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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-07-16
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I can hear you you can hear me so that's good hopefully other people can hear us too there's the famous turn it off and turn it on trick that's you know it's worked since I was a kid you know that was an old Robert Hawk trick so although they're usually involved like whacking it on the side and you know it's like You Gotta Throw the radio out the window to really get it to work okay it looks like we've got lots of stuff in the Q a happening um it might be because it was before I could get in here and set it up so um Everybody Can Read what's in the Q a you can also upvote and you can comment on questions in the Q a as well so um that'll help guide our order of operations here I had a couple of questions emailed to me as well I have two of them I feel like there was another one but I have lost it so if I don't get to your question it's because it's it got filed in my email in a way that I'm not able to search for and I don't remember who it was so I apologize um but uh we I will start with one of those just because I think we've gotten it before so um I'm very interested in studies of psychedelics and plant medicines for alternative healing and have tried some as well I follow Michael Pollan and Gabor mate um now I'm wondering if they could have any effect on personality even small very curious about my thoughts as a high o who's versed in personality my concern about their effect on personality is what keeps me away from them so I've got just enough conscientiousness or maybe my openness is just a couple points shy of 99 whatever it is that steers me out of that it's because my concern that it could have some sort of irreversible brain damage essentially that would change my personality um uh in a way that I don't have a lot of control over it and might not even have awareness that it was happening so but that's that's coming out of my history as a high o person who also has a history of substance abuse and a family line of a bunch of substance abuse so I'm particularly uh you know risk-averse when it comes to this kind of thing um I I have every intention of getting involved in lots of mushrooms in my 90s I plan to go hang out in some tropical destination and just you know trip like crazy when I'm 95 so that's my current plan um but I'm holding on to every little neuron that I can recover from 20 years of pretty heavy drinking in the meantime so that's my general take on that I know Doug is also just a just say no kind of guy um but uh I don't know if you have other thoughts on the topic generally yeah I I think that um I think that the people that mess with all of that including the pharmaceutical industry um basically are are not acknowledging and not understanding that all you can do to this thing is you can damage it right so if you there's a time and a place with your bicycle fender when it's when it's rubbing the the wheel that if you bend it you know what I mean you'll compromise the the metal but but now it's not now it's not rubbing your wheel in other words there's ways to damage things that improve its function for your purposes and if we could go in and damage uh that's not even out of bounds uh for the future in other words some fancy Laser Technology to go in and wipe out 20 of the anxiety circuits inside of some hyper conscientious in that case's brain that you know 75 years from now they might be able to improve your functioning by by being incredibly smart and precise about how to do the brain damage that might be useful okay so but right now it's a it's a scatter shot this this reminds me of 17th century medicine we're just gonna cut off you know cut off a hand to to help lead you to death and then maybe that's going to help your pleurisy you know what I mean it's like what the hell you're just gonna go in and do damage to whatever it is that these things are are obviously altering their function in an extreme fashion and uh there will be compensations uh as the brain tries to go about fixing it and and yet if you continue to overwhelm the fixing capability you will alter somebody's I wouldn't you don't even not need to call it their personality you're just going to alter their entire psychological being and all kinds of ways that you aren't going to be measuring and they're they're then they're going to come out of their little Ayahuasca Hut and say oh wow I'm Healed for my trauma yeah you're not healed from anything okay you you did some brain damage let's hope that the the compromised function can be recovered uh I've known people that that did not fully recover and were never the same uh and and they were they know that they are operating on 80 percent of the sensitivity uh that they used to have before they pulled a stunt like that so yeah at this point in time uh remember the the truly best effort of the criminal Enterprise known as the pharmaceutical industry they have actually tried to do good in the world it's not like they haven't been trying and they've been trying really hard and they've had a lot of stolen taxpayer loot to do incredible amounts of research on this uh and yet after basically a hundred years of this they've gotten nothing okay so don't think that somebody you know operating in the woods outside of some place in in New Mexico or China somewhere has some fancy root that you're going to now improve your brain functioning not a chance in hell I would say this it's not the most bizarre Concept in the universe it it is certainly we would be open to legitimate evidence I haven't seen one scrap of legitimate evidence that shows that anybody's even close okay so you know I sure as hell wouldn't be using myself as a research subject but the only brain I've got so that's how I look at it all right yeah and I you know even from the sort of very woo-woo perspective that I bring to the question um I I I it's almost the the woo-woo circles back into a meadow woo-woo kind of answer for this which is um the story that ROM Das always told about his um his teacher his Guru you know when he when he went up to the mountain and he brought a bunch of LSD with him to share with the guru to show him you know check this [ __ ] out I've got I've got the good stuff that shows you behind the veil um the way that he tells the story is that the guru took a whole bunch um much much more than would be indicated and probably a dangerous level and kind of reported back like oh it was interesting like I see why you like it I see what it shows you but I can see all of that without this stuff of course because what else is the goober gonna say right so but from from sort of my there's there's a part of me that feels like if there are truths to be discovered or healing to be done or parallel universes and dimensions to visit um we would be able to do that without the a specific agent you know it wouldn't it wouldn't come down to some particularly as you're saying any any sort of anything that's been marketed by any kind of pharmaceutical uh interest whatsoever but even a traditional concoction um I just don't think that the the mystical design of the universe would would you know make it that specific or only available in the Amazon and not to the rest of the planet or whatever so um I I like to think that these are truths that can be discovered in enough you know Solitude and meditation and intense questioning on one's own time so that's mine yeah I know Doug Doug thinks I'm insane but that's okay all right that's all good all right all right uh but yeah I think lots of reasons to to steer clear okay I posted in the chat for folks that just in case you didn't see