Training Without Conflict™ 팟캐스트 에피소드 5: Dr. Doug Lisle & Dr. Jen Howk

and probably nothing is more interesting to uh pet owners than personality and i think jen will have a lot to say today about that and not not only personality of ourselves and our pets but also her specific dogs she's very excited about their personalities so go ahead chad well sure any excuse to to display the wonderful personalities of my dogs who after all are carrying on my genetic line they are my you know reproductive offspring from the darwinian point of view for so it steams to my brain so i do love to talk about personality and dogs and all things in between so this is a very appropriate conversation so i'm really glad to be here and thank you thank you for that sweet intro that i i have to give the flip side of my experience which was that i was i was in this sort of uh this the finishing a phd in social science at this time in history is um sort of you're siloed into a very particular academic worldview and i was i was parched for truth i was i was very i was trying to answer some questions that i was not finding good answers to in the conventional political science literature and once i discovered evolutionary psychology as a lens to apply some sort of long-standing political questions everything suddenly it was it was like the heavens opened up and the harps started to play and i completely understood so uh once you run into this kind of this quality of information and can apply it to your life whether it's through personality or any any lens that you're trying to solve any problem it's powerful stuff so certainly had that effect on me i cannot wait i cannot wait dr lyle tell us a little bit about your your uh background how did they all start my background was uh just a i was just a conventional conventionally trained or classically trained psychologist so the uh and so when i was going through school in the 1980s the we had what has now been termed the standard social science model and the standard social science model was uh you've heard this from philosophers and and and wise people that you're the sum total of your experiences so that's uh that's the notion and so i i certainly sort of vaguely believe that just like anybody else and so i vaguely believed that that a uh a major a major task of clinical psychology was to sort of work on your weaknesses and you know uh sort of get get yourself in shape one way or the other uh psychologically and so you know if you weren't very conscientious you know not that we even used that term but if you weren't then you'd work on it or if you weren't very extroverted you'd work on it if you weren't very smart you'd work on it in other words one way or the other sort of the task of life

was to was this process of improvement and the things that you were improving uh there was a notion that everything was essentially flexible and uh the and of course there wasn't really any contrary voices to this and the the and the notion was is that since you're the sum total of your experiences anybody that walks in your door if you're a clinician has the the trials and tribulations and the hurts that they have uh the reason they're hurting is that they've been injured you're effectively like an orthopedic physician uh if they if there's if their ankle hurts then somebody tweaked their ankle uh if they've got a bunch of anxiety then somebody made them scared uh somebody caused them some kind of damage at some point this led to to them having those types of reactions now and so this is uh this is the standard fare whether it was learning theory that's been around 100 years or it's a little more of a twisted learning theory of the psychodynamic realm uh if we have a freudian slant on things then things get a little bit more complicated and fascinating about the reason why you wash your hands because you had overly severe toilet training or something like this so the um anyway again like jen uh jen was having this experience in the 2000s because she's a a young person that was born late if you were born earlier properly in the 1950s like myself then when this is all kind of happening there there's literally nobody knows and so uh the the literature that jen would run into that would inform me hadn't been written yet so i'm going through school in the 1980s and i am diligently and honestly studying what is known and getting a first-rate education at this so i'm walking out with my phd in hand feeling like okay that's the way it is and it's confusing and frustrating and there was many uh there's all kinds of jokes about psychologists like uh you know how how many psychologists does it take to change the light bulb just one but the light bulb has to want to change you know the joke is totally my it's my old favorite i love that one so the clients uh the notion is is that that's the jaded view that boy it sure is hard to get people to change but you know and it's their responsibility it's not your responsibility and etc so this is the notion and get what gets derived out of the learning theory tradition and it's going to turn out that the learning theory tradition for all intents and purposes is about 90 percent wrong uh there's 10 percent of it's in there that gets to live but it's essentially at its core it's actually mistaken so you are not for some total of your experiences you are uh what you are is you're

essentially a more or less fixed genetic entity uh so you you can no more become somebody's different uh different personality or character then you can become a different animal uh in other words your individual differences in our dna are so striking and so important that they actually form the foundation of who it is that we are and so therefore strangely and paradoxically as jen and i will talk about it turns out that that means that environment is more important than we thought it means the environment is the only thing that we can change because we can't change ourselves okay so in other words if you approach psychology from the notion that the task of clinical psychology is to change the individual human uh which is essentially the widespread view that goes on in clinical psychology today which is the derivative of the standard social science model that model is wrong at the core so jen and i don't try to seek to change people we seek to try to figure out what they need to change about their situations to improve their lives and that that is uh that is how our our approach is fundamentally different and both of us council people uh essentially life coach uh folks and in a wide variety of domains of life essentially nothing's off the table about what we're willing to talk about uh and uh but the purpose of that of our analysis is to try to not figure out what went wrong in your childhood that changed you in some negative ways so that that's why you're having a negative thing 25 or 30 years later no what we're interested in is what's going on right now in your existence who are you fundamentally and why is there a mismatch between who you are fundamentally and the environment that you find yourself in that winds up being uh the most uh important part of the analytic process that we go through so uh you know we might ask a person about their history not because we're interested in what damaged you we're interested in finding out who you are okay so your life history can tell us a great deal about who it is that you are we're not the slightest bit interested in figuring out how on earth we're going to engineer you to change we're just trying to figure out how to change your life those are two different things it's beautiful yes this is why i so wished and was i wasn't sure how how to approach to invite you to a dog training podcast and to to tell my audience if you guys are not getting it yet but you will see the similarities and you will understand pretty quickly how evolutionary psychology starts from from single cell organism on to to us you know we we are all biologically programmed to avoid something aversive and approach

something that is pleasant that's that's just fundamental stuff and dog training today what so many trainers call it modern dog training is still stuck deeply stuck in the skinnerian ways of of of thinking and and watson and yeah we can make anything through reinforcement and punishment we can just you know and um so that's kind of why that conversation will be so interesting for especially for dog trainers that are truly stuck there and i hope that it just stimulates them to to go deeper and and follow you and get some evolutionary psychology books and and really get a completely different angle of why we're doing what we do and how what can be changed and what cannot be changed because a big problem in dog training is that um it's almost the ego of the dog trainer it's like no i i will fix this problem but not really thinking where the is it a problem where is it coming from why is the dog displaying it all those things it's like no i will reinforce and punish and if i it's not working i'll just do more and and and it becomes it's it's actually sad to some level to watch dogs suffer and trainers getting frustrated just simply because of lack of knowledge and an exposure to a different views of this and it's really really everything comes i guess it comes from animals and experiments and study with animals back to us but then it comes back from us to how we train and how we interact with animals and for whatever reason we are stuck in the 50s and 60s and including including people that uh have phds and graduated uh different different schools and there is still this no you you really can be whatever you want you just need to as you said dr ryle you just you gotta try harder you're just not putting enough so um but this is uh um the whole evolutionary psychology of course we i mean we cannot disregard reinforcement and punishment it's just the fact is that we cannot change something that it's against your genetical makeup and and the best way to deal with it is to understand why is it there when it's going to display itself and can we guide it in some direction that it's it's beneficial for us right yeah i guess uh the i mean the main thing to understand about personality is that it is it is fundamentally a genetic process so when we're talking about sort of this nature nurture debate whether it's with human animals or any other kind of animal including dogs it's you're really how you were expressing your personality in the moment is uh you know just as much uh your your genes as it is the environment that you're looking at right now not the environment that you grew up with the environment that you grew up

with is not having the kind of effect on our personalities or our dog's personalities in the way that we think it is the environment that we're in right now does have quite an effect on how we're expressing our personality in the moment so you know i have two two dogs they're both rescue dogs they're both just kind of these sweet mutts who came to me with all kinds of quote unquote personality problems personality issues um and most people would say well you know they were they were rescues they were street dogs they did a lot of time in the joint at the pound and so they you know they had a lot of childhood trauma they picked up a lot of they had this is where their issues come from they have abandonment issues they're overreactive to things people actually like this don't for some reason we like to to make a story that has a that kind of story behind yeah yeah totally it's i think people have this this very strong intuition that that must be true because they infer that it's true about their own childhood and their own lives and all the problems that they have as adults um they can blame their childhood for it rather rather than it's just kind of a fundamental feature of their personality and they're they just kind of are coming into life with certain difficulties that they're not finding the right environment to put themselves at so so you know just as examples that come to mind um i you know the two dogs could not have more different personalities they look very similar you can see one of them in the background snoozing here the other one's wandering around looks like he's giving himself a pedicure right now so they look very similar everyone thinks they're related but as far as i know they're not one of them was a astray in detroit his name is motown um the other one was a pound puppy in anchorage so i named her melville for after herman melville the author long story um so so they are very different in on major dimensions that we talk about when we talk about personalities so when we talk about personality we often talk about something that's called the big five which is the the sort of five dimensions on which we measure we can really measure people's personality or the personality of animals um and this is peop you know we can we could talk more about this if you like uh and and people can look into this and take quizzes online and all of that uh it's the acronym spells ocean so it's a really easy way to remember it so the big five are o for openness how sort of novelty seeking and adventurous you are c for conscientiousness that's how rule-following and orderly and diligent you are and and well-behaved in general

