doesn't push me enough my house is messy and unorganized although I have plenty of time to clean it I waste a lot of time I've tried reporting when I get done in in a Day to a friend but she doesn't hold me accountable enough either do you have any suggestions to change my cost benefit analysis I think there are like online accountability the first thing that comes to mind is like the diet bet you know you can you can actually put money on the line so you put money on the line that I'm gonna lose 10 of my weight in the next six months or whatever so it gets it hits you a little harder to have um instead of just accountability in the abstract to actually you know have uh some sort of economic stake in it so that's the first thing to come to mind the second is this is a you're lazy you have a lazy personality yeah um I would say from a philosophical point of view and maybe maybe there's a practical uh application here the something that that reaches around my you know I've I've never been lazy exactly in that way but there's certainly been times when I um felt a little you know overwhelmed by some something and therefore didn't feel like going out to any effort to try to act against it because it seemed it was too big a problem the um there there have been rare times when I I oh I would say probably a time where where I have wasted some time has been in certain periods of my life I might have watched some mediocre television okay and so the um and did it kind of habitually for a little while it's been a long time since that was true back in my young days when I was a pool not not now when I'm older and wiser yeah of course yeah of course not no it's a wet deep task you know there's there's a point to this and that is that um at some point I distilled the concept of a hundred thousand hours and so this person may be a lot younger maybe they have two hundred thousand dollars how many hours you think you have left is how many years you're likely to live multiplied by about five thousand it's about 5 000 waking hours a year okay so call it 365 days times more or less 14 hours a day that you're more or less awake and not brushing your teeth so that's about it like that and and it's a strange thing it's contemplate but it's finite it's like it's like little bubbles on a form what when you fill in the last bubble you're done okay there to the best of my knowledge there is no bonus check anywhere after we've looked our lifestyle on Earth maybe but I believe any such thoughts about that are quaint humorous ancient anthropomorphic you know uh concepts of human beings and and thinking about how the universe works come on you're you're just a souped-up chimpanzee a couple million years Out of Africa what makes you think the universe is anything other than exactly what it looks like which is something where animals are born live and die okay and so when you that's how I look at it now the truth is is that it is very strange for me because obviously like most people I don't think about my own death I don't even think about my own old age old age and infirmity I have a uh a lack of ability to run that calculus and and essentially I kind of think I'm frozen in time and my goals are relatively intermediate and when I get there I don't feel like I'm going to be any different than I am now but it's you know five years from now in general I'd actually get the book done I'll actually be five years older okay so the truth is is that I do have and many others have grasped different ways I had somebody maybe yeah I don't think you did this somebody else wrote to me and said they printed out a sheet of oh I don't know what it was 4 000 weeks or something yeah discuss about the there's a calendar that you can buy with weeks and there's little bubbles next to them um and it's very disturbing yeah so the truth is is for me you know 20 weeks times 52 is a thousand weeks left and you can fit them all on a page yeah wow that's what's so disturbing about it is it fits on a poster you know it's like a poster in your room of every week left in your life with a little bubble that you can fill in when it's done you know it's really it's very distressing same caught it's a kind of concept exactly so when I uh start to feel a little bored and and motionless for 15 minutes I have that reminder now in my head what are you doing 100 000 hours you're not going to get any of these back and so it it sort of reorients me towards that doesn't mean I'm in a frantic you know push to try to oh I don't know hunt down some girl or have an A W you know root beer float right away because I might be dead tomorrow in other words I'm not I'm not in some frantic process but yeah but I'm intolerant of looking at the end of a day and feeling like well I just kind of screwed around watched Gilligan's Island on you know if there is such a thing anymore and I basically did it's like no you better make something of the day now I don't have John Wooden type of conscientiousness so John Wooden you know what I mean uh uh is is like like Alan goldhammer never let a day go by where you'll listen substantially ahead financially okay it's like that that isn't where I live so the 15 minutes that I might spat spend petting my favorite cat that's worth every minute of that in other words the feelings I get from that stack up to a very high percentile of Life satisfaction over the hours of my existence therefore that's really worth it now is it worth it for an hour no it's not worth it for an hour but it's worth it for 15 minutes it's probably worth it for for 10 minutes four times so there might be 40 minutes a day that I'm petting cats probably isn't it's probably more like half an hour but that half an hour is really worth it okay so but I I look at this as I am as 10 essentially trying to seek a really rich life experience that's what I'm trying to do trying to decorate it make it you know it's it's my own