it because you gave up on it I think Zoom changed the settings at some point fairly recently um and the default was that if you posted in the chat nobody could see it so everyone felt like they were just shouting into the void so I fixed the setting so you can have conversations in the chat with each other now if you have questions for us we draw those solely from the Q a not from the chat um so if you have a question put it in the Q a function um and same with the I see uh people have been putting their hands up same thing if you have a question just post it in the chat and people can kind of upvote and we'll just we'll go from there all right um I've just bought an expensive house just shy of two million dollars in a very fancy area near the beach we will be visiting you soon um my husband and I are both introverts he's quite agreeable me not so much we have overly friendly neighbors who keep intruding on us and we don't know how to politely signal that we are not interested in becoming friends the neighbors are a gay couple in their early retirement oh no my husband is actually having a worse time than me signaling that they need to back off um well yeah he's agreeable so um we're obviously both annoyed that spending this much money on a house has not bought us any real privacy what would be the best way of signaling to our neighbors that we don't want anything to do with them they just noticed we got a puppy and have already knocked on our front door asking whether we want to go dog walking on the beach it's getting awkward and irritating help oh my god this is my nightmare nightmare oh it's the worst well I can tell you uh what Melissa did in Florida or where where oh the uh that uh Melissa's has been a live-in partner of mine for on and off for 15 years uh and is my best friend the uh but Melissa told the neighbors next door who were friendly and he's a psychologist for God's sakes she just said as the wife came over trying to you know uh trying to push her way uh in to to make this a foursome she just said you know Doug's just not social uh yeah yeah it's like you can have one of you essentially so probably the wife here is the toughest one and she might be um uh I I I don't even want to think through all the little political gay rejection Dynamics here that probably she's probably if she's if she's made it a stern of stuff the thing to do is to say to them you know we we appreciate you know what what friendly folks you guys are uh but whatever his name is Dawn you know Don's just not social yeah that's just that we're that's just uh so we kind of live our lives as recklessness but yeah we we're really glad to have you here just so you know we're we know it's a really nice neighborhood and and we're not surprised we've got nice Neighbors thanks yeah yeah you have to you gotta insult yeah go ahead hey it's it's this is the correct message but it also as you're implying has to be delivered with the correct attitude because I I have delivered that message with my sort of agreeableness and it just doesn't stick it's like oh you know Michael really is a workaholic he doesn't doesn't you know we really we don't go out much like I'd love to have you over but you know and maybe when the book is done etc etc it's clearly not Landing with these people um although I don't have people I do have people showing up in the yard and kind of yelling it's there's enough of a um a kind of rural uh Country Life respect Vibe out here that people don't necessarily knock on doors but they'll come in your driveway and Shout Whatever [Music] um and uh so that's about as intrusive as people will get so that's nice it's nice to live in a place where that that's a norm um but definitely there's I I think there's a little disbelief in my my accounting that that is true um and so you have to deliver it in a way that's like just like you said you know he's really he's just not very social and and we we kind of bought the house to get away from everybody and be be uh recluses and and just leave it at that and and I think there will be a sort of a a little bit of a Extinction uh path here when they they come and they get defeated socially a number of times they they're not going to keep trying in Earnest forever probably um you'll just have to watch out for running into them on the beach and you know the the when they see you go out to the car and they're out in the yard and it's weird yeah it's perfectly civilly friendly between me and yeah you know yeah I can remember his name because it's the same name as a prisoner that I worked with he balances out the absolute curmudgeon douchebag on the other side right the the you've got that it's so pleasant but he's just an idiot he's well he's an idiot who makes poor choices he's the guy that cut the tree cutter yeah yeah never to be forgiven yeah yeah so yeah yeah Melissa is much more um is much less dynamically friendly than you she's yeah she has a business-like effect that can come across where it's like this is just how it is yeah sort of yeah I can't pull that off it just it doesn't exist in the nervous system Yeah well yeah born to be a concierge yeah the Lord help us all right so yeah I wish we had better better sort of magic for you but that's just remember what's on the other side just a high principle is a CB okay right so they are two guys and they're independently running a CV and they are reinforcing each other's by their conversation they're checking their CB with each other and because since both of them are social and friendly and warm and fuzzy and want to want to be social uh which has served them both well that's how they found each other uh that's how they found a good one because they had to talk to an awful lot of them before they found a great partner good for them okay so the uh but that uh they so they're not getting good uh they're both uh you know extroverted in that way extroverted and affable and so they're they're probably rarely outright rejected you know so as a result of that also because socially people are afraid to offend them you know there's there is this kind of dynamic where it's like well I wouldn't I wouldn't want them to think that I'm a homophobe so I be super super nice and generous when it's really like hey I'm just an introvert you know David oh my God I came across uh uh some some like not KKK regalia but definitely Confederate flag and some other stuff out in the wild in West Virginia the other day it's a thrill it's out there right all right that was good yeah yeah so yeah that definitely that that well and depending on your comfort with white lies you know you can you can also do some signaling that's not too specific but is a big sort of like slow slow your roll kind of signal I.E you know my husband just uh he's got some health issues and we just don't go out much you know sort of something something like that that is like oh well the worry is that then they show up with casseroles like yeah yeah I in case your husband needs you know is there anything we can do but um you know things like that I.E we're private people we're going through some stuff um you know we've we uh we're expecting visitors Etc et cetera et cetera like all that kind of the health issue is uh is actually legitimate because it's mental health yeah it is yeah yeah totally fair yeah well it's totally fair and that that's a that's a very smooth signal and they can speculate all they want about what it is but they don't get to ask right no it's it really in in civil discourse you don't get to pry when you when you go ahead and make that you you hang out that flag it's like oh you know is there anything I can do that's about as far as you're really allowed to go if you go past that then you're then