e is for how extroverted you are versus how introverted you are uh a is for how agreeable how easy going how cooperative you are and then n is for neuroticism so we we think of that as sort of how emotionally stable or unstable you are how how excited do you get when someone knocks on the door if you're a dog um or do you just sit on the couch and stay asleep because it's like oh whatever you know unless they have food i'm not that not that interested and how anxious do you get if you're a dog when you hear fireworks you know how how much does that agitate you so my two dogs they differ on a lot of dimensions but they differ a huge amount on emotional stability doug can attest to this he's lived with them before so so my my dog motown he's very agreeable so he's very sweet he's very good-natured but he's very unstable so he gets extremely excited if we're going on an adventure or something's happening and he's like he can barely contain himself he's whining he's he's just very very amped up um and also something bad is happening if there's big noises if people are yelling at each other if there's fireworks he can't handle it he freaks out shakes he trembles he has to go hide so this is emotional stability and humans are just as we have just as much variance on those dimensions as animals do so a huge part of my job as the person who lives with these animals and tries to give them the best life that i can um and you know train them at least within a a a reasonable degree of being you know fit for public life to some degree is to give them the best environment for their personality so it's important for motown's nervous system that i keep him in fairly quiet places you know a lot of neighbors coming in going banging around making noise yelling at each other but that is a that's a really stressful environment for him in a way that it's not as stressful for mellie she she could be fine with that it wouldn't bug her as much mo would just be every little sound you know he'd be all agitated and freaking out um it's important that i live if i'm going to live with other people that we have harmonious relationships that there's not a lot of conflict because he feels that disproportionately in a very it causes him a worse life experience to have to be living in a volatile environment so we are as humans we're exactly the same you wouldn't put a dog in an environment that is ill-suited for it you wouldn't try to like change the if you have a cat who gets really skittish every time somebody comes over to visit you goes and runs off and hides in the laundry room which a lot of cats do you don't drag the cat out and say no

you need to learn to socialize you need to learn to be more extroverted and to tolerate this because that's good for you and you're you're isolating by hiding yourself from company we don't even it doesn't even occur to us to try to do that but we do that for ourselves all the time you know you'll hear traditional therapists say no no no you're you're hiding from your experiences you know it's dangerous to self-isolate in this way you need to build up your tolerance and change your boundaries and all of these kinds of ideas that we can somehow make ourselves more comfortable in environments that are really not pleasant or even toxic for us and of course we do the same to dogs we we sort of inflict these these sorts of things on them and expect them to build a different relationship to a different kind of environment that is just not suited for them yes that's that's amazing that that's so i i hope my my the trainers and my my audience really takes notes of this because it's uh one of the big problems as a dog trainer is is this instead of trying to evaluate and and really understand what is what is if you want to call it home base for for that puppy and and if the puppy is shy and doesn't have that enough or or you know it's not really a courage but self-confidence because courageous we can get to that in a little bit but uh you know and and just it's not social it's very much aware of everything and as a trainer it's immediately becoming this challenge of how good as a trainer i am and how i'm gonna change now this puppy and just completely i mean just putting him in situation after situation that clearly there is his genetic makeup says this is who i am and all you're doing it's it really goes borderline to torturing for no reason but with the good intentions of oh i'm gonna fix this instead of trying to understand that a lot of the problems with dog training today is uh that big gap of understanding what you can change and what you cannot change yeah and not taking it personally not making it about you letting it be about the dog so i actually struggled with this before i really understood evolutionary psychology i got both the dogs you know 10 years ago and i sort of you know the decade ago it was sort of this very um it was the leadership model right like are you being a good i'm not going to name names are you being a good leader for your dog are they are they you know deferring to your your alpha status in the pack um and this is still very hegemonic and thinking out there in the world about like you know you run into an average person who is not particularly interested in dogs who doesn't know much about dogs or your

dog training then i i'm not an expert by any means i just love my dogs and want to do right by them and that was the kind of ascendant paradigm at the time so you had to be a strong leader you had to show them who's boss and if they they understood that your boss then they're they'll fall in the line appropriately um and of course you want the dog to respect you you want the dog to you know understand that you you are if there are rules that the they're going to they're there there's teeth behind those rules but there's a difference between that in this ego driven process that that informs a lot of that so um you know when i started i melly you wouldn't know how to look at her right now but she's actually very very reactive with other dogs she she just has a terrible time she's um you know it's really it's a lot better than it used to be just because we've had more exposure she's been able to recalibrate a little bit but i still can't take her on the same kinds of of adventures that i can take motown she just she it stresses her out it stresses me out she picks up on my stress it makes everybody more than poor motown who's got the delicate nervous system knows that everybody's stressed so he's more stressed it's just a bad experience so even though in principle i would want to have the sort of egoic benefit of being like oh yeah i took this damaged animal you know this dog that had all this childhood trauma and i provided such a wonderful uh training environment for her that i changed her completely and now she's blossomed and she's able to like this is bs you know i've been able to start yeah yeah so i give her i take her in environments that is she's not going to get to the limits of her tolerance so if she can go on hikes she can come on you know experiences and walks and i can you know i can provide that for her but i'm not going to take her to like a farmer's market where there are a bunch of other dogs around and that you know they're off leash they're running up to her that's setting her up to fail it's just setting her up to fail she might be okay she you know she might work through it and be okay but it's gonna cause her stress it's gonna make everybody unhappy it's gonna stress out the people at the farmers market i'm gonna take her to a trail near my house where maybe we'll run into a couple of people with other dogs but they're on the other side and i can i can treat her when she you know is paying attention to me instead of them and i can do that whole thing and that's fine it's manageable so it's all about working with the the who who you are as a human who your dog is as a dog and and understanding that people

have these kind of thresholds have this zone of of comfort and tolerance and it's not always a good thing to yank people and push them out of those zones it doesn't mean that you're not growing as a person or that you're afraid of change or any of these kinds of um you know ideas that we impose on on people wanting to be in an environment that suits them there's there's that we really need to make progress on that both in the human realm and the canine realm yeah yeah and and also i think uh on the other side as as the therapist or as the dog trainer you cannot blame yourself or or or take it as a failure because you cannot go against the genes that uh you know like you're really making such a like you're going in a in a rabbit hole that you you completely it's not good for you for your self-esteem as a as a teacher or as a therapist or because you you really start to believe that why is it not working i'm doing everything that i've been told that should work yeah well the main way that we ran into this and i know you had mentioned sort of that you wanted to get into the idea of the pleasure trap which is something that we talk a lot a lot about where when we're talking about personality limitations we're talking about your sort of your personality constraints and and how they affect everything in your life including your um the ease with which you can be compliant on a diet so so for some people if you're trying to get healthy if you're trying to lose weight if you're trying to improve your health it's going to come much more easily to some people than it is to others not because of some character flaw or you know all of this sort of you know because of your childhood your grandma made you cookies and so now when you get stressed you want the cookies this this is not how it works you have personality differences at the genetic level that make you more or less susceptible to falling into certain types of traps around healthy living and so when we're in the position of trying to coach somebody through that process you you cannot make it about you and how good a coach or a therapist you are and whether that person is successful or not you have to recognize that they are coming from that wherever they are sitting on these personality dimensions particularly their level of conscientiousness um and their emotional stability and and really all of it that the conscientiousness is really what it all comes down to you have to have respect for that and you and you cannot make it about you or you are uh really running down the wrong road yeah i i really would like to to go a little bit with that because that that's how i got so

interested in evolutionary psychology it was i i remember that it was yesterday i haven't listened to that that show i haven't seen it in a while but when dr lal it was such a fun presentation too and um we will put the links to it as well but i it would be very interesting to to talk a little bit about the you know the the three fundamental principles of the motivational triad and like i really would like to cover a little bit of this because it it relates so much in dog training um and and just the way we can think about even a bird or a or something super small organism how much complicity on on a different level i'll i'll just let you talk about it because i i don't want i cannot say anything remotely close to the way you what uh what ivan's uh describing is uh we started synthesized down a huge problem uh in in human life down to some a very distilled down to some fundamental dilemma uh and that is that essentially we are kind of like mobs that are programmed to fly the light and if you if it turns out that that light happens to me my front porch and you happen to be a moth anywhere near it then uh probably in the morning i'm gonna see you dead on the ground uh which i often do i'll see you know a dozen little tiny moths dead on the ground but why is that and that's because their instincts are designed by nature to fly to the light so certain certain stimuli out there are cues that were designed by nature to move toward so whether it's attractive mates or whether it's food or whether it's things that are correlated with that so for example a beautiful landscape is actually correlated with safety and food so that's why we like to look at a landscape that has a bunch of grass and trees we actually like to look down on that landscape because we like to see that we have a gravitational advantage over predators and competitors we like to see trees because trees you can get up in a tree and get a much better vantage point and also protect yourself from either heat or or rain and you can also possibly eat things that are in the tree and you can also escape predators in the trees so it's really no mystery at all why human beings love trees that's why if you go into a new subdivision and the houses are four feet apart from each other and there's no trees you have this feeling of boy do i not like this this is a very uncomfortable place to be even though the insides of the home may be great the outsides of the home are very unappealing when you go to a neighborhood where there's big wide lawns and a bunch of trees and a bunch of bushes this is now mimicking the environments that human beings evolved in on the opera and savannah

