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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-08-14
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good did it work good all right all right a little technical mystery to get us started today so all right good yep all right well anything anything before we dive into questions here oh I don't think so the uh yeah maybe we'll have some interesting questions that will come up and we'll leak into other things but probably not true it's true yep yeah sorry we're getting a little uh started a little late everyone I see some comments about that it's uh we just had some issues with the link so um but should be fine now um I should have fixed the chat Daryl I think I tried to fix it so everyone can chat with everyone um at least in theory that's how it should be set so um and just a reminder to everybody the Q a you can um upvote questions so if there are things that you would prefer that we get to you can indicate your interests there and you can also respond um to questions if you'd like so if you do have a question try to add it ask it in the Q a tool we're more likely to see it there all right all right okay what's your background oh you don't recognize it you don't recognize this it's The Shining okay it's been too long since I saw it so just in that sort of morbid mood today oh good yeah just picture a picture of the little twins on their tricycles down the going to the the door the elevator doors there yeah I thought I'd cheer everyone up yeah all right what do we got I want let's see I wanted to get to the bottom of the stress of stress anxiety and health two possible mechanisms I've come across would be either the diversion of the body's resources from the immune system to focus on perceived threats in the macro environment or reduce Sleep Quality slash quantity which could also hurt the immune system Robert trivers also puts forward some similar thoughts in the Folly of fools in chapter six the Immunology of self-deception the data may not show an effect on life expectancy but what about quality of life through acute or chronic illness it's a big a lot a lot of stuff in this question um I think it's actually pretty simple and that is that the uh as you see you're not going to find uh you're going to scratch around and not going to find any correlations with life expectancy so which tells you that it's not particularly toxic okay so what do we in fact no evidence that it's toxic at all that stress is not toxic just to yeah yeah I mean as this person is recognizing they are obviously done some reason a reading you're looking at about a diversion of resources and so um there are going to be times when uh when you know there is some theoretical Optimum that ingeniously resides inside of every cell called homeostasis and it's you're always being pushed out of homeostasis at every nanosecond somewhere in this incredibly complicated system the um now the um uh if you are quote very stressed let's talk about that so what does that mean that means you have um you have three major uh parts to your brain if we're going to look at the calculation of value in order to your brain is doing a lot of other things it's it's managing you know it it's it's it's it's paying attention to the the gravitational force of your rear end against the seed is paying attention to the the uh what how cool or warm the room is or how your hands feel or you know you've got an itchy little mosquito bite on your left leg it's paying attention to a lot of things but what it's doing is it's running constantly updating cost benefit analysis uh that that essentially is the interplay between three massive databases the first is the universal value system that makes you you and that includes that's the equivalent of Gray's Anatomy in other words there's an architecture of the way your mind is built and your mind is built primarily to run cost benefit analyzes and then execute the highest value behavioral option in that as a result of that cost benefit analysis so the that that architecture is extraordinarily complex um just as the architecture of the human body itself is extraordinarily and complex so is the architecture the neural architecture that involves the problem of running cost benefit analyzes is impossibly complicated um and so when I say impossibly it was we we can actually understand it and we can see it in Broad Strokes uh but it's the equivalent of we can see Mount Everest but we can't see every molecule that builds Mount Everest we can see what it amounts to but we can't we can't actually count or understand all you know or C all the little Parts your mind is running apparently more than two trillion data bits of calculation per second so that makes it um it's running uh more than a thousand times data data analysis then the fastest supercomputer in the world that means the the cost benefit analytics are impossibly complex uh it can be done because it has an automated system that it's born with and it's designed by nature to draw in two databases one of them is your immediate sensory environment and the second is all of your memories of relevant sensory experiences you had before so I uh I'm looking at the the the big red rock at the churn in the river I can see it it does that in principle doesn't mean anything to me except that I remember my friend Bill told me hey watch out when you get to the Big Red Rock on the River there's a crocodile that lives on right around there okay so now I didn't have this previous sensory experience of the Big Red Rock before but I had a Century experience of listening to my friend describe this so those my immediate sensory evidence I also I'm aware that that a crocodile is a predator and I'm and uh and I that I know what that means and therefore I know that that's something I'm trying to avoid so all of my calculus my innate machinery and my immediate sensory environment and all of my memories too that are relevant to the sensory environment and the computation all triangulate together in trillions of calculations and come up with quote the level of my stress okay well what do we mean by stress okay well we mean that the organism has been pushed out of a uh out of homeostasis in order to deal with some kind of environmental challenge okay so that challenge can be real quote right in your face or it can be imagined uh but whatever it is the nervous system believes that it is a sufficient probability even if it's only in your imagination that there that there may not be any decent evidence in the environment to indicate that that threat is real but you could think so anyway why well because you're schizophrenic for God's sakes and you are hearing things and having sensory evidence at nobody else has um but otherwise the the so so that's what we get now would we expect that that would be toxic to the organism of course not if it was toxic to the organism why would it have it as part of its Arsenal for survival and reproduction okay oh but does doesn't aren't there costs sure there's cost to