all social norms are broken and you can do whatever you want then you can put the the signs in your yard because they've they've broken the rules if they get really nosy about it so yeah that's exactly how I read it yeah yeah all right um let me get to the other one that was emailed to me just so I don't forget about it you get rewarded for uh breaking through my email Mountain um is there any possibility for one person to deal with discovering her own distortions is there any book or Workshop that you can suggest buying I have nothing against therapists I'm actually doing therapy for a while it's just that it's so hard to find a non-romanticizing tell me more about your parents kind of therapist I'm accepting my therapist as she is but I still have to I still want to have a tool that I can do by myself to make everything more effective well I would say that the following is true that that is kind of a pie in the sky project so let me tell you what the real project is the real project is to uh simply which you're doing anyway doing an assay of your emotional life so and when a correlation coefficient about what people and things are correlated with good reactions out of your nervous system what things are correlated with bad reactions out of your nervous system our job is to Simply optimize our life experience and that means you know uh sometimes uh being smart about realizing you know whenever I end up talking with these people I'm always winding up irritated and feeling like I'm wasting my time and and I feel you know maybe like a little bit attacked and less confident and and frustrated and then I have a little baggage rattling around in my head for two days afterwards you know I just I had somebody that was uh it's really struggling with feedback about their uh about issues with their mom it's like for God's sakes there's nothing about your mother that means you you got to have any significant amount of interaction with her you don't owe her anything she has she has to earn her way into your Coalition and she's going to earn that way not by some infinite debt that you have but by the the value for Value exchange process in the present for God's sakes okay and that's true with anybody that you're interacting with so if you've got a douchebag boss the only reason you should be there is that that's the best all all cause alternative that you've got in your face right now and it's you know if there's only one gas station out there and you know I don't know wherever it is and northeast corner of Alaska and that's the only Boston town and that's the only job in town and you've got three kids to feed well then you got to put up with it yeah that's like an otherwise our job is to um you know a therapist I mean what all we're really doing here all therapy is I don't even like the term the uh all we're talking about is learning and the and we're TR we're attempting to learn how to run the cost benefit analyzes of our life more accurately so this is about Precision okay and so if you've got um significant distortions quote unquote what gen Jen calls personality Distortion which I don't know that anybody's ever actually said it quite that way that the uh you could you could call it that the the truth is is that all of us are are running major cost benefit analysis all the time under under a considerable amount of distortion that is because the cost benefit analyzes that you're running are immensely complex and so you're having to make guesses about the parameters that are involved in the cost benefit analyzes you get updated information with the feedback you're like well I expected that to be a good party it was dead you know when the Joneses throw a party I'm never going again maybe okay in other words you're constantly updating drawing inferences from uh the new evidence and then then going at it again so our job is to look specifically rather rather than at your personality for example unless there's a pattern that keeps showing up across a bunch of different relationships then we might say wow you know what I mean that's interesting I wind up bitterly fighting everybody getting fired and litigating I wonder what that is what could it be it must be because I'm such an empath yeah whatever so you know and any therapist worth their assault could could uh essentially triangulate on that pretty quickly and if they had the guts they'd feed it back to you because they could see it none of them do though none of them do they don't have the guys they don't know anything they're completely a bunch of ignoramuses so the truth of the matter is you know it at best there's some people with some IQ and some life experience and you know and and they they're just a little bit better bartender than you are but what they're gonna say is well you seem to have a lot of conflict with the men in your life and it's probably because you didn't get the love from your dad that you wanted so they will call out the pattern you know they'll say like it looks it looks like this is you know it's really similar to the story that you told me about you know your uh your old roommate that's repeating itself with with your ex here and you know this is it probably has something to do with your father's abandonment yes that's the problem is that the world's therapists actually have a they actually have a heuristical device that is broken that is broken yeah and uh and it's not just partially wrong it's actually 100 wrong so you're you're going to therapy to remove distortions in your thinking and you're getting what you're getting are plausible I.E those those those are plausible theories it just turns out they're totally wrong it was plausible that the four humors of the body being out of balance was right too but it turns out that's not right either so all kinds of things that are that essentially instead a a superficially plausible looking pattern of causality uh the it are incorrect in fact they almost always are and so as a result it turns out that it did it took till 1985 where human beings to prove what was suspected by a lot of people in history which is that the upbringing's got nothing to do with it okay now most people the vast majority of people didn't see it that way and so and they don't they still don't so the uh and the reason why people aren't taught that at universities is because social science is corrupt okay and so it's the whole thing is rotten to the core basically I mean not 100 of it it's ninety percent rotten and so as a result uh 92 88 95 yeah really it depends depends on your psychology is actually probably better than political sciences yeah probably because you're right at the heart of the values conflicts so yeah psychology has got psychology has a lot of legitimate science like in color vision and you know motion perception and you know all stuff like that that cognitive stuff yeah we start getting around personality individual differences uh human nature all that kind of stuff and we're lost in a hurry so anyway well the long and short of it is that look to your specific domains of your existence uh work romance friendship Family Health those are going to be the five basic domains of human action and so look to there and and essentially assay which of those is squawking the most in other words something you got intuition about which of those could be significantly better that intuition is probably right in other words your uh when you're feeling really good and really healthy you're probably not seriously sick and if you're feel seriously sick you're probably not very healthy in other words your feelings are pretty good guidance systems to tell you uh where things are at uh you know you can be distorted you can be a home builder working under a