where they they were designed by nature to seek out certain stimuli that were correlated with biological success it's going to turn out that there's so our aesthetic preferences on any domain whether it's for mates whether it's for friendships so none of us like people that turn out to be thieving backstabbing flakes uh we like people that are pleasant resourceful and and you know and loyal that that's those are natural things that we're looking for inmates we like physical characteristics that that are associated incidentally with low mutation loads which means that at the fundamental level we want to reproduce with entities that are going to cause uh offspring that are going to be very very biologically stable and more likely to survive and also then be more likely to reproduce because they're evidencing uh indications of low mutation load i.e good looks so this is amazing because what we're gonna do is as we keep circling down through this it's like a it's like a series of chinese boxes that you open one and then you open it and then you then you inside of it's another chinese box and other side there's another one there's another one there's another one and it never ends and where it's heading down to is it's heading down to a principle of energy conservation so the reason why we like the people we like is that they actually give us a good deal when it comes to energy exchange if we if they're if we invest energy in them and then they betray us it's like oh my god you just inconvenienced me i just suffered some major losses i wasted a bunch of my life energy okay the uh the reason uh why we seek attractiveness inmates is because it's energy conserving it's because in fact it's not a waste of time to reproduce with them because the offspring will be viable this is an amazing insight into the nature of biology the reason why we like the food we like is we actually like the food best it has the most energy in it and not only that it has the most energy in it we like it when it takes the least energy to consume it that's why we like chocolate shakes and coca-cola and hamburgers because they're very very soft that's why a hamburger is the national food of america as opposed to a steak burger it was a steak burger which would be from industries point of view much easier and much more effective to make steak burgers you just slice the steak and i have a little slice there and it's it keeps better because you haven't broken down the matrix by by putting it through a grinder but it turns out no that's not going to be nearly as appealing to people because it takes 12 percent more energy to eat a steak than it does to eat the same amount of

calories in a hamburger or it's been chopped up in little bits and you don't have to work as hard physically to break the breakdown of the molecular structure so the point of all this is that that you're designed by nature to really do three things which is to seek pleasure which is you were saying ivan things that we move towards there was anything that feels pleasant we're attracted to it we're designed to move away from things that will cause us pain so it doesn't have to be when we stare at a desert landscape it's not causing us pain to stare at the desert landscape but we can feel or anticipate the pain that's going to come from starving to death and being hot and being thirsty and being dead so as a result we are we are in fact the pleasure the our aesthetic preferences are moving us towards pleasure moving us away from pain and in doing so those things are actually designed into our neural circuitry to help us conserve energy because the whole point is to have actions that will be optimal for survival and reproductive success irrespective of the fact that human beings try to block reproductive process is not relevant the neural circuits of all organisms are designed by nature with one and only one purpose which is to statistically maximize the likelihood of genetic success and so therefore all of the aesthetic preferences and therefore all of the behavioral tendencies of the species are designed to be highly specifically organized to make sure that that species goes for the things that interacting with those things will cause it to be more likely to successfully reproduce and to survive so i'm not attracted to dog manure to eat it because but a dumbfly would be okay so in principle the the the organism would be infinitely uh flexible in its evolutionary tree in terms of what might be pleasant and what might be pleasant i don't like to eat wood but termites do okay in fact it's so specific that if you tried to eat the food that a chimpanzee eats which is our closest cousin by far in the animal kingdom you would die because you can't eat the food that they eat it would poison you so each animal is actually a highly specific package of adaptive mechanisms in order to survive with its specific ecological niche and um so cats for example are obligate carnivores they're gonna have to eat meat whereas most most even though they're they're omnivorous they can't survive on an omnivorous diet many omnivores can so we human beings can can uh can absolutely be vegans if they want to be and that's not a problem at all but not not all creatures are built that way so the long story is this the the synthesis of all this thinking

is that a creature is pretty simple it seeks pleasure avoids pain and conserves energy okay so whenever you're watching any behavior of any human or animal just think to yourself what's going on there it's attempting to seek pleasure avoid pain or conserve energy that you know in some uh possibly in a human it could be a very convoluted pathway why it might be doing that so it might for example be oh i don't know teaching its kid math okay and you're like well how is that seeking pleasure avoiding pain or conserving energy and what it is is it's designed by nature to try to get the kid to be more successful if it's more successful that it gets better grades then it gets uh gets into a better college gets into a better college gets a better job gets a better job makes more money per unit of energy expended if it does that it can then display the waste of its ability to earn extra income and therefore attract a mate uh the mate that it attracts might be ten percent more attractive therefore the genes of the of the grandchildren might be five percent sexier and therefore statistically more likely to then take those genes on into future generations so little do we understand we have no insight into the knowledge that when we're helping our sixth grader with his math homework we're actually scheming on him being more competitive sexually 15 years from now okay that and and so it is in fact pleasure seeking vicariously and it's energy conservation uh by derivative so this is the the magnificent uh integration now of understanding motivation can be now distilled right down through some very core evolutionary principles uh and this is this is what makes our way of looking at things and would make our way of uh looking at dog training you know a unique and different perspective i was amazed at what you said just a little while ago ivan that that you talked about about what you were describing is you were literally describing the the current field and the past field of clinical psychology literally they're dog trainers and they are dog trainers attempting to make a genetically shy dog 25 percent less shy and they can see that that shyness has penalties that it would be that it would be more advantageous for that organism to not be at the 25th percentile shyness but to get itself to the 50th percentile and that therapist has been miseducated in the belief that that is their job as a therapist to do that that it would be advantageous for that to happen and that by god all we have to do is use schenerian uh principles of some kind to get it there or psychodynamic principles about what's blocking you from this or how are you self-sabotaging

so this isn't a profound uh misunderstanding but we can actually see it uh amusingly and and and clearly through the lens of dog training yeah wow that's what these people are they are they're misinformed dog trainers trying to make uh trying to teach your dog tricks that it that that is not consistent with its natural repertoire yeah no that's that's exactly true i mean it's uh that's what drew me to to listening to uh beat the genes your podcast and then all you need to do is replace therapists with trainer and person with the animal and on top of that all the experiments and all the studies um it's just mind-blowing so so much beauty and knowledge and and and once you once you have it in your head you then you look at how typically those things are viewed and dealt with and and and it's just like how why why why are we not moving forward what's going on like why do why i mean why do we not want to accept this like there is there is something with social sciences for sure right i mean there is something but there is definitely a problem with this i don't know if you guys want to get there or not that's you know but but there is something that i just oh yeah this is something that um this was one of the things that vaxxed me when i was in grad school you know i was working on a dissertation where this question was coming up and it was sort of in the context of why are we why are we blaming ancient history for current problems so this is there's this idea very dominant in um in a lot of social science about uh ancestral trauma sort of ancestral you know the sort of the things that happened to your ancestors three generations ago or response that's that's why you have the problems that you have today it's why you have the personality that you have today and this just didn't it didn't pass the the basic sort of sniff test for me it just didn't i kept asking i kept going to these seminars being like what's the mechanism how is this actually how is this you know explained to me how something that happened in the 17th century is is affecting the daily life of somebody who's living today like how does this work i really want to understand this this process um and i just couldn't find any evidence for it i just i kept i kept searching and couldn't find it but it's such a it's such a dominant paradigm and and it and sort of the derivatives of it you know we can we can look to our early experience for any kind of issue that we face um any kind of competitive struggle that we're having so you know we're not getting the uh the sort of we don't have the salary that we think we deserve we haven't reached the level of

um achievement in our chosen profession we have we don't have the our our wife isn't as hot as we would hope that she is like all of these things we sort of blame on something went wrong early in our life or even more uh you know sort of invisibly something has gone wrong further down the line that is affecting my ability to uh be be my best self in the present moment and this just it just didn't fly it just didn't make sense um and so the more i looked into it the more i realized there is no evidence for this and so exactly the same question came up why then why do we remain so attached to this notion why are we so devoted to this idea instead of looking at the reality of this situation and so whenever you're confused by something um there's there's a very nice little mantra which is to follow the money in political science language we follow the incentives so what are the ins what would be the incentives in the in the social sciences and in the sort of in modern modern psychology and it's because the both parties are very incentivized to continue playing these roles and so it is very uh financially lucrative for the for the psychologists who are who are sort of taking you back through all of the bad things that happened to you early in life uh to keep you in this kind of victimhood spiral that oh if we just look at all of the things that have gone wrong then you don't have to take this radical responsibility for who you are right now and the liabilities that perhaps you do have in your personality but to look at those very squarely and take responsibility for them and then choose your environment accordingly to optimize your circumstances it's much easier it's much it's it's much easier and it makes much more money to look at things that we cannot change at the past and and to sort of like outsource our responsibility and our blame in that way and we have over time created all of these strongly now institutionalized incentives to continue doing that um it's it's really it's a big mess and it's deep in our um are sort of avoidant energy conserving natural history and and just the sort of how the species is wired and it's also supported by a vast array of a psychological industrial complex that now supports it and i think you see it across you see it in psychology you see it in the in academia and it sounds like you see it in dog training so that's amazing to us to hear that that is true but not particularly surprising yeah it really i mean it's the similarities are uh beyond i mean it's just it's like identical um yes including even even like in the last 10 15 years it's so popular right now to to make studies and and all these studies