personal Christmas tree we're trying to like make it really neat and being lazy it's like whoa careful if you're really enjoying the laziness that's one thing if you're in a hammock and you're here in the sea breeze so the birds tweeting and you know you're you're You've Got a Good Earth you know iced tea it's just really the right thing and you're sipping on it and it's warm sunshine that's not lazy that's an extremely good use of your existence because the internal experience of your nervous system is at a high percentile relative to it it's typical vicissitudes and and Baseline so I'm I'm looking to have a better experience you know in other words a good experience relative to what this nervous system is typically capable of so that doesn't mean I'm going to sit in a messy room you know what I mean looking at some stupid crap on the internet that is not connected to a better life experience you know and I can't you know I understand that we have very interesting addictive life processes but addictive-like processes are where behind very low energy output we can stick something that's a little bit stimulating uh under the nervous systems of a human being and cause them to basically waste the next two minutes and then the next few minutes after that and the next two minutes after that because there's a channel factor of investment to actually uh do something far more substantial and if they can keep you there I mean this is the whole idea of ads in a television program like let's keep you stringing out to the end and then you know let's keep you know get you in and then we we have the dramatic little thing in the middle of the soap opera and then you got to go to the ad it's like you're gonna keep stringing you along and the uh so I look at my world like hey don't get strung along you know if I ever feel a little bit somehow a little bit listless or or bored or and I'm looking to do something mediocre for the next hour a really good thing is to LEAP into some messy project that I know that needs to be done because I know in minutes I'm actually going to be a lot happier okay but the feeling of productive activity is is so much higher than than essentially you know listless mediocrity so you know what can I say um I feel like we could be talking about something that we could say is just personality but I think there's more to it than that in other words you could have a kid uh sitting in front of a television set uh munching on Cheetos getting fat not accomplishing anything and just kind of in a mediocre nervous system state or you could pull the plug on the TV set make it impossible for them to use it get rid of their cell phone get rid of their computer and now they can have to go out in the world and actually Act okay and I think that that will create a better life experience for that individual than letting their genetic code operate inside of an environment that uh it's not very well designed for so you are not designed you're designed to be as lazy as you can get away with but you're not designed for an environment that allows it so that's that's one of uh so the questioner I look at your environment in your environmental circumstances and it's like a little too benign a little too cushy or a little bit of an animal in the zoo and we're getting a derivative media mediocre life experience for hours where that where the emotional scoreboard could be a lot higher uh if we if we altered the circumstances that makes sense to you Jen hi Dad I just had some some barking start here of course it's thunder thunder always begins every time we're doing a q a I feel maybe we should avoid late afternoon um it does make sense you I I think there is it's an interesting kind of like um you know the laziness in conversation with the environmental accused because sometimes we'll get questions about these I think um David Goggins is one of them they're they're sort of these personalities who have turned their lives around you know they were this kind of you know sit at home watch you know Gilligan's Island don't don't do anything with your life and then they sort of like got it together and transformed everything and it's like well look personality is not stable you know this person really changed but I think that is tapping into exactly what you're talking about which is they there's there's a feedback loop that happens when you feel the self-efficacy of of you you manage to get off your ass and do something the one time and it was it was fulfilling enough and and gave your nervous system some new information that that was a valuable thing to do and so you're more motivated to keep doing it or to do it again um whereas before you begin the process you don't have that feedback loop in in action and so the sort of initiation energy is the problem um and I think that's why the questionnaire has this intuition that they you know this external check this sort of like somebody to push me kind of thing um and I think that can be helpful in overcoming the initiation energy problem but the real motivation to continue with it is going to come from this intrinsic reward process of um you know I feel better when I do that relative to not doing it yeah yeah and the the self-esteem and the external feedback that you get is more positive yeah I think look at uh I I am even though like I said it's very abstract I'm very aware of my aging and my morality can't help it because I I really do see that 75 of my life is likely over and we're down to the last 25 percent and the last 25 percent the last five percent isn't likely to be too great so it's like whoa you know I'm I'm down to 20 percent I've already lived the vast majority of the kinds of experiences that I'm ever going to live into the future so we're talking about replays now okay is largely what it is novel interesting permutations but the replays okay and so now I recognize man I settled a lot of times for you know