government that inflates their currency and you're thinking things are going great guns and you can't miss and you can't wait to carve up another thousand acres to build a bunch of homes on them and whoops turns out that when they screwed with the currency you got on the wrong end of when it is that they're doing they're stealing so your project is screwed this actually happened to many many people but there was the builder of the year in Sacramento was a guy that you know was organized building a huge independent home builder uh who got the builder of the year in 2007 and was totally bankrupt by 2008. oh man we're no fault of his own you know what I'm saying man I didn't know enough about the macroeconomics and and the the thievery that takes place in Washington and New York so anyway that's uh look way too long a story let's go on to something else but yeah the essence here is that you reverse engineer yes your problems you know you you look everybody unless they're really not psychologically minded whatsoever but you're probably not asking this question if you're not psychologically minded so if you're psychologically minded and you're sort of like why do I have these patterns these like why am I self-sabotaging why do I why why do I keep why did this happen in my last relationship and you have this kind of it's been fed to you by everyone from Oprah to your therapist that it's childhood junk um you know think about okay well what is the essence of what would that Distortion be if I had to kind of figure out what kind of distortion it is and you could look at personality you could also look at the kind of CBT distortions you know the that's a that's another accessible framework so I do I tend to catastrophize do I tend to mind read you know you kind of there is this question actually reminded me um there is an app that's not terrible it's not the worst app in the world that's like a little CBT app so you pick a little um Emoji for your feeling that day and you do a little journaling and it prompts you it says well what do you what are you feeling and do you think this statement is um you know we could file this under any of these nine or ten distortions these are are you are you catastrophizing are you mind reading are you fortune telling um and it just helps kind of walk through uh you know in just very basic it's just sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where it kind of guides you through this so there are a lot of garbage apps that one is not the worst in the world I think it's free or close to it so something like that for that sort of distortion the idea is that you just want to start getting a concrete idea of what are the immutable personality characteristics that are leading me over and over again into the weeds over here do I have a tendency to do this do I have a tendency to overreact to this kind of situation do I have a tendency to assume the worst of a situation Etc et cetera and then you translate that into the the the personality character characteristics and traits that you were not going to be able to to fundamentally change but then you can work from there to start thinking about how you can alter your environment or you know set boundaries in your relationships or all of these different things in in conventional therapists speak that are working on the environment harder than they're working on yourself where the the therapist is going to want to work on yourself and heal the past um so you just need to rethink your way around that whole Paradigm but by isolating these characteristics into actual traits that that you can then kind of project uh outcomes from and and work backwards so yeah I wanted perfect Jim yeah the the um most most significant emotional distressing recurrent situations are coming from um the uh the first place of analysis is what is the nature of this problem and what what what are the what are the mechanisms that are struggling here for needs that would have been basic to the Stone Age environment that's the other big yeah overall big months so it's a mismatch yeah we just we keep finding in in phone call after phone call it's a mismatch in the Stone Age brain mismatching the Stone Age brain mismatching the Stone Age brain uh and so the uh rather than oh there's something wrong with you and that's why you're having troubles no there is a there's you're running up against some interesting challenges where there's a mismatch between the Stone Age brain and the environment that it now finds itself in so um you know oh gee I I could I could list 15 of them off the top of my head and hit 78 of all the clinical problems that ever walk into a psychotherapist's office okay and uh and yet they're not being analyzed from that perspective but that is what the problem is there's a mismatch between their that person's modern environment in the Stone Age plan my kid is addicted to video games he's he's depressed he's on he's smoking weed you know he's not doing anything what's the problem the problem is the kid doesn't have to earn a living by grabbing a spear and running 16 miles a day with the other men okay that's why he's staying up till all hours of the night because he's got residual energy and he's got super normal stimuli that he's staring at the whole damn thing is nothing other than a mismatch between the modern environment and Stone Age brain and I just diagnosed and fixed about 13 million youth yeah with ADHD who can't sit still in their classroom Yeah question low self-esteem you know what I mean anxiety motivation bad attitude like whatever like we just just like that we've figured out the root of the problem so that that's how we look at things here and that's why we don't work with people about their issues like that that's big waste of time that's a therapist that is not in fact understanding that a specific failure region of your existence is because of the way you're running cost benefit analysis and executing action in pursuit of an improvement you don't know something's vital about what it is that you're doing and you continue to fail okay and and the specific evolutionarily defined targets that you're seeking and your Stone Age brain is actually running enough it has enough evidence that it suspects you could get to a better place but it can't figure out how Okay so that that's the correct way to be analyzing the problem not oh we had a bad pattern of learning that took place in childhood that is a hundred percent [ __ ] okay so this is uh so of course typical therapy is wandering out of the weeds and even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then so once in a while a therapist will help okay all right all right we're all fired up here okay um have you do you have any general social suggestions for a socially anxious introvert if I did what I felt like doing I'd almost never go out or do anything social so I often push myself to do things I know I'm not exactly in the mood for but it's hard to know when to cut myself some slack and just chill out at home I'm running a constant CV on social outings but I feel like I'm almost never satisfied with my decisions help um yeah the first question is how often are you glad that you did it anyway you know are you um like are you over are you are you sort of talking yourself out of doing the thing that you want to do which is sit home and watch a movie or read a book or hang out with your partner or whatever it is that you're doing and you go do a thing and you're sort of ultimately glad that you did it and so you're you're glad that you pushed yourself or that somebody pushed you a little bit or do you feel drained and resentful and like oh my God I don't want to do that again or is it sort of a mix of those