basically are saying one thing and it's the same thing over and over but it's just every new graduate it's just so repetitive and nothing new comes out and on top of that it they try to tell you that this is here is the data and how it's working the cool thing about real dog training is we have competitions we have actual real life tests to to put it in practice so when you make a study and you get the you know the group of dogs and you do everything and whatever your outcome you want to make it of course you can if you want to just see where the study is going to take you of course you can but ultimately once you present the findings then all of these dog trainers can just take it to the training field and test it on their own they don't need it's not like it's a much similar simple way as a dog trainer to deal with this and and we really see it very um directly that it's just a a bs and it it's like why are you wasting money um and why are you getting money for something that clearly is not working and you're trying to say that's working but it's like because like we you know with dog training it's interesting i mean we're dog dog trainers can be pretty fanatics of of we spend money we go places to learn and anything anything new that comes out especially if you're in some competitive field like if i know that there is a certain way let's say somebody in hong kong right now is training dogs and he's super successful and he's doing something different well guess what quite a few of us will be flying and i would not care that it's a covet i will find a way i will take the quarantines i'll deal with it but i will be there i will learn this and yes it's a it's a very very big problem with how we are stuck on on we can change something like we can and and probably it's similar with the with the work you do in that way um like you know we can say yeah okay well the dog has the problem we're gonna put it in this differential reinforcement program and we're gonna make a big plan but it's gonna take a while and next thing you know it's like six months a year two years i mean the dog's life spell by the time it's 80 years old and you're still trying to go on the right path seeing that there is just not no reason there is no improvement whatsoever and but you still the belief that you're doing the right thing it's so overwhelming and it keeps you going and on top of that you're finding yourself in this kind of ideology circle that if if somebody's trying to convince you that this is not the right pattern that you're wasting your time it makes you even stronger to more persistent to to follow it and and seeing no results it's the amazing part

and and you're you're really you're undermining the life experience of that animal you're you're sort of you're not working with it you're working against it so you're you're creating circumstances that are chronically stressful and unsatisfying and uh just you know again studying setting the the dog up to fail in whatever reality you're trying to impose upon him and i mean i mean it's inescapable to make the comparison to parenting which is something that we talk a lot about too so uh you're gonna see a lot of overlap with the sort of parenting industrial complex which is also based on this complete you know blank slate idea that you can you can shape your child into whoever it is that you think would be best for that child to be we have these ideas that we bring to our parenting relationships to our relationships with our animals that live with us or that we're training um to clients uh therapeutically to students in in um you know school rooms we just we have all of this egocentric bias about what would be best for our subject we get all of our ego wrapped up in the idea we have all of this you know half half baked evidence that we bring to apply to the problem and then we take it very personally if if our subject continues to fail at the threshold that we have assigned to them to succeed rather than tuning into what actually is is the best environment the best situation the best expression of this individual this individual creature this individual child who who are they really and who do they want to be and how can we support them in that by by taking away things that are going to um you know create all of these sources of stress for them yeah yeah that's that's just it's amazing i mean it's really amazing because instead of instead of like really like looking at a puppy and and the trainer will be just purposefully just not blinking trying to find something that's the puppy is worried about something that the puppy is not good at to start to work with instead of trying to see what that puppy can shine with what he can flourish and where where is that personality gonna take him so ultimately you actually make a so much more fulfilled life and purposeful life when you follow your talent and instinct and and this is what you're good at you're you know you you're athletically built and you have the love to run you you don't want to sit in front of a computer yes we can make you sit in front of the computer but you will not like it and there is nothing we can do to make you like it right yeah yeah i mean we think i mean this is this is exactly how we would approach it if you were a gardener you don't try to convince your plants

you don't try to like you know force your uh you know i'm not a gardener so i can't actually give specific examples of specific plants but if you had some sort of flower that you know really does not like direct sunlight it's really just is going to wilt under direct sunlight it's too much for it because it's much more of a temperate flower you're not going to go put it in full sunlight and expect it to just get more resilient you know it's going to it's going to adapt it's going to build up a tolerance like you're gonna kill the flower or you're at the very least you're going to you know give it a much uh much less happy life experience in its little flower life than it otherwise would have had we don't we don't think it doesn't cross our mind to try to do that with a with a plant so you if you're you are just as much of a potted plant as the things that you're trying to grow on your porch you you have very fixed personality characteristics so do your so do your dogs so does everyone else that you meet it doesn't mean that people can't express themselves differently according to circumstances so you know we can we can take somebody and with great incentives or great coercion we can move the expression of their personality within a range so with enough threats with enough punishment you can get uh you know a dog to be very sort of you know constrained in its behavior and afraid of you basically you can of course force force any animal into that sort of circumstance or you can you know put enough carrots in front of it yeah incentivize it enough that you can get it to do almost anything but you haven't changed its personality you haven't actually you're not working with what that creature really finds joyful and at its highest expression of itself you're just you've got like a dancing monkey that you're sort of incentivizing and constraining in very specific ways for that moment in time just like you can take a hardened criminal and put them in prison and under penalty of great coercive threat they're going to get in line they're not going to be starting prison riots every day because it's going to be a world of hurt for them to do so even though in principle they would very much like to and doug can certainly speak to this particular example he's worked with um worked with these populations before so people and animals can be shaped and put into these little boxes of behavior that they feel that they have to stay in for whatever set of reasons is specific to that moment but they are potted plants you are a potted plant and if you don't like direct sunshine don't put yourself in a situation where you're being exposed to direct sunshine

all the time find yourself a little a little shade get yourself into situations that are working with your nervous system that are helping you we we have this other concept that we talk about all the time which is it has even more urgency in the life of a dog because they live so much um you know less less hours than we do but humans don't have that much time we call it a hundred thousand hours so you know if you're sort of late middle age that's about what you're looking at for the rest of your existence for the rest of your waking hours you have about a hundred thousand hours that you're going to experience so how are you spending those hours are you spending those hours in situations that are fundamentally unpleasant to you that cause great stress to you because you think it's going to somehow make you into a better person or are you subjecting your child or your dog to you know you've got a kid that hates piano lessons but you keep insisting that they go to their piano lessons because it's good for them it'll teach them discipline and they'll learn to like it and they'll be they'll thank you later like you you are robbing that childhood of those hours that they could otherwise be doing something that would would genuinely bring them great joy and the same thing with a dog like i have this one very athletic dog you know in his he doesn't see very well now he's he's lost an eye along the way and um so he's not as athletic and agile as he once was but he used to be you know great sprinter and you could catch anything that you threw in the air and that gave him great joy to have that sort of experience the little couch potato behind me that is not the case but she's very very um excited and and willing and uh it gives her great joy to learn something new so some new little tricks some new little you know as long as it doesn't take too much exertion she loves to um she loves to be in that process of learning something new and being rewarded for it and having that positive feedback cycle where he's just not as inclined to that he would love to just romp and express himself differently so it has been part of my my task as the human custodian to these creatures to give them sort of separate parallel environments that give them different things that incentivize and uh create joy for them in very different ways because it's not the same i can't give them the same household if they were my children i would i would be very mindful of what creates joy in this being and how can i facilitate it to the best of my ability it's that that's your job that's your job as the custodian of an animal or yourself or your child or anything yeah it's a

but it's still a problem even even with i mean starting from home starting from a kid as you said with your parents saying you know you will play tennis no you will play the piano all the way until you get a job and you still don't know who you are and what you want because along the way you got so confused that you never even thought to to look at yourself what you're good at who you really are and that with dogs is even more interesting in some ways because we you know we we breed dogs selectively so so if you want a dog that's gonna do sled dogs you know like mushing then you pick up a certain dog and even then there is a chance that genetically may not be but the percentage the high percentage of a chance that the dogs gonna enjoy running in the woods pulling a sled are much much higher than uh some different breed and and that you know with with dog trainers that should already be a really something that just right in your face you know like there is selection and you can we we can select a dog that can be very that loves to do protection sports for example so yes if you take that dog and keep it in a different environment and that dog genetically wants to do this kind of sports then you look at it as a problem and it becomes a problem only because it actually was selected genetically to be that dog but we put it in the wrong environment and immediately now we look at it as a problem and the other way around amazing yes and of course with people we cannot do that but but with dogs it's easy it's like okay you want this dog that is going to be easy going that you're going to go to the concert you're going to sit down and everybody's going to walk around and you know the dog is going to have a blast and not gonna stress out it's not gonna freak out or you have a dog that is just genetically weaker and and not so self-confident and oh we're going to fix it and then and there is this big mission from one trainer to another trainer to then to a behaviorist then through the the whole medication process which i don't know how you feel about that but this is another big big very popular and very i mean i mean doctors make so much money of of our prescription yeah every month and even there is no even studies there is not enough data that these things ever have worked but there is dog after dog after dog and they don't even they don't know how to evaluate the dogs it's like oh yeah let's write the prescription and come next month and you're on a plan now it's a very common procedure what are they writing prescriptions for it's a psychotropic medications very much oh yeah very much the same as as you would have in your field