a mediocre emotional situation when I have when I have found and been able to put myself into situations where it was a lot better okay and so there's there's reasons behind those decisions uh some of it has to do with agreeableness and cowardice and not getting out of relationships and all kinds of all kinds of personal characteristics and and but the but the point is is right now I'm much less tolerant of that because I recognize whoa we're now down to it now we're down to the last you know whatever five six thousand days it's like there's only there's only so many more of them and so if I'm going to do enjoyable interesting things you know now is the time and so that uh I don't want to look back 15 years from now and say well I did about the same job at seizing my happiness as I did when I was you know 35. it's like I didn't do a bad job at 35 but I could have done a lot better job and uh and I want to make the most of this now so that that's trying to speak to you you know across the years saying don't waste it because you don't get the time back it feels infinite but it's not infinite yeah I guess the the only other thing to add to this is you know she's she's anchoring the question around um housekeeping and so it's fair enough if housekeeping is a bad CB on your 100 000 hours you know so that's that's where you start thinking about hiring somebody or it's it's like yeah you might be lazy looking at that trade-off and you know you but and so you're maybe you're not doing anything super productive and so you have this feeling like well it's not like I'm doing anything more valuable with my time um but if you were in principle doing something more valuable with your time that doesn't necessarily mean that now you should still reserve some of that time for housekeeping in fact it might help your whole motivational structure to be like okay I'm gonna devote you know x 100 a week to bring somebody in to kind of keep things maintained and and I'm gonna make a commitment to doing these other things that are more hundred thousand hour friendly so um I I think you can get in a little bit of a trap feeling like you know I'm not my house is a mess and and therefore I don't deserve to do things that are more pleasant to bring me more joy or more fulfilling until I get this sorted out but getting that sorted out by Outsourcing it might actually kind of in an upside down Way Drive the motivational mechanism to excite you about other things absolutely Jim Rohn uh said he had a big list of all kinds of crap that was on it and finally he sat down and made a list said things all do and things I'll never do oh excellent and you know what I I've never forgotten that because I'll see things on my list and I'll realize I really don't want to do that so pay somebody else to do it that is absolutely the right thing to do because my life is instantly going to get better uh and that that is yeah well well said Jen that's good yeah all right so we're trying to read tea leaves in into questions and we wind up going all over the place but that's because we're dealing with sketches in front of us but that's sometimes good because it's it's things for other people all right what else we got all right Jeffrey Miller has made the point that normally virtuous people may not fit our concept of virtue when sex is involved since getting sex is the main point of their other virtues so it's all fair in Love and War I sometimes see otherwise perfectly conscientious people get involved in adultery they may not be in a relationship only their partner does that mean they're not as trustworthy as I thought or is their behavior in their sex life not to be conflated with other domains that's very interesting let me think about that I I think that Rings true um to me in my clinical experience um let's have let's think about that I I this there's there's all kinds of things that swirl through here that that paints us a picture of uh I'm just I'm just gonna struggle with this for a minute this part of this comes down to uh our our long-term relationships are often heavily conflicted and have longer lives to them than they would have had in human nature because of financial issues yeah having to do with wrong civilization and the rise of real estate and the lives of wealth and therefore the important the rise of an institution in marriage and marital law and property law and inheritance law and and therefore the incredibly importance of knowing whose seed and whose eggs are going where and who they belong to and therefore to make sure that all my life's blood and energy is going to my DNA and not somebody else's so all of that so we have created a world because of that where people are making 50-year decisions with the five-year check and so behind that you're going to find an awful lot of very virtuous I.E High conscientious people 15 years into something or more that was dead for all intents and purposes or should have been 10 years ago and yet because of their extremely high conscientiousness they said somebody the average conscientious just got a divorce sell two or three whatever okay but uh the Liz Taylor plan the Liz Jay Taylor plan a Doris Day for God's sakes oh no really oh yeah seven seven I had an idea I didn't give her so much credit no I wouldn't give her that much credit she's got she's got my ex-wife written all over her you know just the uh just sweet and straight and you know what's the problem but apparently she walked back into I think one of her kids after number seven and sat down and just said I sure can pick him yeah so anyway the point of all this is that this could be the reason for the confused look that we see that in fact it's a lot of very highly conscientious people are gritting their teeth and surviving marriages that are you know with a decent person that that are dead below the waist and have long since been there and now this is a financial you know