things which probably is more like a mix of those things so it's um I think kind of breaking it down and figuring in how much how much is overriding your true desire and how much is just that you contain a couple of competitive desires like part of you wants to stay home part of you knows that there is value in going out and having the experience and doing the new thing and that's welcome to life with a personality that doesn't all line up neatly in one column like like Doug was talking about on the last podcast my my life has been a war between openness and conscientiousness and so often my CB is completely all over the map because there will be one loud part of my brain that really wants to do the thing and another loud part of my brain that wants to do the other thing and they have a death match and ultimately the calculator spits out the the optimized mathematical instructions for this is this is the best thing to do nobody is going to feel like they got a good deal because neither neither aspect of your personality is going to get entirely you know what it thinks it wants um and and so it's it's just an ongoing sort of thing um where you switch back and forth and it's it's situation specific and sometimes you're going to regret things and sometimes you're going to be glad you did them and you can't um it feels like you can't trust your judgment so I know I know that feeling but I think it's pretty common um for most people who have personalities of any type but yeah what's your take on that my take is is that this is almost always the case that this person would not have had any of these problems in the Stone Age right he wouldn't have had the options you'd be hanging with the same 22 people your entire lifetime and so the anxious introverted people are not anxious and introverted and in other words the first question I asked the people that asked me this is are you that way with your best friend and family and the answer is almost always no I have no problem at all and chatty as hell me and my three sisters get together no no no not a problem that's the Stone Age environment okay the I the environment of oh well let's go to a party and my my two sisters and I will she's been invited and there's some friends to meet and forget it that never happens in the Stone Age there are no other people there's only 2 000 people on the planet 83 000 years ago yeah okay so the truth of the matter is is that of course through uh natural and sexual selection you've seen shifts in Personalities in the last fifty thousand years uh with the dawn of civilization and the rise of of cities so now you've got a hell of a lot of these hyper extroverts that were never part of the original design original design is reasonably xenophobic really appropriately so yeah stage your business you know what well look at chimps look at how look at how xenophobic chimps are totally like unbelievably yeah hostile yeah what are you doing over here what's happening yeah you better you better run yeah we're gonna kill you if we can and eat you yeah yeah the point is is that this person uh the first thing we understand there's nothing wrong with you you're closer to the original design second of all if we put you under the circumstances that would have been consistent with the Stone Age there's not even an issue here what you're seeing is that oh my God if if I if I was a little if I had some of these genes and these more modern people that are living on top of each other in Hong Kong that I could be talking to everybody all the time meeting a bunch of mates and friends and all kinds of interesting things well fine but the truth of the matter is there's a counter balancing society and xenophobia okay so you know somebody lived through the plagues who was it the people didn't want to talk to anybody and didn't meet anybody and their whole damn family didn't need anybody and so we all survived okay so there's a there's a point to quote the natural social distancing uh that people do and so and we believe that uh actually avoidance of communicable diseases of various kinds is a major feature in the in the uh continued profit that comes with being introverted so I would say that you're the real solution is not to how can I get myself to be more outgoing it's to figure out where on Earth you're going to have a repeat exposure effect for a small group of people that you really like and that becomes your social existence you know and uh if there's not enough so that that's kind of the idea so somebody that plays on a co-ed volleyball team 15 years you know it's been pretty much the same people every year and and you know that's the whole idea but basically get yourself a little group and farm Your Existence out of that little group uh rather than and then then we add everything that Jen says the rest of it if there's nobody to date there then you're gonna have to grit your teeth and you're going to be at war between these two uh parts of your personality both of them legitimate and you know your how big is your Lido how important is your you know the desires in that Arena answer if is it big enough to push through your anxiety Then maybe you get somewhere up it's not big enough to push through the anxiety you may just sit in a cabin so there's no fix for it not until we get the laser-guided missile that goes into your brain and destroys some of the anxiety which we don't have not not sure that's going to be technology I'm going to have enthusiasm for within my lifetime that's uh that sounds a little concerning all right uh let's see um we'd love to hear an update on the world situation if appropriate um we're doing Hawk block chair when we finish this one so we can we can roll that over into that because we'll we'll rant for an hour or so about the world situation whatever strikes our fancy do you have anything falling apart but they're trying they're trying really hard they're trying really hard it's it's pretty yeah there's definitely a lot to talk about but we didn't identified well identified so we'll see all right we'll get back to that on hot watch yeah um let's see what do we think about Carl Young the collective unconscious and so on have you found a use for the thoughts of other esoteric philosopher psychologists does Dr Lyle think all of that is junk not sure yeah that's a big question you you first go ahead yeah um you know I used to be very Enchanted by jungian thought and archetypes and some symbols and DreamWork and everything and I I don't rule out that that could enchant me again at some point in the future but I find it not particularly useful for anything that I would be interested in discovering about myself or any help certainly any help with clients it's sort of the the only utility it ever served was you know maybe it's kind of interesting to think about the archetypal symbols in your dreams to you know try to is there is there a message beyond the message and and can I sit with that and meditate with that and discover some truth that is not previously accessible to me so that's obviously a really um crude reduction of what Young is writing about and talking about but that was basically how I used him um and I just don't find that as useful anymore I don't find utility in dream interpretation like I used to think that I did because compared to just a working understanding of evolutionary psychology and the cost-benefit analysis fundamentally above all else it just pales and it's like it's like sort of a sideshow it's like a it's like parlor trick like okay yeah it's kind of fun to think about your dreams and maybe there are some important messages that are coming through your dreams and maybe they do have some Universal features and there's some kind of cool