chewing an apple you could actually you could actually have the apple peel cut you in between your a couple of your of your teeth and actually draw blood in other words there's costs and benefits to everything and your behavior cannot be precise and complete and accurate and without consequence so you are constantly being pushed and shoved in you know in and around homeostasis the it's a theoretical construct it doesn't even really exist it just means that the system knows that hey we would be a little better off if we actually moved our biochemistry a little bit to the left okay but it's part of a more coordinated system that says that's nice but we happen to be running from a Tyrannosaurus Rex right now so I really can't be worried about the fact that you just have your foot stuck on a thorn we don't really care the system runs a hierarchical analysis and through its two trillion calculations per second capability it can figure out what is higher priority and what is lower priority so does that mean that you have to sacrifice your sleep when your your job or your promotion may be on the line with this big presentation that's next month and you're going to have to just eat [ __ ] for the next 30 days yes okay well what about if that promotion is something you didn't really want anyway and it's only going to be another two percent raise because you work for the government it's just going to come with a much more responsibility then sleep like a baby because who gives a damn unless you happen to be a hyper conscientious nut case whose Universal value system got preset to way overestimate the worst case scenario which means you're going to be laughed at and you know the person that's in the room that you're trying to date is going to dump you and say forget it because you made an idiot out of yourself in other words you may calculate this thing well or you may calculate it poorly but you may calculate it into a stress response because you are perceiving that there are sufficient losses that it's worth staying up okay so the kind of curious thing that you'll hear in the world about mindfulness is going to be the notion that somehow you could consciously override that process which you cannot the entire process is being run by automated calculations and you don't have any choice in the matter now what you might be able to do those you might be able to learn certain things that actually wind up resulting in reducing your stress okay that that may be possible but are we worried about stress and the impact on the body not particularly uh I would trust that the Stone Age brain's ability to calculate the cost benefit analysis of keeping me up at night is probably a pretty good calculator okay and and finally if my brain gets dirty enough and ineffective enough uh it will finally turn off and I'll go to sleep so uh I can't tell you how many people say I never sleep yeah it's [ __ ] if they actually turn on a little machine and track it turns out they're sleeping 6.4 hours so they're frustrated that they're waking up tired that's because they're under stress because there's some contingencies for Behavior out there in the environment that are telling them we're better off awake and thinking than we are asleep until we reach a certain amount of sleep deprivation and then we're better off sleeping okay I don't know if that answers the question Jen it was just a diatribe no I think that that mostly gets to the question um the the quality of life through chronic illness is the other question here the the yeah you're not going to get chronic illness from this that would be extremely unusual uh you would have to be uh I mean look at the people they walked out of the Holocaust and they lived longer than people that weren't in the concentration camps why because they reverse the other Genesis from a rich diet it's exactly what happened so no I don't uh I'm not buying you know one of the least politically correct uh conclusions out there in the literature literally I mean I have never get out but that's exactly what what that's what esselstyn claims yeah well that's interesting yeah I came to the same independent conclusion I hadn't read that so I'm glad that that's exactly what you thought the uh this lines up with other data that we've seen similar data in other circumstances around the globe the uh yeah what people like people like to hear that stress is a big impact on your health you want to know why you don't want to hear the truth which is the Bon bonds and the cigarettes right sure right yeah so everybody but Doug aren't they just only eating the bon bons and smoking the cigarettes to self-medicate the stress I I think I've cornered your argument yeah yeah you know I Checkmate okay it couldn't possibly be that I like bonbons because they're just tasty oh yeah because they're they're Engineers because I don't want to eat the bonbons because I know that they're going to make me fat and sick so why am I doing that it must be because I'm stressed maybe it's because it's super normal stimuli that's being evaluated by the Stone Age brain is super valuable to guard against starvation which is the main threat for the Stone Age brain so I just have a suspicion that that's what's going on and the stress you have is over your uh is over your weight or your health or your high blood pressure or your cholesterol or whatever the hell is the sequelae for meeting the bonbons but no I don't think you're eating the bonbons because you're under stress now people will actually find in the digestion of all food that particularly rich food you're going to get a little endorphin response of course and so you you are going to seek it out to some degree more often if you are experiencing stress um but that that it's still the nature of the food itself you know you're you're a great great grandmother would still chew on some carrot sticks to try to get that same effect and she wasn't paying the cost that you pay for the bon bons um so it's still it's still the food it's still the pleasure trap yeah yeah and it's also this kind of stress is um is very time limited and I'm saying there there are of course people that are inherently High Strung because they're hyper conscientious nuts and they're unstable but there's nothing to stop that so you can try what you can meditate Listen to George Winston or Enya you know what I mean get your [ __ ] do Deep Dark Shades so if you ever miraculously fall asleep at a reasonable hour maybe you'll stay put for a while don't have your cats and dogs and they're sleeping with you because they'll wake you up in other words you do everything reasonable that you're a hyper conscientious anti-nut and that's how you're going to live and your ancestors uh kept our ancestors alive yeah I'm sleeping at the back of the cave and I'm perfectly comfortable right right it helps me to know that you're out there okay neurotic yeah that's that's actually a theme that comes up a lot when I talk to clients where it's like well what is the advantage of of the the high conscientious net