child raising partnership between two friendly people that care about each other and love each other and as people but hey this is not a romance and so now uh maybe it I mean let's take an example where the white still qualifies but the husband no longer qualifies so the wife is dodging sexuality in this thing for the last five years now now one of the two of them finally has an affair out of frustration like is that low conscientiousness no it is not low Consciousness that's that's people that are operating inside of a twisted Zoo having to live in a strange way that that makes them do things that you know from from The Outsider from some abstract rules it looks you know unconscientious when in fact it's not so I think that's maybe a halfway decent answer to that yeah yeah no I think that's that's a very good answer to that so yeah all right we have a pleasure trap question just to shake things up here so I've been a whole food you you snot in the mood uh I've been Whole Food plant-based for about 10 years and normalized my weight and recently I've been eating Beyond satisfaction on Whole Food plant-based Foods I've put on five pounds and I see this getting worse if I don't break the pattern uh any stressors seem to have me leaning into eating more my spouse avoids eating when stressed and I seem to do the opposite any thoughts about how I might break this habit and get some space around this I only eat in an eight to four window but I can eat a lot in this time frame and get physically uncomfortable from the volume thank you Doug is Doug has an answer get rid of the a24 window is promoting cramming the food so yeah totally yeah let's go let's go to a nice 14-hour window let's make sure we keep it within 14 hours so you know start it start at 7am don't eat past 9 pm at night there that's a good intermittent fasting okay so let's do that or now let's find out what the next three or four months bring I would also be very skeptical I I don't think it's a full five pounds if you're if you're eating uh you know you've started really cramming on whole plant Foods you're you've got a lot of glycogen you've just got more glycogen you're carrying around and and more uh stuff in your intestines than you usually do you've got you've just got more matter um and so you're that's going to retain a lot of water and keep a couple of extra pounds on you so it's it may not be it probably almost certainly is not five pounds of fat um it might be a couple pounds of fat if you're really eating over the hunger drive and really stuffing it in um but I think Doug's uh recommendation about the window is is really good um and of course yeah yeah the window those it causes so many problems for people I mean people get it work the problem is that it works for a while I think um and and it can be really it gives people a sense of control and it gives people a sense of um uh momentum and excitement and motivation and and then slowly the the body starts to restore equilibrium and reclaim the territory um and uh you just can't you can't outwit it um and so people get very attached to the window when really it's probably in the long term causing more problems damn you're smart I've just been there man yeah I have just been but you know what when people will start a restriction program of any kind I think you're absolutely right that that they've got they're sitting on top of a bunch of leptin signaling anyway to the hypothalamus and so if they'll just get their act together they start to they start to lose weight then they get a they actually feel better physically there's a momentum to it but exactly right sooner or later this thing kind of walks itself into trouble and now we're out of control Jen I've never heard anybody map that out that way that is I mean I've absorbed it and so all I know I know what the end of that road is the end of that road is trouble so I tell people don't get on it right but you're right I have all also seen 300 people that have started some kind of restrictive process and got on a good roll for a while and things were going really well and then they finally go sideways which includes a really a low excessively low calorie density as well so you know people people will have the same exact process where it's like okay all nuts and seeds out you know three or four hundred calories a pound only um and it's like incredibly effective in the short term and it's inherently very motivating and and people then cling to it like a Talisman of success um and and uh you know the body is just gonna catch up so of course it's effective of course it's it's your you know fewer calories are coming in initially um but it's not a long-term strategy calorie density is a long-term strategy but eating a super low calorie density that is too low for for your biology is not a sustainable strategy ancestorly we're we're up you know six seven hundred calories a pound so um yes I argue and I do routinely the people who talk to me um because we Jen and I see this all the time which is that um that we wind up with people doing super job for a while on low calorie density relieved that they can eat Society of sorts a funny looking Society based on stretch reception um and not too bad nutrient reception but remember they're overweight so now they shed weight for a while and now we get down to a pretty leanish looking situation where there's been a substantial weight loss now what I will argue that nobody in the world can prove at this point um but I will argue that there's a resource acquisition algorithm Inside the Mind that knows intuitively the range of calorie density of foods that's appropriate for the species yeah so this is well beyond modern Neuroscience in the same way that a lot of the pleasure droplets written well beyond the knowledge of 2001 when I wrote the last sentence we didn't publish for two years but I wrote the last sentence in you know 2001 A Lot in