very much it's i mean it's the same when i've whenever i've you know reported any kind of behavioral issue to my vet you know it's like oh well you know separation anxiety so here's some drugs to fix that or you know it's this very sort of yeah we're going to manage it and i know enough you know as somebody who's i've had i've had therapists trying to shove psych meds at me since i was a kid with every sort of little passing bad mood well we can fix that with some prozac no you can't no you can't that's a bigger conversation that we can have but it's you know what i think you know having this conversation i we would never even with cats we don't have this we don't really get this far you know we're sort of if you've got a nervous skittish cat who's scared of visitors you just assume that that's the cat's personality you don't even think twice about it you certainly wouldn't think twice about it if you had an aquarium with different types of fish and one of the fish hides under a rock all the time and you never see it swimming around it's like oh yeah that's how that fish is that's pretty much how that whole species is so we don't have this dissonance with most animals but with dogs it's a little too close to us and we have this sort of proxy parent relationship where we take it all very personally and we start to um we start to project our own experience onto the dogs because we're sort of this co-evolved species and we are very close to them and and they they are sort of living with us and sharing our lives i think it starts to just those boundaries start to get very fuzzy and we start to think that we can apply the same kind of misguided blank slate principles to dogs that we can apply to ourselves because for some reason we believe that it works with with ourselves in part we believe that it works with ourselves because the the the other scenario is a little depressing and unthinkable and most people don't want to deal with at ie you're not being as successful in life for reasons that you can't blame on distant forces that ruined you so you know if you can't blame your parents for your failures in life then you have to say who's left to blame um it starts to become this kind of yeah we don't want to go there most people don't want to go there so because we can't go there for ourselves we don't want to go there with our dogs um yeah i grew up in alaska with the iditarod of course and the you know the mushing dogs and when i was a kid there was a there was a musher who had a team of poodles and it was like this novelty thing and and everybody recognized that it was a novelty thing that these obviously were not

you know standard poodles are not suited for for a thousand mile trek across the alaskan wilderness in february like this is not something that you're going to so it was at that time it was transparently sort of just a stick and he was out for the you know the the sponsorship and everything by the way i know i know that exact story and and what happened after right right now the all the machine in all the all the uh sled dog races are strictly for the northern breeds you cannot they it's you cannot it's not allowed to try to go with the poodles right now simply because we recognize that they're not selectively genetically they cannot enjoy this long race like they don't have the stamina they don't it doesn't it doesn't speak to their soul in the same kind of way that it does if you get a malamute out there like i've been on the trail i've i'm not a big supporter of the item around for my own reasons but i've definitely have met those dogs and you can't deny that those dogs are experiencing quite a bit of joy in that process that is what they are born to do they're born to run they're born to work they're born to pull um that is what they have been aggressively selected and bred for so they are fulfilling their their sort of their their species being destiny and in some sort of real way whether that can translate into the the extreme sport that the iditarod and other other races have become and the sort of the continued pressure to uh demand more and more from those dogs to run shorter and shorter races and everything else that goes along with the with that you know we can have a separate debate about that but they they clearly those dogs are having a great time um for the most part and and poodles would not you know like my dogs would not my dogs would scratch before they even left the you know the starting line so um i don't care how many little little you know pieces of salmon you're dangling in front of them how much you're incentivizing them they're not going to have a good time that it's a very interesting like also the um like when we bring up the puppy or when we just as a you know like um when you're when you're competing in dog sports and sometimes you you just have this idea that i mean it's a it's not a bad thing that you dream high because if you don't dream high chances are you will not accomplish because you don't have that goal but at the same time you you have to recognize and try to stay somewhat realistic of who you are and where you are in the group of everybody kind of like the um the ego trap that you talk about so often to where the kid or or the puppy grows up and it's been told that

you're really good i mean you're just as good if not better than everybody else until the day comes that a reality check gets in and how do you face this and for the dog and for a competitor this is very hard like i we train dogs but we also train the dog owners how to compete and a lot of times in in our industry it's very common that you know in order to keep your clients you keep pumping them up and you keep telling them how much talent they have and everything then they go to one competition they don't do well they go to another competition they don't do well now we start to find excuses and of course there is always excuses right when the reality is this is this is where you are that's your lane like you just simply cannot beat there and it's unfortunate because if if that person or if that dog we understand their limitations then we can allow happiness to come in and enjoy where you are instead of trying to be something you cannot be right and with dogs and competitors this is a it becomes it's really become very similar uh uh analogy to to the mom with the piano and the kid or the tennis courts it's like no we will we just need to do it harder and we need to sacrifice more and we're going to be we're going to be there why why are we thinking like this like what what is that coming there's all kinds of problems you're you're talking about a number of issues but one of them um a major issue is that i uh unhappiness uh a source of unhappiness is when our current feedback from the world is less than we think that it could be or should be so you're designed just as you're designed to have a pleasant feeling looking at a pretty landscape you're also deciding to have an unpleasant cold you know foreboding feeling looking at an ugly landscape and so you're designed by nature then if you're looking at an ugly landscape to start looking for a better landscape because you you want that feeling of saying okay now this is this is now a good set of circumstances and not only that you also have an estimator in your head that can say you know what this is we've been looking at a lot of landscapes for a lot of years this is more or less about as good as it gets okay so it's it could be better there could be some little niche valley somewhere that's 15 better but when we feel good about the landscape it's because we feel like okay this is pretty darn good i can feel this okay now those are automated value judgments that are built into the system so you're designed by nature to to analyze ecological conditions through your senses to put those through a very sophisticated values calculus and to know the same thing is true in looking at mates

nobody has to teach you what's a good looking maid and what isn't a good looking mate you know and you know it intuitively and you know it immediately in fact we know that it's so good you know and one in literally one-seventh of a second people's estimations on those things are highly reliable okay so these are automated value judgments and value judgments means things are comparative things are comparative means when it comes to contest issues for humans it means they're competitive okay so it means that we are we sit within competitive ecological niches and those ecological niches are romance friendship and commerce those are the three inherent competitive buckets that human beings have to compete in now you can choose to not compete but if you choose to not compete then you will not be awarded any relationships in those areas in other words you are forced into those competitions whether you want to be in them or not now you're designed by nature to feel good when the feedback that we get from any of those domains is consistent with what it is that we feel like is a good situation for us and so it's like looking at a good landscape we've been wandering in the desert and now it gets better it's pretty good and we're like thank goodness now i'm now i'm getting now my nervous system is giving me feedback that tells me that i'm in a good location the same thing happens in any competitive domain if you feel like you know you're working awfully hard for 13 an hour but you feel like you should be making 16 or 18 because you've got some friends that aren't any smarter than you are and aren't any more knowledgeable than you are but they're making 18 an hour and you're making 13 then you're feeling like you're in the desert you're in a money desert and you're essentially in a commerce esteemed desert you're not being valued that much and you're frustrated now if you go across the street apply give them your resume and they say great you like your experience we'll start you at 18 an hour okay now we feel a lot a lot better you know so now the feedback that we've gotten is consistent with our personal estimation about what it is that we think is reasonable for us so what what's going to happen is that we have uh a natural estimating equipment that we have uh these this natural estimating equipment is pretty well outlined by albert bandura a famous stanford professor you know writing 50 years ago he calls it self-efficacy so essentially we we can we can have a feel for about where we think we should stand with respect to a competitive arena now it's not an equilibrium in other words we may try we think you know that we sometimes a delight happens

when we don't think we can jump over that three foot high jump but it turns out we go up there scared and we do it and we're like whoa i didn't know i could jump over it okay uh some some guy hits on a pretty girl in this history class and he feels like it's at the upper range of his trading range and she agrees to go out with him and seem seems excited about it hey it's a great day in the neighborhood when when our feedback exceeds our expectations but it's going to turn out that that's going to be rare what's going to happen is that human beings are designed to be generally sitting in a low-grade frustration where they feel like you know what if i hustle a little bit and put some energy in and basically put myself in a better competitive situation i'm going to get better feedback so their design a human and an animal is designed by nature to constantly be scanning and plotting how it could use its energies in order to improve its circumstances so in humans that's in mating it's in friendship and it's in trade so in this case it is how can i go from seventh in the dog show to getting on the podium okay so the nervous system looks at it and it doesn't it doesn't likely set its target at gold not if it's in seventh place it's setting it at improving and climbing because it looks at the people that are sixth and fifth and it says you know what they don't have any secret sauce that i don't have if i work harder and i work smarter i'm going to be able to climb this dominance hierarchy and earn more skin so that's how it works now that's all fine so the normal natural motivation says what can i work on harder and better in order to climb a hierarchy in order to gain more esteem however we have a very interesting trap that sits in the middle of this path and that is that if somehow which is not difficult to do somehow the expectations become unrealistically hot so if some parent or some coach or some feedback system basically puts the bar higher and says oh yeah you're seventh now but i think that you could be on you could be the world champ okay or you could be the best in san jose that dog could be the best dog in san jose now what we've done is we've now put the bar at a place where the person's estimating equipment their innate very sophisticated self-efficacy equipment doesn't believe that that's true so the fact that somebody else believes it's true but we don't believe it's true now sets up a very very troublesome dynamic what i call the ego trap so now what happens is is that if we don't think that that's possible then we are we have highly conflicted motivation about even attempting it because if we if we try really hard