message there um but how helpful is that going to be in making better decisions to improve my life experience than just plain old meat and potatoes evolutionary psychology not particularly so for me I've just kind of moved away from it and I'm not very much in touch with it at all but I still really enjoy listening to Jordan Peterson kind of talk about the jungian themes in the Bible and you know the the hero's journey and how it's missing and the modern experience and um I find Value in all of that because it's it's definitely valid insight into the mismatch which we're talking about before you know there was hero's journey all over the Stone Age which is completely lacking I I the first thing I think um sort of similar to what you were saying when I when I talked to somebody who's having issues with a young male in their household whether it's their son or their nephew or their cousin or their little brother is like does he have um male role models that he wants to impress you know how how much is he being pushed with his physical limits and his um just his limits in general is is there uh some sort of mentor out there out there it doesn't have to be his dad ideally we would want it to be his dad but it certainly doesn't it could be an older brother it can be um you know a a friend at work who he's just looking up to and aspiring to model himself after and this is jungian archetypal Heroes Journey kind of stuff um and so I think we just talk about it in different language um and I you know I use it for intellectual entertainment and not much more than that all good yeah the uh I think we talked about this I can't remember where where we talked about this might have been on uh Beecher jeans where we recently I think in the last one we were talking about how we um we had some question maybe about Buddhism or oh yeah how can spirituality and EP yeah how does spirituality fit into EP or something like that yeah right yeah you you were you Doug Doug totally thinks I'm crazy totally she's like all right crazy open whacked up like no but but we we point out that that there are that there are uh what you're looking at without getting fancy about it is you're looking about human universals so you are looking about um features of the the architecture of human motivation that is you know that your motivation has an architecture in the same way that your hand has an architecture and that architecture has certainly been witnessed by a billion people over the years and a lot of them have been smart so Carla Yoon had Brent and he was looking for patterns that's what that's what a brain is actually even in a in a trilobite the brain is a pattern recognition device so Carla Jung and Freud and all these people were looking for patterns um they discerned some things that in other words not everything they said was patently false in other words they they actually said some things that were true a lot of things that they said that were true had been said before by other people so the uh but that doesn't mean that the things that they said that have truth in them might be interesting to read by somebody okay so somebody might read a Jung or even a Freud and think they learn something and maybe they would learn something but you'd learn a hell of a lot more by reading the moral animal wouldn't be even be close so the uh you would you would learn massively more about human nature almost inestimally more but if you read the blank slate so in other words you're you're you're essentially trying to learn something about the about you know the body by talking to a 14th century anatomist it's like good luck it's not that the guy doesn't know anything it's just that he his understanding pales in comparison to a 21st century professor of anatomy and physiology at a med school that's the difference and so you might say oh really is it that much and the answer is it is that much here is the Adapted Mind okay if you were to look in the Adapted Mind and attempt to read the psychological Foundation of culture okay uh written by written it says to be in cosmetes but I I heard it's Lita okay I mean I'm sure John edited the Daylights out of it and they talked for 14 years about it but if you were to read that now you're going to see the 21st century Brilliance of people that are sitting on top of an integrated set of understanding a conciliant understanding of of all of what happens in the entire universe that's who those people are Carl Jung was a guy that didn't know [ __ ] from Shinola had no idea how inheritance work I had no idea how natural selection worked that you know it really did I mean he was what was he he was like a 14th century Anonymous did he see some things that were true yeah he did he did see some things were true was he poetic and ingenious about how you described it yes he had some IQ that could he could he hold a candle did he shine the shoes of way to cosmetes not even close Okay so that's that's how this goes down when it comes to the depth of understanding of human nature and that's why I don't bother reading them there you go or Freud for that matter you know I read three pages of Freud and is so Haywire I I just can't yeah I'm more comfortable talking total [ __ ] about Freud than I am about young but uh yeah yeah I mean it's very it's very similar to the discussion that we had about spirituality and EP so if that when and if that podcast goes up um yeah we can there's more on this topic there it's so good hey Alfred Adler who doesn't get enough credit was was uh uh talked tremendous you know based his whole thinking around seeing that everybody's striving for superiority and he considered that to be you know the dysfunctionalist that isn't actually a million miles miles away from how I see that right yeah sure so in other words if I I would probably of those three guys who were the big three dudes of psychoanalytic theory that uh I'm probably closer to Adler than I am to the other two that are the other two slouches no they're not slouches but they're not freaking David Buss I mean try to talk to anyone about man woman dynamics of what the hell would they know as Freud said what does a woman want frustrated as hell I couldn't figure it out the uh Hey listen they had a lot of company by in 1985 the uh you know I don't like this guy so that's why I can't come up Robert Sternberg okay Robert Sternberg Big Shot Yale Professor okay uh uh who was one of these redundant publishing academic little munchkins uh that got himself famous from publishing a Jillian things and and wormed his way into the the Nexus of education and psychology research and had enough brains to be able to understand factor analysis so he got famous intimidating all the the Lesser beings with that for a while the but that guy at the Nebraska Symposium on motivation which is a big famous Symposium on the nature of motivation in 1985 said outride to God in the universe and where it's recorded where he can't deny it they have no idea why parents love their children no idea such a mystery none like literally that that is where Psychology was now the if you ask Carl Jung as Sigmund Freud no embarrassment they would have known either but guess what made a cosmet is new and she didn't have a PhD yet it's really simple you're designed by nature to Value highly anything that's going to Aid in Tibet the reproductive of your genetic code okay so there you have it okay and so and you're gonna like them more depending upon how much it looks like they resemble you even in your own family it's going to turn out that the genes that more resemble you you're gonna love that child more than the other one that resembles more of your spouse okay identifiable and true that this is that this goes on so