that book is making inferences about um the about our motivational system that was not in evidence at the time but it had to be right and it was it had to be right because it's direct derivative of evolutionary biology right it's the same way that there's no like you can eat a starch-based diet that that the most core of the dense thing that you're eating is 500 calories a pound you can do it and if you have a steady stream of that it's like oh which what am I eating I'm a healthy vegan I'm needing salad and fruit and steamed vegetables and then I for my calories you know I I eat you know I eat you know beans and rice and potatoes it's like well good good for you but we've got an interesting problem we've got a stone age brain that ate a hell of a lot of meat and eggs that were 800 calories a pound it ate a lot of Honey at 1800 calories a pound and I ate some nuts and seeds that were three thousand calories a pound and so the problem is if you're up you're up there where you're the maximum thing that you're eating is brown rice at 500 yours you can do it and you can do it indefinitely there there's no you know John mcdougall's been right forever it's like yes you can do this but here's the problem you weren't designed to do it so soon you certainly weren't designed to do it between eight and four like if you're if you're gonna do it don't stop at four o'clock you're not gonna get enough calories you weren't designed to do it ever and so the point of the matter of this is that you can do it that you can almost imagine the algorithm constantly saying yes but we're in trouble you know the potatoes go down we're dead so in other words that's why the men got up in the morning and run for 16 miles today with spear in their hand because they're out to get a hundred thousand calories in some young wildebeest and to come home and everybody Chomps down 800 calories a pound which they've got an algorithm to do the point is is that if we get to lean or we get too short in the window you know we get too tight we can wind up you know that that we wind up with essentially recompensation backlash and and coming off the rails so this is uh this is why it is that we try to you know if people want to talk about 500 characters a pound remember that's the average that's not the top right right big difference yeah but yeah people want to do you know if if uh 500 calories a pound is good then you know 300 calories a pound is better and it's sort of this you know I'm gonna get an A plus in this class and I'm gonna top out my calorie density at this at this level rather than you know it is it has to be more sustainable than that or you're going to run into exactly this kind of problem yeah yeah all right we've got one more we got one more poor princess is losing it there's thunder thunder she's so sensitive she's such a snowflake um all right uh next one is I find myself in an unusual situation for my age I've become an entrepreneur at the age of 29 I'm making about half a million dollars a year I'm a highly conscious do they want a date and I don't care if they're real and Doug's like [Laughter] like provision me all right what do we got yeah well she's unfortunately for you she's highly conscientious but also fairly disagreeable and I think as we get into this question we're actually looking at quite disagreeable this personality combination is making me think very hard about how I am toward my employees I want my perfectionistic pound of Flesh she's an Alan goldhammer I keep extremely high standards for my company's output and I'm extremely hawkish in quality controlling my employees work or a publishing company that focuses on quality controlling high value legal and policy translation work so high stakes here when I'm unhappy with my employees work I find myself becoming irrepressibly resentful and mean-spirited and This Time Slips into my communication as well as in silent treatment I regret to say I find myself harboring punitive and manipulative thoughts I want to know how to beat my genes and move toward optimal cooperativeness with my team I would say you need to hire deputies deputies who you trust who are less disagreeable perhaps to manage manage the team because you I think if you're managing them directly I I think you need a second like a like a right-hand person who can handle your vicissitudes um but who is also extremely trustworthy and who you trust to to to handle the the force um that's the first thing that comes to mind because you can make 400 000 a year right 500 and put a hundred thousand dollars employee between you and them to to someone who's just like you know absolutely you depend on yeah the there's a interesting sort of ancillary principle and problem that's percolating underneath us and this is um this is uh what we might call infinite debt so disagreeable people God forbid that you borrow some money from it it's like well you're going to be hearing that yeah yeah yes we have you you know my disagreeable friend who I've I've broken up with and I borrowed money from him once and it wasn't even that much and never never heard the end of it expect emails to this day about it where's my 200. and and a similar infinite debt comes out of very disagreeable parents who feel like you owe them everything and you know all the way to their grid okay so uh that's a that's another example and a disagreeable person like this sort of high achieving super high conscientious Etc you can feel like uh I have known successful entrepreneurial people um several that have what they feel like is fascinating because I've actually been in on even uh corporate Consulting uh and what it feels like to them I'm laughing at it because I can completely understand why they feel this way but it's so absurd they feel like they're giving you a job okay I mean this is Alan right totally yeah feels like without me you'd be out on the street with a bull you know with a