uh so parents and coaches and therapists uh and success people all have a very twisted misunderstanding about the proper place for motivation from where they sit their attitude is just try as you can and whatever happens happens just do your very best and wherever you land you land that's from the standpoint of the individual that's hearing that message what they're hearing is that you've got nothing to lose by giving your very best but that is not true because if there's been a signal that says that we think that you could win gold then if you do not win gold by doing your very best and you in fact take eighth place at the next olympics you will have lost tremendous status because the people that have signaled to you that they thought you could win gold basically are signaling that they think that your dna is the best dna on earth and when it turns out that your dna is the eighth best dna which is about where you were this time around when you took seven then it means that you lose status or esteem with those individuals and if you are estimating that it is very likely that they have overestimated your dna then you are in no rush to disillusion them because by having that status it is a useful lever over resources who is going to give the million-dollar contract to the smiling blonde skier the the the firm that thinks that she could win gold or the third firm that now knows that she took seven answer the people that think that she could win gold so therefore she's highly motivated to never be in that olympic games and did sprain her ankle one week beforehand and to tragically be the heartbreak kid that uh that isn't even in the games but could have been okay so this trap is easily set it's set routinely millions of times a day around the world by parents coaches therapists dog trainers everything else under the sun in other words setting expectations overly high for the individual puts a countervailing avoidant and procrastinating instinct activated and is counter-productive and it is a major cause of human self-destruction now the the solution to the problem is to shut your big mouth and do not you know if you're the therapist or coach we don't hype and we don't put the bar high our goal is to say you know what i don't have any idea what your upper limit is okay we may be close to that upper limit now and what we're going to do though is we're going to find out and there's no secret sauce all there is is fundamentals and our our job is to work these fundamentals you don't lose a hundred pounds people i have a lady that this year lost 120 pounds she didn't lose 120 pounds she lost about five or six ounces a day

okay that is the only way it's done so she was losing essentially a quarter of an ounce an hour quarter of an ounce is a thimble full in this tiny little cap that goes on top so every hour that she made a good decision she lost a little tiny tiny bit of fat that's what happened and after a year if i sit here and i do that little thimble pull literally 1 000 times three decisions times 333 days okay on this on decision making of what she's going to eat there's every time she does that there's a tiny little thimble and if we do that a thousand times guess what i've got i've got 120 pounds of fat that all big achievements are nothing but little tiny achievements strung together and when we coach people our job is to actually focus on nothing other than the fundamentals and with an adventurous attitude towards we don't really have any idea where it's going okay the hell with the idea of going for the gold if you were if you are very close and you have calibrated processes that can tell you that you are gold medal class in something then i don't have to talk that into you you already know it okay but the bs of parents coaches teachers administrators and and uh everybody else that that is going to essentially plug a bunch of hype what you do with people is you push them into a motivational crisis where the best solution is to have is to actually activate avoidance circuitry which gets you out of doing your very best you want to self-handicap you want to self-destruct because you want to have an excuse why it is that you are falling short of expectations and so that that is the ego drop i knew that you were interested in us discussing that that is a wide angle lens on what this is i wanted to say something kind of quickly i want to add something jen and i are very firm and very unusual in our insistence that our personalities are genetic and therefore limited the uh you won't see this written anywhere you won't even see it written in the literature that we would we would cite uh let me explain to you what that literature is so that the people understand that this is not an opinion okay what we are actually describing here is scientifically verified fact and the facts have been verified by more than 14 million pairs of people have been investigated worldwide in the last 30 years there is no doubt about what i'm going to tell you is fact we first discovered that personality was genetic in the mid-1980s uh it was done through 92 pairs of monozygotic or identical twins that had been separated at birth in the state of minnesota and then raised apart they had been born from the 1920s on in the 1980s a set of investigators at the university of minnesota

went to track these people down and when they found them often they were found within 100 miles of each other obviously because they were adopted out in from the same location but sometimes they were thousands of miles apart this wife takes people away from minnesota it takes them to seattle and florida and los angeles into mexico city there's no telling where people might wind up but what they then did was they then looked at how similar they were relative to how two unrelated people would be uh would be related two unrelated people's correlation coefficients on intelligence openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism is zero you correlate zero with a random member of the population of the world that's the whole point you don't have anything in common with them other than that you're a human but your personality if i know something about your brother um that doesn't tell me anything at all about the guy next door nothing so if your brother is an extreme introvert that and you say well what does that mean about the guy next door nothing okay my best guess about what the guy's next door personality is on introversion extroversion is that he's in the middle of the graph that's the best guess i've got so the question is if two people are unrelated and they are raised together two adopted people if they're raised in the same house how alike are they the answer is zero they raised by the same parents the correlation coefficient between those two people is zero if one if an older brother is very extroverted what is the odds that the younger brother will be either introverted extroverted answer there is no relationship whatsoever okay none you do not improve your ability to predict if a person is extroverted intelligence open conscientious neurotic anything at all you can't predict anything what you know what their older adopted sibling is because there's no relationship now if those two people were genetically related uh monozygotic twins separated at birth and had nothing to do with each other for 47 years and they meet in the office of the psychologist at the university of minnesota those two people are unbelievably similar they are eerily similar and if you measure them one of them will be a little more extroverted than the other today on the test and one of them's iq will be two or three points higher than the other today on the test but they will be extremely similar but here's where it gets really interesting if you bring them back a year later the one that was a little bit more extroverted on the test a year ago is no more likely to be overly uh more extroverted as they are likely to be less

extroverted a year later on the test there is no relationship between if they're a little bit higher there it doesn't predict anything about that test a year later which means that the differences that you see between two monozygotic twins are completely unpredictable yeah yeah which means they are not personality differences it means the personalities are essentially identical their intelligences are identical their characteristics are identical they are not exactly the same person because at this moment in time they occupy slightly different environments so one of them is in a really nice loving relationship the other one's married to a and as a result their anxieties are a little different okay so when you test them out today they look a little bit different but the truth is the personalities aren't different as jen would say the personality expressions are different they live they're living in different environments these what i've reported to you you can verify for yourself in the magna opus of behavioral genetics it is a book called blueprint published by the most famous most methylated behavior geneticists in the world a man by by the name of professor robert plummen so he will say things like um education matters or education is important but it doesn't matter what he's saying is it's an important part of the life process but it won't make a single bit of difference as to how smart your kid is or how well they're going to do in college yes okay parenting is important but it doesn't matter what does he mean it means apparently as jan was describing with her dogs she's a parent to the dogs her job is to help them enjoy their process but it doesn't matter in terms of moving who they are as dogs she's not gonna move who they are as dogs by one percent they're going to stay exactly the same to the day they die okay so what we want to do with people uh and with dogs or you know essentially anything the it turns out that the dog's personalities are every bit as genetic as human personalities which turn out to be genetic so that means that what we want to do with people is to understand who they are and then to figure out what situations we want to put them in to make them excited if they're competitive and they love to compete and they want to elbow people to the top of a dominant hierarchy great can we do that okay the uh if we if they're shy and quiet we put them where it's shy and quiet if it turns out it's exciting and interesting and challenging we put them there if they love to bang on the piano we put a piano in front of them but if they don't like to bang on the piano for god's sakes let's not make them do it what a total waste of time

so that's that's uh i wanted to make sure that we had covered and understood the depth of the knowledge that sits behind our opinion is is unshakable and will not be overturned by any modern bs that fights against us people don't like the notion that their children are limited okay here's what how your children are limited their height okay their intelligence their personality characteristics their character these things are all limited here's what isn't limited okay the variance of their happiness that's what's not limited you can make them miserable by putting them in lousy circumstances that will make their life experience miserable or we can have we can help engineer situational situations that makes their life experience extremely benign and pleasant that is where we have the control we don't have the control over how brilliant and how many blue ribbons they get yeah beautifully set yes please i like jen to always weigh in when i go on a rant because she a lot of times has little loose ends that i've forgotten and she paints it better and tell us what what else comes to mind for you out of this no that i mean that that covers it beautifully i think you said 14 million pairs of twins it's actually 15 million i think in the in the meta study that flowman's recording um reporting about and that was a couple of years ago so the you know the irony is that we we sort of are doubling down on this blank slate view of looking at human nature and human potential was culturally at the very moment that we have stronger and stronger more powerful and just more quantity of evidence from this genetic perspective so everything that that doug is saying is is like this is not even this is it's not even controversial really to make this point if you if you know the literature but it's incredibly controversial just in a practical cultural sort of way to say something you know as as crazy as oh yeah our personalities are much more nature than nurture it's almost entirely nature um nurture the the the yeah these these sort of um these these cryptic things that people plummet like plumen will say about i can't remember exactly how he phrases that the parenting is important but doesn't matter matters but he says that parents mother no parents are important parents mother but they're not important or parents are important but they don't matter it was one or two nobody knows quite what this means but it's you know i think if this says you know it's it however we want to phrase it it matters to the existence of motown my nervous dog if i live in a loud apartment where people are setting off fireworks in the street every day that makes him miserable