case personality and it is it's it's not necessarily so much a personal Advantage for you um but it is it's you all of the all of the costs that you pay at the individual level in the modern environment were mitigated in the social and the the collective unit of the Village um so you people who have high conscientious in that case personalities today they're often kind of living on their own or maybe they have a relationship but it's not in great shape or they're they're just sort of very isolated and the isolatedness Really raises the cost of that personality and it's not a normal State of Affairs for The Human Condition so it's it's it's not like you evolved that way to benefit other people instead of yourself um that would be like a misunderstanding of how it works but the the the full emotional toll and the cycle logical toll that you're experiencing would have been hugely compensated by having big Louis around to tell you it's all going to be okay and you know just alpha males there to protect you and and to reassure you um in a way that is not really present for a lot of particularly women with this personality trait today yeah and also not just big Louie but a whole bunch of them yeah actually your mind is embedded in 40 other people and you're sweeping through there and you also have a tremendous amount of experience with these people okay so you actually know which 10 people to really trust and so as your brain sweeps through and looks and sees that they're not they're not upset about whatever it is right exactly of course it's been a impact just like just like I look at the flight attendants when I if the turbulence is really bad of course the thing you do is you look at the flight attendants freaking out you know right if they're not freaking out I don't have to freak out as much um and so if I don't have that check I'm gonna have a lot more in just inherent anxiety because I don't know what's happening it feels weird it's it's disturbing so we've all done that I've done it I've been watching turbulence and then turning over and the flight attendants are chatting in the back and yeah yeah okay sure yeah and you know I'm sure that's part of their training everything's cool you don't you don't let them see you sweat but they can't hide it if they're truly freaked out so yeah yeah all right all right well that's that's that one there was something else that came up in that answer but I've lost it so we'll see if it comes back up here so so um I have a question about the big five dimension of openness to experience I'm very intellectually curious and open to a lot of new and radical ideas and fields of study but not particularly interested in real Adventures does that make me at least still somewhat open yeah this is um I've talked before about Jordan Peterson's tests his big five test which is really a big 10 test because he he disaggregates all all the big five into two sort of um you know the two big biggest facets of that trait so conscientiousness gets split into orderliness versus industriousness for example and agreeableness gets split into um politeness and compassion and openness gets split into uh I think he still calls it openness but it would be more accurate to think of it as adventurousness like your your propensity for jumping out of an airplane for example um versus versus um intellectual curiosity um and so you can score very very high and one of those and very very low on another one and depending what sort of big five test you're taking and how how it skews toward for example orderliness over industriousness and conscientiousness if I took a big five test that only measured my orderliness my conscientiousness would plummet to to a very low level because I'm not particularly orderly um all of my conscientiousness is driven by my my industriousness um and uh you know people people will have these they'll be really really skewed on one dimension or another my openness is fairly balanced I'm high in both um the sort of adventurousness and the the intellectual curiosity but I'm higher in intellectual curiosity and so I I'm not uh I'm not total I'm not a thrill seeker you know I'm I'm open to weird experiences um more than the average Bearer but not at an exceptionally high level but somebody depending again if the test if the questions on the test are along the lines of I want to eat at a new restaurant every night and they're built around novelty they're built around thrill seeking and Novelty um but they're not going to address questions of abstract reasoning and and pursuing ideas and and being really interested in intellectual debates it's just going to miss all of that and so it's going to underestimate how open you really are yeah yeah so I like his I like his a lot for the granularity of it it's worth the 10 bucks that he charges it's a little bit of a it's a little little exploitative but it is a good test all right anything do you have anything else on that no all good all right um okay interested in our thoughts on what role function ADHD has in evolution if any and how real is it and then she follows that up and says is ADHD just someone who's an hcnc hcnc being a high conscientious nutcase very technical term that we tend to use and sometimes we'll use the acronym without explaining it so yeah this is a super super common question we get this a lot yeah um you're gonna find um that now we have to go back and say what I was not going to say on this second question because it wasn't necessary or useful but we what we want to do is we want to understand that your we can conceptually think of of um personality as being half a dozen ingredients okay we could do that like okay well you get you get a 68 percentile dose of openness you get a 92nd percentile dose of intelligence you get a 30 second percentile and then Jordan Peterson would say well actually there's 10 out of five so now we've got you know 10 little things we have doses of but none of this is true okay it's a what you actually have is 25 000 genes and it turns out that those 25 000 genes half of them build your brain so 12 000 some somewhere between 10 and 15 000 genes are are building proteins that build your brain okay that have built your brain so now it's going to turn out that from within there the the the genes are acting oftentimes in concert uh as well as individually uh and a given Gene doesn't do one thing it does 77 different things and so as a result actually tracking the pathways of What gene does what is in in principle it's impossible you you can you can it's actually in principle impossible the the the I I don't believe that there's enough computational capability or time in the known universe or any known thing about any machine we could build we could actually figure this out okay now does that mean we can't seem out Everest no we can see Mount Everest we can see that there are characteristics uh for facing cost benefit analytic problems in evolution that give rise to varying Tendencies on either side of a bell curve I.E be more optimistic or less optimistic