I get a team. It's the You Project. It's doctor Bill, our favorite geek, our favorite researcher, our favorite nerd. I hope I didn't offend you with any of that, mate, but you are loved here at the U Project. How are you?
I'm gret on my favorite podcast.
Ah, good, dude, it's really nice to have you back. You and I just had a deep and meaningful I reckon eight or nine minute connection before we went live. You're always busy. I'm always busy, but it was nice to just chat with you, and you know, I look forward to these talks and I look forward to spending a bit of time from you and learning from you.
So just before we get going, everybody. Bill's website is author Bill Sullivan, One word dot com author Bill Sullivan, And if you go into the articles bit or the no you just go straight in there. There's a whole lot of articles, which we're going to talk about a couple today. I didn't realize how prolific you are. You you crank out a fair bit, like with a lot
of people who have an article section on there. It's like seven articles written over the last decade, and I'm like the most recent one is twenty nine seen or something. But you've written a lot this year, and you are quite prolific in your writing for various publications.
Yeah, it's something I just enjoy doing. I read a lot of science. It's part of my job. And when I come across studies that I just find plain interesting or they relate to my book, please to meet me, you know, the like logical extension or new data related to that topic. I can't help myself but to write about it and put it out there on the various
venues that are kind enough to accept my work. And I do a quarterly newsletter too that's associated with the book, so people can go to the website and sign up for that. I don't slam your inbox often, but four times a year you'll get some links and other bits of writing from me, most of which are related to the book. Because, as you know more than most people, the biology of the self and the biology behind human
behaviors constantly changing. We're getting new data all the time, so it's something that you perpetually have to update in order to stay accurate.
Isn't it funny how at different times through history, I mean always you know, in the evolutionary and the scientific and the research timeline, Like we're doing stuff now in twenty twenty four and thinking stuff and believing stuff that in one hundred years I'll look back and go, what was wrong with them in twenty twenty What would they even? How did they for a moment think that that was real? Or you know, it's like we you know.
If you think about it just just one hundred years ago, you know, we're going back to like nineteen twenty four, there's no such thing as penicillin antibiotics. You know, it's just like these precious medicines that we now just take for granted. It's totally revolutionized things. Back in nineteen twenty four, we had no idea that DNA was the molecule responsible for heredity. Okay, that was still a mystery, much less
knowing what it looks like and how it functions. To think that all of that was sorted out in just one hundred years, it really does boggle the mind where we might be in another one hundred years from now, and how remitive we're really going to look one.
Hundred percent now, just quickly before we dive in everyone. Bill's book is called Please to Meet me epigenetics, DNA, microbes, and the hidden forces shaping who we are, Jen's germs and the curious forces that make us who we are. So I downloaded your book, and I'm not going to bullshit and say I've listened to it. I've got nine books on my list. It's the next one. So I'm listening to a book at the moment, which is called Unfollow.
So I've got one hour from the end and then it's sixty minutes to go, and then I'm up to your book, which I will give you a debrief on next time.
I'm on the edge of my seat. I can't wait.
Yeah, you have to say, I'll give you a review out of five. Have you ever heard of I'm sure you have. This is digressing, but we'll get on topic in a minute. Of the Westbroo Baptist Westboro Baptist Church, those people who protest at soldiers funerals and you know anti gay slogans, and have you you've heard of that?
Oh? Yes, they make our national news from time to time. Yeah.
Yeah, Well, so there's a lady who was born in that cult called Megan Phelps Roper, and she wrote a book called Unfollow. Oh, it's fucking fascinating. Oh I bet it would be.
Rare glimpse into what it would be like to come up this culture of hypocritical heat.
Oh my goodness. And it's so she is. She's brilliant. I mean, she has got an amazing mind. And for somebody who grew up in this, you know, like it's really hate masquerading us love, right, it was just for me who's fascinated in I'm fascinated and cults. I'm fascinated in the way that we think, the way that we see the world. I'm fascinated with beliefs. I'm fascinated with this need that people have to be right, you know. And oh my god, it's called unfollow everyone and get
that after you get doctor Bill's book, of course. But it's such a fascinating insight into a culture within a culture, and this we you know, I spoke before about basically while we were off air, the echo chamber, you know,
confirmation bias. It's just incredible the way that some people build this reality and this whole kind of paradigm of we are the one, how many people or how many groups like that we have the hotline to God and literally they believe that everyone in the world, I mean on planet Earth who doesn't agree with their doctrine is one going to hell and two wrong.
It's like, and that's just the current people alive, right, all the people before us also must be burning in hell now too. Yeah, you're talking about you know, hundreds of billions of souls. So, yeah, it's crazy.
I can't.
I got to get a little bit of a teaser out of you. What was the spark that led this individual to start questioning this dogma and leave the group?