it's a terrible experience he's he's going to be agitated and barking and freaked out all the time it's a much more pleasant experience for him to be in a calm quiet space where he has a soft place to sleep and nobody's screaming at him um so that is there's subjective importance there but it doesn't make him less likely to react the next time he hears fireworks if and so if we gave him a personality test he's going to score differently on how anxious he is depending on whether he's living in the house with the fireworks outside or if he's living in the country mansion with a nice little old lady who gives him the the cushy bed and she really nice kibble every day so he's going to just be having a better time he's going to be enjoying his life more he's going to be everything's just going to be more calmed down in that moment but he can speak and move across the continuum depending on what's going on in his life so the the environments that we provide our children or provide our animals or provide are goldfish you don't you don't have dirty water for the goldfish that you know it's struggling to breathe and it can't it's it's it's having a miserable life experience um it doesn't change who the goldfish is you know depending on whether it has a little plastic castle to swim around and entertain itself or clean water or fake flowers or anything but it certainly does provide a better life experience for that goldfish so this is this is what it all comes down to and we have to realize that that is the the the same lens that we have to view our own lives and our own happiness through is is really finding uh what is that environment what does that look like how do we you know why are you wasting your hundred thousand hours um in some job that you hate like what is the distortion that is leading you into that life rather than doing the things that would give you authentic joy um and it's this is a this is a lifelong reflection process there are no easy answers for understanding who am i really what really brings me happiness it requires a lot of honesty a lot of introspection a lot of experimentation you don't really know until you you get into it you get the data for yourself through experimenting and through trying out different things um and this is just this is what life is all about so we can't tell you quite what that environment looks like for you and you probably don't know yourself but you can discover it through the process of living wow and it's uh it's it's really like um but we with the dogs and the dog trainers that whole industry it's the ego of i can i can fix something and even if there is nothing to fix it's like no

i will make a dif i am such a good dog trainer that can make a dramatic change in your dog instead of trying to look at the dog and and see what do you like what do you want to be what what can you enjoy it's such a it's such a insult to the dog it's such a like crime against that dog's life to put yourself in that that sort of role where it's about you and it's not about the dog it's about the dog it's about their life it's like this is they they have their limited experience on planet earth let's try to make it as joyful and as productive and happy for them as we possibly can just like we would want to do for our kids or our friends or ideally for ourselves so it must be frustrating in your field knowing what you know and i mean even even like how how would you address a client to to bring it back to home base and and say let's let's see who you are and let's see what you like instead of you know putting this tremendous pressure on yourself and ultimately knowing that it's gonna break down and and it's because this would be very similar to why pet owners will start to seek a dog trainer because the dog has a problem and the has whatever the genetic makeup is whatever the you know it wasn't something that it's right i mean genetics are not acquired by experience from yesterday what you did and but in the like as a as a pet owner you always read that no we can do some magic with positive reinforcement or we can just punish and suppress or yeah i mean there's the bot extreme which neither one can succeed against the genetic makeup but it's a big cell and and there is this quest of of almost every pet owner that the dog is a little bit shy like you know you open a soda in the camp pops and the dog gets tired it's like oh we need to fix this no you you're not gonna be able to fix this but they will somebody will tell them that we can fix it and then they're going to put it on a program and now it's going to just exactly exactly it's a lucrative process it's a lucrative process in therapy in the parenting industrial complex too so this is you know it's it's an endless you have endless people who are really susceptible to this notion that you know oh well uh transformation is possible if i just have the right magic beans and so we are just wired to kind of like we want its energy conservation to go back to what doug was talking about you know we really want to because we are fundamentally beholden to this competitive process it's you know we want to be as you know we want to display our gene quality to the world we want to be the best that we can possibly be we want to do it with the least amount of effort that we possibly can and it just makes

us very susceptible to an easy deal or to to something that we haven't tried before if somebody's got a method somebody's got a you know some some information that we haven't come across that could make a huge difference in our competitive standing we're our dogs we're going to be we're going to be very inclined to bite on that because it's just very very compelling for everything that matters as far as our inference around our survival and reproduction capabilities and so we we're just we have this we have this weakness we we're very drawn to it and there's no shortage of people who are willing to sell us transformation in a bottle transformation in a program um it's it's a it's a two-way street where there's buyers and sellers yeah and as long as we have this misunderstanding of what what uh human nature or dog nature or earthworm nature really is about and and that you you can't completely transform you cannot completely take a take a shy animal uh whether it's a two-legged animal or four-legged or a six-legged animal and turn it into you know some kind of superstar extrovert it's just not going to happen you can situationally temporarily get people to do a lot of things under a lot of different constraints and incentives but you cannot permanently shift their personality but that doesn't make us any less likely to want to try and to be willing to shell out money for the the next big promise from some charismatic trainer or charismatic transformation coach or whoever it is that's trying to sell us that program but this is the it's so interesting when like i find myself sometimes at this place knowing that i will tell a client what their potential is as a individual or the dog's potential because i i compete in a the highest level of dog sports also and i know what it takes from personality from the person and the dog to to be a world champion and i know it's not there maybe maybe the dog has it but the person doesn't or the other way around or it's a complete misfit for some reasons if i say that they will make a phone call and they will get the approval that they can and they will keep searching for that approval they will fail and they they will blame that trainer now that the the system of training sucks or the the excuses right as we were talking will start pouring and then they will not still not gonna be able to self-check they will just move to the next big trainer with the big promise and i will go on i mean i see it going on with like i know people that would go through five six dogs that means good 10 15 years of i will be a world champion and and it's a miserable life like it's really a miserable life

to try to chase something that it's not with your capacity but they always bite that bite which which is the amazing part for me like i just you're looking at uh you're looking at narcissism okay so the uh it's going to turn out that that each of these bell curves or each of these characteristics on ocean uh open this conscientiousness extroversion agreeables and neuroticism uh your those characteristics fall in bell curves that's because because they're genetic uh the most successful genetic characteristic there is the most common in the gene pool by definition and it turns out that it's generally the most adaptive for most situations so for openness it sounds cool to be really open uh sounds like oh that's a really good thing uh but uh jen hawk here is actually very open and she's she's very many times almost not alive okay right so she in her first you know 30 years on this earth she had many more harrowing life and death kinds of experiences that i did because i don't have any openness at all hardly okay so as a result you know it's hard for me to stray outside of my camry more than 15 feet uh whereas uh jen's you know sailing down some river in china i don't know what that's hanging out with some smugglers you know getting getting all wrapped up with the wrong people yeah i'm as an animal i'm my openness just makes me more well like what's over there what someone like let's just go a little further than than everybody else is comfortable with so there are not many people on the bell curve that have opened us that high because most of us get killed off we just you don't survive crossing the road to see what's on the other side a few of us do survive so those genes continue in the population um one of my dogs is much more open than the other dogs so yeah all of these things are on the bell curve so i think doug is is pointing to the fact that these people who are like when at any cost what we're going to be the world champ but my dog my dog is going to do it these are the same as the the parents that are so ill attuned to the the what their child actually wants that they're forcing them grabbing them by their little arm and no you are going to win the spelling bee because it's going to make me look good it's that's their narcissism so on the bell curve of narcissism which is really they're very disagreeable that's the the way to think about what narcissism really is um they're just they they don't even really care about the life experience of that other creature whether it's a dog or a child or a friend or a an employee all they care about is is their glory they're they're gonna succeed they're gonna get the benefits and and it's just

this tunnel vision that is born of this disagreeable stubborn you know we we could we could throw some bad words in there i don't know how family-friendly this podcast is oh it's super yeah it's free you you can go so but then how do you how do you handle like if you if you try to sincerely obviously help and and and because it will be help but that's not what they would want to hear how do you is it even possible in some situation i feel like it's a you you lose as a you gotta i mean you're looking at personality limitation in in that sort of sense too so there are some people that will just not hear reason when it comes to that that kind of shit-headedness you know they're going to win they're going to they're going to drag that dog or a succession of dogs or children or whatever it's they they cannot really be moved out of that place if they are really truly dug in disagreeable narcissists and you have to have just sort of just like you're gonna honor and respect your own personality limitations and and gifts you're going to honor and respect them and other people and other animals as well and so there's there's a point at which you're like you know what i can't it's not it's also not my job to run your show like it's not your job to run that dog show or your child's show but it's also not really my job to tell you that it's not your job to run there's like it's it's live and let live and there are personalities out there that are going to be damaging the life experiences of other entities and we do our best just you know in the therapeutic capacity to kind of shine a spotlight on that and to show people what's really happening and why they're really doing that and a lot of people when they recognize it they you know they they're like oh i you know i wouldn't want to do that i'm doing that that would be called this distortion personality distortion if you're very far over on the bell curve with something like disagreeableness it means you're functionally going through life with sort of tinted goggles on you're like in this fun house mirror where you're you're not seeing things quite as they are you're seeing them through the filter of your real extreme personality characteristics so a lot of people that we talk to when you confront them with the reality of that you say hey you know you're you're being pretty obnoxious when you're dragging your kids to you know piano teacher after piano teacher because the succession of piano teachers haven't turned them in to mozart and you think you're gonna find the piano teacher who can't um they obviously hate this you know this you're not creating joy for this if you confront