about going over the next Hill that's open goodness okay uh being uh for example uh more or less Pleasant with my con specifics I.E agreeable okay so we can see that we can break these into broad categories but the truth of the matter is we're looking at individual Gene frequencies for God's sakes okay now uh and we can see that that's true because um we can we could tell that a pair of monozygotic twins shares an awful lot of similarity in how it is that they go about doing all kinds of funny little effects the uh and that that those patterns are utterly unique to them that that there isn't a third person on Earth that you could say oh boy you damn near fit in with these two MZ twins not really there there's uh there's so much variation in the personality that crosses all kinds of uh little things like for example you know how how sensitive you are to a certain smell for God's sakes where would you where would you put that in personality it's a personality characteristic it's an individual difference variable okay and it has implications For Thought feeling and behavior so what the hell do you call that other than a personality characteristic but it's not it's not in this big catchment of the Big Ten or the big five or whatever you want to call it look what the question was so the uh ADHD ADHD ironically okay so um ADHD I uh I typically don't see it looking correlated with Hyper conscientiousness but you sometimes will but that's a random event you'll sometimes find a person that's ADHD and Hyper conscientious unusual as hell okay the uh but ADHD itself is not a disorder okay the uh all it is is a gene variation and I I believe that all you're looking at is rapidly shifting attention and that's why you're going to find it far more in boys and girls because boys are further from the tribe and it are vastly more dangerous circumstances than girls and so therefore you better be you better be turning your head quickly at the sign of anything moving at the edge of your peripheral vision okay that would be very important if you're a woman you're uh and you are indebted with 18 other women and a big bunch of blackberries and you're gossiping and keeping your eye on the kids and listening to them scream you are not on the edge of death okay if you're a male you are one wrong move one you know one you didn't notice the Predator who's quietly sneaking up behind you and you did not pay attention you didn't shift your attention away from what you were doing dead Okay so no surprise this is diagnosed ten to one male to female is is what you'd see so uh is it a disorder of course it's not a disorder it's a bell curve of how rapidly Shifting the attention is and so you're going to find that there's going to be uh you know first to the 99th percentile and any kid that's up there anywhere near where they can get their greedy hands on them and medicate them they're going to call it ADHD okay notice that kid doesn't have any problem playing his video game he's not having any problems that like that he has a problem sitting in class staring at a chalkboard listening to something he's disinterested in and his brain says scan the environment check check to the left to check to the right because there's nothing that important going on in front of you that's all it is it's not a disorder right so that's a uh the vast majority of human unnecessary suffering is coming from the juxtaposition of a stone age brain with a moderate environment that includes well over 90 percent of all physical disability and premature death and suffering almost all of that is coming as a derivative of a stone age body that is not eating sleeping and exercising consistent and Drug using within its natural history uh architecture the same thing is true with quote disorders of any kind yeah uh oh the person has social anxiety disorder really they have social anxiety disorder yes they're really shy and they get really anxious in groups really how about around the table with their three best friends and their three siblings oh well not there well what the hell do you think they were designed for that is precisely the ecological circumstances for which they were designed the fact that some people are crazy enough to never have met a stranger and could walk into a party and say hey fine good for them for some reason you know those genes made it made it through you know uh and we're overly trusting and managed to reproduce more than they got slaughtered okay but just just at me next time Doug you know the point is is that there's nothing in the world distorted disordered about a shy and uh socially anxious human we put them under under ecologically valid circumstances and they are perfectly and totally comfortable okay so but no Xanax is going to be the solution for you or no no we know that's addictive so boost bar oh no well actually not that problem you know the ssris is what really counts even though it has just finally been admitted we're now forced to admit our opponent has nothing to do with your uh depression but the SSRI still seemed to work somehow seemed to work so if you've got social anxiety disorder you should take this I we've seen that this is helpful right right yeah well speaking of ching ching I have some some additional bitching on this question to do which especially as as ADHD diagnoses apply to women um I I have in the last two weeks probably talked to four different women who have had some practitioner quasi diagnose them with ADHD and try and try to medicate them and so they've brought this up with me and I've actually seen this um uh uh very common on uh sort of in the The Tick Tock Instagram reels pop psychology realm so it's very fashionable especially for women to now be self-diagnosing or seeking out diagnoses as some kind of neurodivergent oh I have undiagnosed autism I have undiagnosed ADHD et cetera et cetera et cetera so this is just the the freaking pharmaceutical racket expanding its claws into new populations from adolescent boys so you know we've we've got we've we've been able to lock in that demographic for years and now we just start just like we have with every other diagnosis we start um diagnostic creep and you know now um well ADHD and autism look different in women than they do in men than it does um and the symptoms manifest very differently and for some women it could look like this and for some women it could look like that and the symptoms that are being listed are things like I wait until the last minute to complete things or um I'm I'm uh I'm very afraid of rejection I mean impossibly vague and and uh Universal issues of human competition um and so it's it's no surprise that big Pharma is latching on to these things and recognizing that there's sort of people facing competitive dilemmas that they're looking for a quick fix for and oh well you've gone through your whole life without being properly diagnosed and yeah here let's let's give you this very relieving sense of belonging along with this with this new pathology we're going to assign you and we'll just put