Yeah, so they were I mean, you know, I'm not even going to say the word, but the homosexuals where God hates homosexual gods and God that all of this placarding hate very hateful and hurtful. But they always told themselves it was coming from a place of love. It was scriptural, it was Bible based, it was all that. And over time some stuff started happening within the church. So there was a very very unified front for a
long time. Like this lady at twenty five or twenty six, still lived with her mum and dad, still was very much under their authority, had never kissed a boy, had never been on a date, but at the same time
a lawyer and highly intelligent. Most like there was a highly disproportionate number of lawyers within the Phelps Roper clan because they needed to be because they were always in court, right, that's true, but they're just started to be like she's you know, she spoke about the internal struggle of recognizing things that were inconsistent and that you know, like that, you know, especially the New Testament is so much about love and kindness and forgiveness and turning the other cheek
and you know, the beam in your own eye and all that kind of like Jesus based a lot more friendly than the Old Testament, you know. But she said she started to see within the context of the church, which was very unified, and then started to fall apart,
and then she started to question. So you know, she would get in trouble at twenty five years of age if she reached up to get something off her shelf and somebody saw a slither of her stomach, so she would be punished, right and then and it just y just like she started to have this awareness beyond the programming and that you know, you think about the fact that how we've all been programmed in one way or another doc via media, social media, school, church, synagogue, mom, dad,
friend's family, and then you wake up one day and you try to distinguish between where does my programming end? And where am I? Yeah, like where's Craig? Yeah, where's the end of Because you know, I understand objectivity, but I'm not objective for the most part, because I have subjective experiences and views and beliefs, and I have pre existing values and ideas and standards and beliefs, and you know, prejudice and all of that shit that I have to
acknowledge because I'm human. It's like, the idea of objectivity and open mindedness is nice, but the practice is high.
Well, there's been some pretty fascinating studies that have been done on not necessarily religious and non religious, but on like conservative and liberal people, going back into like historical records and looking at personality as a child and how it tracks with whether the individual becomes a conservative or a liberal on the right or left. And there's some
really striking parallels there. And one of the things that I think loops into religion, because any more conservatives, at least in the US, are of a religious affiliation than the liberals are okay, And one of the striking personality profiles that you see in the conservatives and the religious is this unquestioning obedience to authority. And I think that is part and parcel of either it's being afraid or you're showing respect, or maybe it's a combination of both
of those, but you simply do not question authority. And whether there's like some sort of genetic basis to that or whether it's just a cultural imprint, it's really quite fascinating. But you can find families that are by and large conservative, but then you get, you know, the black sheep of the family, I suppose, wander off and become you know,
more progressive and liberal. Yes, And a lot of people chalk that up to things like, well, they had different ex experiences, they had more education, maybe they were exposed to a more culturally diverse group of people. And I think all that could be completely true. There's, interestingly enough, there's some genetic evidence that suggests that variations in the dopamine receptors of your brain also track with whether someone is more liberal or conservative, which I find fascinating.
Yes, I for a while, I don't know if I've told you this, ione bought my audience. But for I grew up in a very Catholic church, which was just very Catholic environment, I should say, which was not anywhere near the authoritarian, megalomaniacal kind of level of control that these people were experienced to. But after that, you might
think more or less me out to this doc. But I was involved in a from when I was about nineteen to almost my mid twenties in a quite a strict Pentecostal church, and there was so many, ah, so many familiar concepts in this story. And I'm like, ah, Like I was engaged when I was twenty or twenty one to a girl who was my age. In the church, we weren't allowed to be alone together. Well, it was really frowned upon. So I get it. I'm like, you know,
I'm like, oh yeah, And I remember even then. And I came into the game in Verticomma's late and there was so much control and manipulation about you know, you having your own thoughts and if you questioned anything, literally I was told, you know, that's Satan trying to or that's the devil trying to derail you. You know, It's like you don't not Essentially, literally, you need to submit to authority, and the authority is all the people in the church above you.
Well, you know a way, if you started questioning things.
They can't control you.
Well, they can't control and the whole foundation, yes, of what their beliefs are built on, starts to be rue. Yes, what takes is a little critical thinking. It's not hard to disprove a lot of the tenets of religion, or at least it put some put some doubt into that model. So yeah, that's that's why they completely frown upon any inkling or any residue of critical thought. They've got to stamp that out immediately because that could literally burn the whole place down.
Yes, And it's funny how when you do think like you think critically, you ask reasonable questions, you're curious, You're that you are not allowed to doubt. You're not allowed to ask questions, not certain questions, you're not allowed to open certain conversational doors. You are It's like your job is to conform. Yeah, and if you're not conforming, you're bad.