them and you show them the situation some people if they have other personality characteristics that make that possible they'll be like oh god you know i i didn't want to do that like i i you know i see now what's happening how can i stop this how can i interrupt this pattern and i think you would have the same situation with with the dog training world although it doesn't happen very often it takes um awareness it takes iq it takes a certain humility um that co-existing with that narcissism which you're just not going to find that often which incidentally leads us to a very important uh insight into how it is that jen and i try to coach people about living better lives which is that just as you should see yourself as fixed see everybody else is fixed so you're living life on a chess board and if that's if that's a bishop that's on the black then it's a bishop that's on the black and if that's a rook it's a rook it is what it is and if it's a disagreeable narcissist it's a disagreeable narcissist there's like absolutely no point in arguing with it okay the best thing that you can do is to back away from it as fast as possible and don't turn your back on the way out of the room right so you've only got 100 000 hours to live more or less and every hour you are in it fighting and arguing etc with some disagreeable individual you're just wasting your time you may because if you're if you're fighting and arguing you're trying to change them that's why you're fighting and arguing you're trying to like somehow be like what do i need to tell you to call like oh if only you saw this as i see it then you would change you have what we call this egocentric bias and hey you're not changing anybody you're not changing your dog you're not changing your boss you're not changing your husband you're not changing your kids you're not changing anybody so you know the the sort of true enlightenment in life is not taking anything personally including the personalities of other people yeah and that also includes like you made a question to us about how we feel that we know this and and our field does not know it and is it frustrating not particularly um it's kind of it's frustrating in the sense that uh in the same way that it's frustrating for you knowing that dogs are being trained badly and that they're sort of experiencing uh unhappiness where it's unnecessary but you know human ignorance ignorance is the thief of of happiness and longevity in other words ignorance is what leads us to waste time and waste life opportunity it's not a tragedy to have lived life less well than you could have lived it it's just sort of it is what it was

and so you know if a person stays in some relationship with 25 years working for his dad or married to somebody that they don't want to be married to or you know or you know going to spending every sunday night with their with their brother and sister-in-law eating spaghetti and they hate it all okay is it a tragedy i don't call it a tragedy i would say that they left a lot of potential life enjoyment on the table they suffered unnecessarily and they suffered unnecessarily behind a distortion and their ability to analyze what was actually in their best interest and and that includes thinking that you're gonna change the old man or that you're you're you're gonna you're gonna work out the disagreements with your mate or that you're going to finally enjoy your sister-in-law's company one day now okay none of these things are likely to happen and you're going to know whether or not they're likely within relatively short order as the evidence is going to pour in that what you're dealing with is fixed personality characteristics not only in you but in them so this leads to actually a very curious insight is that not only is your personality genetic and not only is someone else's personality genetic it is also true that the interaction between you is genetic okay so how much you love a friend is actually genetic it's a an emergent property of those two individuals and you're not going to change that the only thing where you see things problems transcended is when there is a distortion and communication you didn't understand something and you misread it so you actually misread something about the person's personality and you thought something terrible was true when really it wasn't you were seeing it through the long the wrong lens the classic in this is pride and prejudice by jane austen that is the ultimate story of a great love that almost didn't happen because people got the wrong information and didn't see it clearly okay so uh but believe me if your kid doesn't like chess doesn't like piano in fact doesn't like riding horses and doesn't like basketball doesn't like any of the things that you like and what they really like is pokey man or whatever it is that they do you know if we want to play the guitar let them play the guitar okay and uh let them be who it is that they are and and sort of let and and and give up the notion that we're going to change them uh into something that's more valuable for us and get yourself get your ego out of that equation you know so much of like oh all my kid does is play pokemon all day and instead of being a great chess player because i was a great chess player you were imposing your own analysis of

your success on that kid and you're you were holding them hostage to your own unlived dreams and that is just that is a shitty thing to do to a kid and it is uh you don't want to steal their childhood in that way and you don't want to steal it from your dogs either just attend to your own life and your own dreams and your own responsibilities and you know stay as as a spiritual leader byron katie says whose business are you in are you in your business or somebody else's business and if you're not in your own business you're in the wrong you're in the raw business and another little note and that is that a key is to be paying attention to your own frustrations okay so when you are frustrated that's because that's a signal out of your evolutionary biology that's telling you that you are you have a discrepancy between where you are and where you think you should be it's puzzling you and you're frustrated one of the common problems of that is you're not either recognizing your own genetics or you're not recognizing somebody else's genitals and therefore you're not recognizing that relationship uh is you know that may not be changeable now that isn't always true it sometimes there is a fundamental key of success that is being overlooked that's why you need subject matter experts uh that we we need to sometimes there is an informational process that's missing sometimes there are fundamentals that need to be learned to close the distance between where we are and where we could be or should be that that's an important distinction you know that's the serenity prayer like you know what can we change and what can't we change and the wisdom isn't knowing the difference so jen and i actually have a online we have a thing called the living wisdom library and this is uh that name wasn't chosen accidentally a wisdom is literally the ability to know the difference between you know what you can change and what you can't change because uh there's much that we cannot change that we are spending tremendous efforts of trying to change and there are things that we can change that we aren't spending any efforts intelligently and so this is really where it's at this is the nature of wisdom is to try to have that insight and evolutionary biology and behavior genetics shed tremendous knowledge onto those questions and that's what we try to do with our clients and we try to share that that knowledge more more widely yeah i i know like i was just thinking probably some of my audience that were impatient and that couldn't really understand why what are we talking this is not dog training and the ones that have listened so far i'm sure that they're they're gonna have

to go again and listen again because there's so much that that was said that it's like just directly applies to being a dog trainer being a good dog trainer um of of [Music] completely well it's not even completely different field it's just you have the uh you actually have the education and you're working with humans versus uh just being a dog trainer that you're grow up as a oh no we're just gonna reinforce behavior and punish behaviors and we're gonna make things happen and completely disregard genetics so this is this is part of the i mean we were really we we do uh walk our talk as well as we can and uh you know it helps that we're both pretty uh on the big five we're both you could say that we're both fairly agreeable fairly emotionally stable so we we don't take it too personally if people aren't interested and they are sort of like well get back to the dog training you know what the heck is all of this nonsense we're just really here to connect with people who are really interested and can apply this and um want to hear more and they can they can find us as doug was saying on the living wisdom library we have two different podcasts that we do we're we're all over the place which is the second one the the one i that i the one that i listen to is the b2 jeans podcast which is the other one that you have yeah it's uh it's one that i just started so it's a beat your genes is very much like uh clinical questions and and people's individual questions and problems through the lens of evolutionary psychology and my podcast which doug is a recurring guest on um just we just started it it's called hawk blocked and it has a pun on my name um and it's really looking rather than looking at individual issues it's looking at broad political cultural issues through the lens of evolutionary psychology so we talk about sort of trends and politics and um the the way that we're changing the way that we interact online and all of those kinds of things oh interesting yeah we will definitely list all of those um um with to go along with the podcast for sure and what about the book that you are working on is it what can you give us a little hint we don't want to ego trap ourselves by giving you too too strict of a deadline but it's we're definitely we're making very good progress hopefully by the the end of this year it'll be i think that's safe to say that we're looking at sort of uh the thing is we want to um you know this book is this this is covering a huge amount of territory that nobody else is really in this space nobody is sort of marrying together the the clinical and the practical and the academic and everything that

we're taking on it's really half textbook of evolutionary psychology in the kind of history of modern psychology and then the other half is really a self-help book you know what is life about how do you take these principles and and live your best life so this is quite the project that we've taken on and as we as we go through it we keep discovering new things that need to be included and um and we need to give our readers time to give us feedback once we get copies out to our our sort of readers and editors and so it's hard to give an exact deadline that we're we're we've made really good progress and um i would i would say the end of this year's safe at least getting getting that direction i don't know what doug thinks uh i think that's reasonable but uh we're fortunately we're we're not under any deadline uh so that essentially we are going to we're going to do exactly the process that we think is the right process which is uh no secret sauce work our fundamentals and uh when when it's finished it'll be finished and so uh i'm i'm i'm looking forward you know you don't rush michelangelo or michael jones either go russian yeah this is what we're up to and it should be it should be a quite a read when we're done i think beautiful well i think um hopefully hopefully i really hope that uh everybody that's listening and watching uh changes their you know uh how they see genetics and how genetics affect behavior and opens a new chapter for them with there is so much more to to learn than just reinforce and punish um and and yeah i was very very happy i know there is so much more that we can talk like i i would love to talk about nutrition like i would love to talk about it because it's just as important as everything else that we never really you know i mean yeah i i cannot even start because we're happy to come back if you if you'd like to chat again yeah there's there's limitless territory thank you this will be very nice because uh again yeah i mean when when we're talking especially when we're talking well not even i was gonna say like high-end competition and sports and how important it is to you know what you eat and how you how how your brain and everything gets affected but even even a pet dog and just a in any person what you eat everything pretty much starts there or ends there right then and but yeah i will i will definitely uh we will definitely have another one at some point um thank you thank you so much for joining me and um as i said we're gonna list all the uh the two podcasts and the websites and i'm sure there will be a lot of followers that will just just like me that that's it's really like guys if you

if you're watching this is a lot of stuff that i talk about that's how i got interested in and that's where it really kind of came from text to dr lyle and dr chen it's wonderful to connect with you always a great um pleasure to to brag about my dogs [Laughter] any excuse so i can't believe how good nelly's been this whole time like let me just display my child over here i know i know you you said that she will do something she's been so good oh she's she's well they're getting older now so they just basically sleep all the time so but she's she's a good girl she's just very misunderstood thank you well thank you very much for having us thank you so much thank you so much [Music] you