sign on you like that that's how he thinks and he's not just Alan I've seen it elsewhere in other words they're looking at their people and they're feeling like I'm way over paying you you didn't have a pot to piss in when you walked through my door I provided with my Ingenuity and drive I found a sector of the marketplace that can use your abilities of which you're only giving me you know 30th percent effort for god sakes and so so essentially it's the infinite debt uh that that you know this this is you know you should feel like Bob Cratchit in Scrooge like you should just be working like hell because you're just your mediocrity and your mouth is wide open knitting fed and you know you owe me unbelievable homage because I am making your life possible that is how the entrepreneurial feels they it is hilarious for me to get inside these people's heads and find out that that's what's really in there and they are so astonished when one of their pretty good people that never got off their ass to really legitimately earn the 58 000 a year that I gave them that that person walks what are they thinking where where could they possibly go and so this is the this is the filter of the disagreeable personality that if it's intelligent and it's successful it looks at its own success as private fish evidence that it's right um so in other words I can do no wrong on Bill Gates I'm a billionaire I'm a multi-billionaire so clearly I'm a genius it's like no you're not even remotely close to a genius right you're a highly distorted brain okay right so I I have seen the highly distorted brains uh one of them was a the CEO of a Fortune 100 company okay so the point is is that inside that brain remarkable arrogance about this so this is this this young lady is actually falling in line with a pattern consistent with her circumstances and her personality and uh and so she's she's doing a unique thing which is to say hey I think I got a weird personality because I've been listening to beat your jeans what the hell am I supposed to do about it good for you really good question so uh probably a consult with one of the two of us is probably a very good idea because sorting through the entire Haystack of what's going on we may come up with other things yeah so that's probably well worth your while the um but but the basic idea that we're talking about is okay careful they don't owe you anything okay and uh and so all we're looking to do is to you know to try to insulate you from the natural inferences that you're sitting you know and making as our friend Alan sits with the Quiet seething contempt for everybody that he writes totally can't help it yeah yeah very true yeah all right just a couple I I do see the chat I don't want to usually type back while we're talking though guys so um as far as the last Hawk blocked I was having Zoom issues someone hacked our Zoom account it was all secure but somebody tried to hack it so Zoom basically cut off access for a week for me um and then our payment didn't go through so there's been a number of things with zoom so I just couldn't get the file um but it will be up shortly um and then uh the question about the did I pay back the 200 so I don't remember all the details about this this interaction but it literally happened in 1999 and it had to do with a um a deposit for an apartment and I believe I I paid back some large percentage of it but there was some like one or two hundred dollars that I just didn't have at the time um that I that I didn't give him but I gave him back like 800 and then you know it was it was one or two that I didn't I was I was like you know when I when I'm a little more secure um and uh and then it just became such a thing that I kind of dug in about it I met this guy yeah Doug knows what I'm talking about and that guy should be peeling grapes for Jen [Laughter] and then some of its parts over time because it was such a such a wedge for him to be like you know he would just bring it up anytime he needed a little bit of advantage in the conversation and so there were plenty of times where I had the money and I just like you know what you know it's so I know you don't need it and this is just like you know you're just being shitty so yeah yeah so it was all it was all just it was it was an infinite it was clearly going to be an infinite debt no matter what you know there was there was a very similar one to where we were traveling together and I finished the last of a bottle of wine and he was upset about it for decades so that fits perfectly oh my god let's put it this way when I met this guy there was instant Mutual dislike yes it was intense two seconds yeah that was done and that is really rare for me it's very rare yeah it's not rare for him I I didn't have that happen when I met the Manson killer [Laughter] yeah I know it was it was something to behold for sure yeah it's not rare for him at all in fact it's the it's the usual state of affairs and so it quite took me back when you you had a lot of antipathy toward him I was like what yeah you know maybe I'm I need to catch up here yeah difficult difficult character wow all right all right all right well I think that that takes us through there's a bunch more questions that we as usual haven't gotten to um and I know a few of these I've seen before and so next time I will try to even if it's not at the top of the list um if I recognize it I will I will uh give it a little bump up so yeah all right all good okay are we are we gonna rant in a bit yeah we're gonna rant it a bit so okay all right we'll we'll uh take a short break we'll take a short break and I'm gonna put four princesses Thundershirt on her yes she's having such a hard time for a little emotionally unstable creature all right all right everybody all right well we will see you soon see you next time you guys have a good night all right bye
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