it's like wow you talk about depth of insight you know all the way down to particle physics this is this is what evolutionary psychology is and anything else is intelligent speculation Insight over the centuries a lot of it is really spectacular and so all these guys uh the the great fathers of psychoanalysis were not stupid none of them they were all super high IQ people and they were trying like crazy but they were limited by their uh they adjacent possible they they they were their adjacent possible was just not they were a couple boxes away you know and so it's an interesting thought experiment too because I'm I'm sure if Freud were around today post behavioral genetics Revolution he'd be just as disgusting as he was in his time right he would he would be just as I mean he would it would just be Freud 2.0 on steroids it would be all trauma all the time um you know he'd be he'd be huge he'd be bigger than Dr Phil yeah um um but young is an interesting question like you you take that brain and you put it post Darwin post post behavioral genetics Revolution post you know like all of it and he's still got a lot of openness in there um and it's you know and and it's still you get something probably like Jordan Peterson you know something that is coming to grips with with genetic personality and understanding but it's seeing a lot of room for agency and mysticism in there um and and so yeah it's it's not that they are that's I think that's why I was a little allergic to can't shine the shoes of Lita cosmetes because it's not it's not as if he's an inferior intellect um he's he's just a creature of his time he is an inferior Salida maybe yeah yeah intellect to Robert Wright no not at all yeah quite the quite the contrary yeah so so yeah I think we have to take people within the context of their moment yeah it just impossible is the perfect perfect way the where you get my irritation what people get it is don't bow down to these people yeah the rules of the matter is is that social science has refused to acknowledge the extraordinary insights that have come out of evolutionary psychology Behavior genetics so therefore people are still acting like this is an even playing field theoretically and clinically and it's not right not even close and so it's disgusting that that the professors of psychology out there are still acting like well you know what would what what would the Great Master say and it's like he's not a great Master he's a different history that that compared to what we know now I mean can we have great respect for Pasteur yeah do you read a textbooks try to figure out what's True by reading what he had to say in 1883 I hope not yeah okay yeah so that's that's the correct way to look at this yeah yeah yeah there's a there's a therapist um that I occasionally hate follow on Instagram I don't follow him but he shows up in my feed all the time and it's this very typical like this is this is one of the genres that I just hate watch all the time so the algorithm has learned that I I Linger on them and I watch them and I repeatedly watch them and I screenshot them in horror and so it just gives me more of them um and there's this one guy so if you if you are on sort of and I'm not actually on Tick Tock but it gets reposted on Instagram so he's if you're at all in that space on either of those apps you've seen him he's very effeminate he's got a lot of vocal fries it's very uh and he's all about you know we're gonna it's it's just it's all about your childhood and it's all about boundaries and and you're really not responsible for anything bad that's that happened to you or any of your bad feelings Etc et cetera so he had a whole kind of response to recent mass shootings um and I forget which one exactly it was in response to and it got it got uh Libs of tick tock picked it up and so it actually got some play and I saw it um promoted there um and he is saying essentially I'm just we can't be we need to stop stigmatizing mental health for these Mass Shooters um because you know it has nothing to do with mental health and in fact people with with uh mental health issues are more likely to be victims than to be Shooters um and so we need to turn our lens to patriarchy and also to the the fact that we have a gun problem in this country but mostly patriarchy um I.E there are no immutable personality characteristics here that I'm going to acknowledge or that you know you could have the a bad seed basically um there's another there's another person I really enjoy in the space who has a podcast too I think this guy's very smart but he's he's very hung up on the fact that well if you just look at these Mass shooters or you look at uh serial killers they all had terrible childhoods and it's like yeah they have terrible genes they had terrible parents who behaved terribly toward them um and now the terrible genes live live again um and there's just it's like yes there's an extremely strong correlation there and it's the aces question again like well do you deny that that all of these people who have these issues you know had these childhood dramas and these childhood issues it's like well of course they did um but these are the genes talking through the generations um and it's just it's like not even on it's nowhere on the radar these people so and then we can still wave our hands around and say patriarchy toxic culture et cetera et cetera and that's as if that's some kind of explanation or answer um yeah it's incredible it's so corrupt it's it's and it's as you say it's not just that it's wrong it's it's actually um misleading in a way that is uh certainly corrosive of individual happiness and and individual well-being and optimizing your life but you know just dangerous and shitty and bad and just as as Jordan Peterson would say that's not good it's the opposite of good it's the it's the absolute very diametrically opposed energy of good yeah yeah all right what else we got what else we have a very a short question are we going to be able to get the book in an e-book format no at least not right away yeah yeah that's actually an interesting question I hadn't even thought about it yeah we're not even thinking our we've got a vision for what this thing is going to look like in your hand that I'm sure eventually they'll there will be an ebook but I can I can answer that at one level because I have been uh I've published things in Kindle before and I can tell you that there's no way it will be in Kindle because of the uh formatting issues in Kindle so Kindle would just break our whole Vision artistically and we can't have that so but there could be an ebook that's like a PDF you know that's that's basically like we we take the pages as they are in the book and we reproduce them in a digital format that you can download that that is a possibility um but no Kindle can go to hell yeah yeah also we don't want Amazon taking a cut of our of our well-earned profits not not sharing it with the evil empire yeah um seeing if we have any other we've got some big questions here [Music] um have either of us seen the series The shrink next door I have not it sounds interesting Will Ferrell and Paul Rudder in it uh based on a true story yeah it's probably pretty good true story of a New York psychologist that took over a patient's life with No Boundaries um yeah I'm sure that's entertaining I haven't heard of it or seen it but uh yeah which one's the I suppose feral would have to be the the Schmo right the the unwitting not the psychologist I I assume um he's he's a Marvel is the Marvel yeah um well if you think we can answer pretty quickly the next one up is uh how can homosexuality be genetic what is the evolutionary purpose of homosexuality so there's there's