you on a really low dose and you know it's been it's the the literature shows that it's really helpful like it's the same old goddamn story and it makes me really really really upset you know as you just describe this I mean we know this is true and it's a little sideline little issue but um but you can you can sniff in a diagnosis depending upon who you are you can sniff concessions yeah oh yeah yeah yeah for sure it's sadly the world has to back off and give me more time on my homework and I'm neurodivergent yeah neurodivergent that's the terminal I've never heard till today oh you got to get on Tick Tock Doug I in my defense I am not on Tick Tock but I do I do sometimes scroll through a psychology Instagram and a lot of things get reposted and it's yeah this is this is you know you you uh the the the world needs to give you uh wider birth because you yeah you you uh you don't operate the same way you don't see things the same way you're you you can't be expected to compete in the same way um the ways in which you compete need to be uh recognized and validated in their own right so it's you're you're not you're not playing this game you're playing a different game you know what and it's incredibly you have to back up for a second because this is um this is actually amazing my my you know it's not like you and I don't talk about all kinds of things like this but my my my fingers are slipping around a concept here that I you we probably already explored that it's bugging me right this second which is that that what what you're watching is an extraordinary juxtaposition of of uh of these perverse incentives and diverse strategies coalescing as we look at our world it looks socially psychologically very very different than it looked in 1980 okay well you are barely being born but the truth is is that at any other time you're watching this victimhood process where which somebody's getting paid you know I mean some scamming is going on but the but the person who's actually being victimized is the person who is wanting to play victim in some way in order to get some other concessions and all you have to do is be willing to accept the diagnosis it's very very interesting that uh as a Young Man people in general hated having a diagnosis you bought it like no don't don't call me this or call me that I don't want that on up until very recently I mean within the last 20 years we're watching an explosion of I'm look at me I'm a diagnostic Pride yeah there's a pride in being damaged and I think that the only I mean there would be alternative alternate one way or the other we understand that every brain uh and actually every living thing on Earth is a resource acquisition machine so what we're seeing is an extraordinary method to get resources yeah and the resources are somewhat varied you know what I mean I.E breaks over performance you know basically it's a self-handicapping strategy I I.E the ego trap uh trauma uh you know Enlightenment any any other whack-a-doodle thing that that people have have conjured up in order to be seen as more beautiful and Brilliant than they really are but they've been somehow handicapped this is just this is a whole new completely completely it's it's just swirling with everything else yeah essentially the escape from competition damn is that a big concept yeah I think we've I think we've been in this this we we've been on this part of the map before well this is the the chapter that I am working on right now it covers a lot of this territory and it also covers the um the the piece that's the that I've tried to really drive home in my dissertation about this which is that it is a supply and a demand yeah that's that's what you're getting to yeah so it's like it's it's not just people who are saying hey I I want the diagnosis you've got someone who is very standing very ready to profit on that diagnosis and so the person who is bringing this this victim claim is actually in turn being victimized by the the corporate process that is very happy to monetize them um bizarrely and and as an ancillary process the people that are handing the pills out also are doing it for status yes everybody so Birch is signaling yeah the whole damn thing is incredible you you couldn't come up with a better scheme yeah yeah there you go ADHD yeah yeah yeah it was it was a scam when it was eight-year-old boys I mean it's your 77 year old grandma it's this is just personality I I had I had friends trying to um just like I had you know psychologists at my campus Health Center that were trying to put me on antidepressants when I'd been dumped like yeah no I'm supposed to be sad like this is I'm supposed to be having a hard time right now I don't want your drugs um I had friends who came wielding their newly uh secured add or ADHD diagnosis especially women um and they're like this is why I struggle in my classes this is why I am not I can't finish this project this is why um you know my dissertation isn't done all of all of the afflictions of graduate student life um and uh and it's like well I think I think you would you know meet the criteria as well I'm like yeah I'm sure I would I'm sure that's it's there's it's broad enough and vague enough and there are enough little things in there that I'm going to be able to find Reflections of my personality somewhere in that inventory um and it's like all the online tests that ask if you have issues with food addiction you can't take those tests without coming out with a positive result that you've got some issues with food addiction it's like the whole thing is rigged to say oh yeah well you do you know you you meet some of the criteria for this disorder and so you really you don't need a very big dose but just a low dose will make a big difference for you it's uh it's unbelievable it's actually really interesting because when you look at this the it's so profitable oh yeah so the the deception that's going on yeah the the the uh the corporate genius deceives the doctor okay the doctor wants to be deceived because they want to be helpful you know they at least at least part of that's part of their their Matrix of uh motivation so but they want status from the patient as well and yeah so they uh and then then the patient you know would love to actually believe and is certainly susceptible to believing that the doctor knows more than they do that there's Geniuses behind this technology and that they've actually they've got a secret trick it's like going to a Tony Robbins seminar so you can be the top salesman in your Club you just have to learn the secret sauce that's going to make you a star okay so that's what's been holding you back like how many people don't think that they should be 25 percentile better off than they are almost all of them there's an inherent narcissism built into the system which was revealed statistically by match.com in other words that literally I didn't know what it was I called it the magic 10 in other words I knew that people were always angling for better I didn't know that the average guy writing to the average female match.com is is going up objectively 25 percentile of physical attractiveness yeah holy smokes Batman that's why you're all still there I can't help it but the point is is that we're you're looking at therefore human nature is ripe to be told that your performance is going to be much better you've been unnecessarily handicapped by some little physiological neuro what do you call it neurodivergent Divergent Gizmo that we actually have the solution for neuro atypical you'll see that too just one little Quirk about you that you know once we get you fixed up it's like you're going to be Miss America all we need to do is do a tiny bit of Light Flow suction and you're there yep it's exactly the same snake oil process and yeah and then on the other side there's there's some self-deceptive [ __ ] going on inside the receiver's head as they angle for some concessions you know what I mean and basically may not half of them probably doesn't believe the pill will do anything but it's gonna it's going to actually cut me a bunch of slack and it's going to be giving me um also a patent excuse me it had Nazi if you don't believe it well and and beyond that Beyond sort of social cover it provides direct uh concessions in the form of you know at most universities if you if you come wielding a formal diagnosis you get all kinds of extra testing time for example you get to um take your final exams alone you don't have to go into the final exam room with all the other riffraff you can be alone with a proctor you can have three or four times as long as the other students do um you know it really is very tailored to the individual and there's no limit to the the sort of I mean you could have two days you could two days with open notes to take a test that everyone else has 45 minutes closed book to do um so there are very practical you know actual resources that are made available to to people who have these make these claims and so the incentives are very strong to pursue them and wherever there are strong incentives there is self-deception all over the place um so it's not as if people are doing this to be you know oh I'm going to take advantage of this system you know I'm gonna I I can I can do this and get away with it it's 31 of them there's there's definitely a nine percent of them are being honestly nodding their head because they know they're in competitive trouble and they're looking just just like that that most people who go on some sort of formal weight loss program believe that this is this is how you know it's it's sort of they believe the stories of emotional eating and they believe the stories of um you know all the all of the uh misguided and misleading um pieces of information cortisol right right hahaha it's cortisone it's not calories it's not yeah yeah or or you know high high childhood a scores or whatever oh that's what it is cortisol which makes me unable to I mean this is all it's very plausible and intuitive when you're in the middle of the problem and you you can put those things together and tell a story that makes sense um and so it's not it's not being done out of this kind of malicious no you know ignorance it's it's it's like well it just seems like that's how it would that's how it has to work um if you interpret the data in a way that would be most beneficial for you of course why would you ever do anything else sure all right let's see what else we got Jen that's all very fun it just lets me know what a what a cauldron of crap it is and after that section of the book that I don't have to write no it's good I'm having a good time in there it's just me and my rage [Laughter] like dissertation time all over again that's right oh man all right so this this is a this is another cheerful one uh we could maybe just direct this questioner to uh now that we do uh Hawk blocked on The Daily you've you've kind of covered this a little bit but back in pre-pandemic days Doug would often cite Pinker and other statistics rational Optimist Etc that talked about how Global human existence is getting better and would continue to improve into the future obviously new [ __ ] has come to light in recent years about the state of global economics Etc I'm wondering if Doug could reflect on this Evolution so yeah I would be glad to reflect on this evolution in short short course here but that's a great question for hotbot the um yeah the short the short answer is the following that um unbeknownst to me yeah until a year ago uh I I was unaware that there was a a very large and extremely wealthy uh well-funded and coordinated effort to actually uh undermine uh Western freedom I did not know that that was a put I the the I there would be no reason for me to suspect that that was support uh I did not suspect that that was a threat the the day of me suspecting this happened was in early August of last year when uh what is your name Valencia wolensky Michelle the head of the CDC who by all by all first pass just looks like another highly intelligent capable bureaucrat the bureaucrat that obviously if she's the head of the CDC and she's 53 years old or whatever she is um but she must be a very bright person and as uh I heard all the reassuring noises about how perfect the vaccines were that I didn't trust them okay early and so our position was don't trust it just wait at the sideline like the good penguin don't jump in the water until you watch see whether Harry gets eaten by the Sea leopard just wait okay so that that was our thing you sit at the edge of the ice and look over the eyes for God's sakes don't jump in so that's what we said and then it turns out that multiple studies in July of 2021 indicated that the vaccines were not working okay one came out of Brookline Massachusetts another one came out of UC Davis uh and uh maybe UCSF I can't remember there was about three studies three different databases all triangulated clearly and the real world data in Israel and the UK and I mean everything sort of happened around the same time and and the story just started to become very clear very quickly and certainly by August yeah the writing was more than on the wall right so by early August I watched wolenska Lewinsky I can't remember people's names that I don't like I've noticed that that's why I'm correcting you the point is is that I watched her literally in the same sentence or two sentences I think it was in one sentence say well we saw this but you should we still need to and it's like I was actually in a semi-state uh shot I actually thought when I saw the evidence from Brookline it's like well then this bullshit's over okay okay that was the was was that the um the the Cape Cod yeah case yeah so so basically what the Rubicon for you was that it did nothing to stop transmission um and that vaccinated people were were just as capable of being contagious as unvaccinated people right um and in some cases even more contagious there was some there was some suggested stuff early on at that point too so yeah we're sitting there looking at that and we're looking