a working Theory which you know I know that's that's kind of generally where we start from um maybe they have to read the books yeah we do have a little vignette in the book about it but yeah I don't wanna I don't want to necessarily give it away right now okay all right consider whether or not we're going to explain that but it's in the book yes um okay well this one this again if we can answer it quickly if the heritability of intelligence increases with age and I am smarter than my parents am I expected to get Dumber as I age or is this mainly a childhood environmental effect EG parents affecting grades and I'm already over that okay they're not understanding that what what it means that the inheritability is increasing with age heritability is not increasing with age the measurement of heritability is increasing with age that's so the um and your your what's what that means is the following and here's how they can tell and that is that if you have for example a couple of monozygotic twins and so we're going to expect that their IQs their IQ measurements should be extremely similar so it's going to turn out that if we measure them at age 10 um they might be quite similar they might correlate let's say 0.75 the um and the thing is is that we'd be like wow that's a you know a fair amount of variances is unaccounted for looks like there's environmental effects that are impacting us now this is what this is one of the more interesting things that Jen and I discovered when we read blueprint because I did not know this so uh it turns out that if you follow these people over time the correlation coefficient between those two individuals Rises so in other words it's you might think well gee the more exposure they are the different environments in the world and one of them becomes an account and the other one becomes a lawyer and they have very different lives and they move apart from each other but you know when they're right into the same roof with the same appearance you know going to the same school and almost in the same class they correlate 0.75 as monozygotic twins but what will happen later we might expect them to correlate 0.6 by the time they're 40 and maybe playing four by the time they're 80. no that's not what happens what happens is is that the randomicity of what you tested on the test the test is just a subset of a way to try to get in and find out a person's level of abilities so yeah when you so a little IQ test there which is pretty good little test the truth is is it's still not a not a comprehensive assessment of what that person's abilities are now actually they would find for example if they did a five hour IQ test at age 10 instead of a one hour IQ test they would find the correlation coefficients between those two kids just to be higher might be 0.79 instead of 0.75 if they had a four day IQ test they'd find it was going to be about 0.85 but they don't have a four day test but it's going to turn out that over time by the time they're 60 years old the dogs are magically appearing all over the place by the time they're 60 years old the um the little variances in what they happen to know or not know the differences between those two people measuring some little set of questions about you know do you know who Louis Armstrong is when they're 10 years old one of them happened to know and one of them didn't happen to know but by the time there's 60 when you use the same population uh verified test those two people who have they happen to be 95th percentile brains they will both know the same questions almost perfectly so in other words we've shaken the error out of the testing process by allowing their whole knowledge base now when it's tested later to be they have more representative knowledge that that they can display so in other words the same hour test winds up being more accurate because we've we've made up for the fact that at some point one of those kids didn't happen to know one of those questions because they missed that day in school but they didn't miss 50 years of life by the time they're 50 and so when we test them at 50 they are increasingly similar in their test outcomes so that that so nothing is dramatic happening about getting smarter or Dumber it isn't becoming more heritable all that's happening is the measurements are indicating the fact the underlying proof that the genes are determining the show that's what's being demonstrated I hope that I hope that is clear yeah I think the question is also conflating it does happen in the sort of childhood distortions wearing away um over time so there there is yeah the parent has stood over you you know forcing you to do your homework and so you're more conscientious but then your conscientiousness becomes more heritable in the sense that the real conscientiousness shows up as soon as we get you out of that environment and leave you to your own devices um so this question kind of combines both of those processes into one big bundle um but I think you're you're you've tackled it at the level it needs to be tackled yeah yeah that's a yeah so that that's a great example whether it's IQ there shouldn't be anything about IQ that she's more more heritable than the other person right yeah almost certainly is not it's just that they they haven't figured that out yet I actually haven't seen anybody make that point but it's uh but it's obvious to me that neural tissue is neural tissue it's neural tissue it's neural tissue there isn't something about a subset of neural tissue that we would measure under an IQ test that should be more heritable than the neural tissue that we would have under conscientiousness or openness doesn't make any sense at all okay right so what that means is that the measurements of the personality characteristics are inherently sloppier which of course it is who's Louis Armstrong you either know it or you don't right right do you like to hang out with your friends well that's a much more difficult question to interpret and get the right answer that describes who it is that you are so the inherent measure of personality is sloppier but what we see if we look at the underlying processes that as we measure things better as Jen says you might have a parent a tiger mom standing over you with a whip until you're 18 because you got you were a MC twin that got put shoved into that house and somebody else is with a bunch of laid-back hippies in in you know arcade of California and so they are who they are they're 58 percentile conscientious you're a 50 percentile conscientious as soon as you leave and get the hell out of there okay suddenly you're conscientious with your your teachers think is 75 percentile because you do a pretty damn good job getting your homework done they just didn't know the tiger mom did it okay now for the rest of your life you're a 50th percentile personality the conscientiousness and it's obvious and you and your twin brother up there if you meet guess what extremely similar that's how that works I guess that's it you guys got a princess Cameo this time that was pretty that's that's I can't promise that every q a but she was very insistent you know Paws Up on the table and everything all right um okay so you and I reconvening shortly shortly yeah okay I I kind of warmed up you did yeah you're definitely we're we're ready to go so yes we'll unleash some world events analysis oh man all right all right well sounds good and um I yes sorry we didn't get to everything we had some sort of big juicy questions that are just like 20 minute questions that we don't have time for so but uh next time we'll be back we'll be back okay all right everybody we will see you next time all right bye
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