at the that um Martha's Vineyard case where you know it was all of those vaccinated guys you know came back with coven um and there were several other cases like that and and it was just yeah and so but then you run smack into the political reality yeah this isn't actually about covid whatsoever right yeah at that moment I actually believed that they would be forced to reverse field and say okay there's no reason at all for any distinction between vaccinated unvaccinated people and literally they went right ahead with an extraordinary uh concept that this was going to be done we're looking at vaccine passports we're looking at this and the other mandates I realized that's when the light went on and I realized okay they are not the slightest bit interested in the truth they are in fact have an incredible agenda what the hell is this that then led me to the last year of finding out like the idiot that I was living I lived the last two decades in a beautiful Pollyanna State as I watched the human mind uh given free enterprise continue to improve the standards of living and the lives of individuals within its reach and you see no end in sight and there would be no end in sight in other words this is the rational Optimist very clearly documents the last 200 years of continued Improvement in The Human Condition uh certainly with because it's been so improved we have massively More Humans so therefore we've got more pollution in the environment yet under the appropriate conditions the rational Optimus continues to see nothing that weighs out an improvement and we see we understand that the future for Humanity was absolutely incredibly bright now we find out oh Bill Gates is in this game and he's not the slightest bit interested in improving The Human Condition he's he's interested in all kinds of Nefarious sons and so are all of his shitty friends and we find out that in fact we are dealing with something that I had no idea was to put okay so what do I think now I think we are the Western democracies are an incredible battle for human freedom and I don't know whether they will succeed so if they succeed which they very well may uh they won't none of them are going to succeed except the United States the United States will lead the way if that if if we remain free then the rest of the western democracies have a chance to course correct over the next decade or so and actually re-establish themselves as decent places to live but we don't know whether that's going to happen because we are watching a Titanic battle that started 10 000 years ago with the first hunter-gatherer Village that absorbed the next Village the next next to it and either made them slaves or made them part of their own and like ink Lots on wax paper the what you've been watching is the necessary consolidation of power because force is where the end of the rubber hits the road in Human Action so we now have basically a tripartite world with Russia being one massive power China being another massive power and the Western democracy is being the third mass of power yeah the United States is the Crown Jewel of the western democracies it by itself is more powerful than the other two major forces that that therefore it also is the only one that is easily usurped okay it would be very hard to overthrow China and take over that regime or Russia and take over that routine it's surprisingly if you take 50 years and a great deal of craftiness and tutoring from Henry Kissinger you can actually figure out if you make your life's work do you serve the Western democracies it just might be possible and so that's where we are today so have I changed my mind on the future I have uh I have absolutely changed my mind statistically if we are able to avoid this assault on freedom then we have a hell of a chance to resume the pathway that we were already on and a magnificent future awaits all Humanity because uh the the ability of free societies to out innovate and out Military uh close societies like Russia and China we will eventually find that freedom would rule in the world okay but right this minute it's in for a hell of a fight because Quail Schwab and Bill Gates and their henchmen have have deeply corrupted the political system that you live in and so it's it's a it's a battle to the end at this point that's how I see it does that sound about right yep that sounds about right yeah and we do we I mean we we talk about this with the the political podcast that we do is now um more or less daily Monday through Friday so if people want to watch that it's on YouTube and also on Apple podcast so you can because Jen won't let me ignore this time that's true it won't let me and she won't leave me in peace that's that's the problem but the story we're telling people she wants to talk about it career political scientist in the middle of this is like General Patton and the famous line from from the movie when he when he's when he gets put on the sideline by like Eisenhower and and he's like the whole world's at War and I'm not in it no right I I yeah I had to go through and and kind of uh look up some of my the people I went to grad school with and see if anyone else is having sort of a similar similar experience and very few there's there's one guy who's been pretty successful and and uh you know is huge huge Twitter following writes for a very well-known uh liberal magazine um and he's he's starting to kind of see what's going on he's I can I can see that he's sort of um concerned in picking up on things but everyone else just has their head down just you know wheel yeah so this is from Academia will do to a person now I'm under stress I lose sleep I'm out of homeostasis that's been that way I've been out of homeostasis for a good solid year since last August yeah yeah it's been that bureaucrat basically going to really leveling the state's guns at my head making it potentially impossible for me to leave the country or re-enter unless I took an experimental gene therapy for something that I was pretty sure I could be without it it wasn't just that it's that they did that um but they also doubled down on that just at the moment that the evidence was becoming clear that that was the wrong thing to do it was like it was this exceptional moment of you know you you're willing to give some latitude for a while where it's like well you know inertia and bureaucracies and you know Saving Face I believe yeah and you can't just tell people that that you know after hyping these things so much you can immediately just totally walk them back but it was this it was this incredible doubling down in this really uh Draconian way that that absolutely demonized the unvaccinated in the in the face of increasingly persuasive and then overwhelming evidence that that was incorrect and morally reprehensible to do so um and so yeah you you at that point you're like what the f is going on and so yeah Doug Doug finally came to terms with evil in the world there you have it there you have it okay this um I'm Gonna Bump this one up because this one has been asked many times and we've never gotten to it um but I recognize it from past week so what can you tell us about depersonalization derealization and other weird states of Mind are these just episodes of unusual brain chemistry or is there some possible function to them oh um that's that's a good question I don't even know what these things are okay so as a as a clinical psychologist I I spent a year in a state mental hospital and I've spent two years in an acute PTSD unit hospital so it's not like I haven't seen a lot of very strange folks okay but um people are also very creative and Status seeking when it comes to describing their internal experiences uh and and making it sound really interesting and exciting and weird and therefore worthy of both attention and concession so I uh certainly there's uh I also know that a great deal of these quote Twilight bizarre [ __ ] happens in the Twilight between Consciousness and unconsciousness there's all kinds of things the vast majority of this [ __ ] takes place sleepwalking and Fugue States you know those are just open States Of Consciousness uh one way or the other but usually from broad daylight wide awake and then somehow fading off into some quote depersonalization well I don't even know what that means in other words we'll find out if you personalized you are when when when the Wild dog comes up exactly exactly and this means different things to every individual who reports it because nobody has anything except their egocentric bias to you know they read a description of what that feels like and they put themselves in that situation so everybody has moments of weird weirdness lightheadedness you know you had too much caffeine you didn't get enough sleep you whatever heat stroke Etc so there can be a million different things going on for people or you can be in a half and half sort of State through meditation through um a very high stress through all kinds of all all kinds of things can do it but as you say yeah suddenly a bear materializes and you're going to get I de-personalized State eliminate is instantly gone yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna be tripping on LSD and like see that there as a as a friend and have a conversation with it most of the time unless unless you do have very unusual brain chemistry situation going on so yeah even you know like I said I've talked to 100 schizophrenics in my life so uh the uh and quite a few of them are extensively so they aren't nearly as weird as Hollywood would let you know they're they're usually you know and I and I've seen some of the most bizarre people in the world in other words I've seen some people that are locked down permanently because they are so crazy and they are pretty crazy and what's going on inside their head is really bizarre but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about these fancy things that we get to talk about in the DSM that makes somebody really special okay so one of the great one of the great things was uh uh a beautiful a beautiful program I I can't I I almost come up with the name of it but um it was a it was a documentary done on Kenneth Bianchi who was the hillstride Strangler in Los Angeles and the uh the this this therapist the psychologist that interviewed him uh the cop said the cop said the guy gets off the plane and says I'm Dr schmoe I have diagnosed more multiple personality disorders than anybody in the country and the cop says we're in trouble we're in trouble this idiot is going to find the Kenneth Bianchi and say multiple personality disorder okay of course yeah well folks there is no such thing as a multiple personality disorder that is a beautiful fabrication for the people who wrote Sybil okay that there this is a complete and utter [ __ ] but how exciting would it be if there was a Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde what what an incredibly fascinating thing wouldn't that make you famous as a psychologist if you found such a thing it literally is a badge of honor and psychologists if they've ever seen one yes I've seen one well I've seen three really okay so and of course don't think that some either schizophrenics you know but typically not typically borderline anti-social personality disorders in other words Oddball people that are slick crazy Kenneth Bianchi being being absolutely a total psychopath yeah very good at perceiving just exactly how the person on the other side of the other other table wants the status you know like what kind of status is going to be juiciest to this guy oh diagnosing me with this with this set of circumstances yeah absolutely that's what psychopathy is yes now the absolute wedding the cops actually brought in Martin Oren out of the University of Pennsylvania so they brought in the big dog and the big dog on videotape trapped Kenneth Bianchi like you just said taking candy from a kid oh man no problem it was absolutely Priceless they show it right in the documentary so as a result of that I had of course great respect for Martin Lawrence at that point and uh then my sister and brother-in-law were attorneys uh were embroiled in a really interesting they got called in as defense attorneys for a very complicated psychiatric case and um the defendant was a psychiatrist and he was being accused of things that he absolutely did not do and they had a really [ __ ] and made me convoluted explanation on the other side and my brother-in-law who didn't respect my opinion about anything because I was too small and too skinny and too weak and too vegetarian so the big dog the law said called me up and said he knew I was an academic psychologist he said where would you go I said Martin Oren he got on the phone to the University of Pennsylvania and draws out Martin Oren and Martin Oren is a superstar witness and he he obliterated the other side and so they became friends with Martin Lawrence which was pretty that's hilarious oh man Martin also is about 400 pounds and uh and delos's mother was overweight and uh she met and Martin Lawrence is an expert in hypnosis and so uh corn said uh she said uh you know I heard that that you're an expert in hypnosis what does well can you use it to lose weight and Warren looks down in his gut it doesn't look like it no [Laughter] that's amazing so anyway that's my Bart North store yeah yeah well there you go yes so yeah yeah I think that that about covers that one yeah all right that's not good for one day I think that's good yeah I've got I've got my uh my group at seven so I'm a little constrained but um but yeah all right very good I harvested a bunch of soybeans today I had a bumper soybean crop so that was very cool that's like good apocalypse food for sure yeah we made edamame out of them which should I say I'm gonna I'm gonna let the others dry to you know preserve them but the the green ones are really great for edamame so that was really cool all right everybody farm Report all right we'll see you next next time same bat Time same bat place all right
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