There's a little more than that, but essentially that's the nuts and bolts, Like, if you want to belong in this group, then you need to think, like, be like us, agree with us, do not question, do not open it, don't open any of these doors, don't hang out with these people, don't like they, do not do. List was fucking thirteen miles long, and I just got to the point where and I did love the idea. I loved the idea of a compassionate, all knowing or loving you know,
divine whatever. I loved that idea. But it wasn't even the God thing that got me out of the church. It was the people. It was the control and the coercial. I'm like, this doesn't make sense. You're not even fucking thinking, like you're literally frustreating. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, speaking of nothing much to do with that we were going to chat about.
But that's a great topic. I love talking about religion. It's a fascinating subject.
Well it's really I mean, it's a multi dimensional thing, isn't it, Like, because it's about it's about belief, it's about ideology, it's about thinking. And you are not you know, we spoke about metacognition before. But you're you're encouraged not to think. Yeah yeah, you're just encouraged to conform.
Right and to have someone tell you not to think or not to question. It's just the antithesis of being a scientist or being curious and learning about the world. So what are these people interested in control? Or do they want to know the truth? And I'm for the truth all the time, you know, I want to figure out what's right and wrong. But I find religion so fascinating because it can bring out the best in people and at the same time bring out the absolute horrors
that humanity is capable of as well. So it's one of these very very unusual things that from my point of view, it's just crazy that people still go for this sort of stuff. But it's it's extremely cemented into our cultural environment.
Speaking of your cultural environment and religion, it's an interesting, an interesting time in the States right now, isn't it. As we record this, it's Monday the twenty second in Australia and it's Sunday the twenty first in the US. Not that not that we're a political show at all, but in terms of behavior and human nature and culture and God and religion, Oh my god, it's a bloody pot purre of craziness for you, I tell you.
I just don't know what to expect anymore when I wake up and see the notifications on my phone. This has been one of the craziest elections I can think of, not only in my lifetime, but in all the history that I've studied. I mean, there's just every day there's something more and more bizarre that's happening. And as you probably heard just a few hours ago, Joe Biden decided that he's not going to run for re election and that's been pushed by a number of people since he
had a very bad performance at that one debate. But it does seem to be more and more people coming around to the idea that, you know, he's lost some of his edge and it's not going to go over well when people go to the polls in November. And that's a very reasonable argument. You know, I watched that debate myself and was just kind of burying my head in my hands, like, oh my god, why did that?
Why didn't the Democratic Party prepare for this? People on the inside must have known that this was the state of deterioration that he was facing. You know, all of
his accomplishments aside. When you go out on debate, you got to sharp, you know that there's unfortunately a lot to an election that goes off the CV, that goes off the resume, and it deals with you know, like how well you can think on your feet, you know, how witty you can be, how sharp you can be, how few mistakes and you know you can have And yeah, he either he had a really really hard bad night
or his age is catching up with him. So I think enough people convinced him that it would behoove the Democratic Party to go with someone else, and that someone else has not been determined yet.
Yeah, didn't I announce it was Kamala Harris? Well, they haven't.
That that is who Biden offered his support for rot rot Okay, but that obviously won't be made official until the Democratic Convention.
Right, Okay. Yeah, So I mean I'm fascinated as you are, with the Brian and with you know, psychology and cognition and and yeah, I've been watching President Biden the last whatever month like everybody else, with curiosity and yeah, I don't mean this to sound how it might, but I actually really feel sorry for him in that, like I've just you know, seen him struggle, and I just I want him to be okay, and I want him to. I feel like going, hey, you've done a great job.
It's time. You know, you've done a great job. Like, let's not let the wheels get any more wobbly. Let's just go. It's been great. I'm Joe Biden, thank you, and you know, good night.
But he may have been a victim of his own success. I mean, he's had an incredible four years. And you know, the media will tell you other some media over here will tell you otherwise. But the country is doing amazingly well given what he inherited, you know, coming off of an insurrection, COVID was still nuts over here, and the economy was in the toilet, all because of his predecessor, or due to a large part because of his predecessor,
and he had to repair all that damage. He's done a remarkably good job of it, and for understandable reasons, wanted to do another four years and complete the job, you know. And I can understand that, and I feel, just like you, I understand your hearts in it. I know mentally you can probably get there, but there's a level of politics that involves showmanship and confidence and things
of that source. You can you can come with a really remarkable resume of achievement and accomplishment, which I you know, I think you can make a good case Biden had really good four years turning this country around, and he's got remarkable character, I mean compared to the other guy. Come on, there's no contest. Yeah, but uh but yeah, when you see that debate performance, it just speaks a thousand words as to we really need to reconsider who's going to take the helm.
Speaking of genes, not blue gens everyone the other one. Tell me about the relationship between cognitive function performance cognitive decline. And I know that there's no I know there's a bunch of variables around this, but how much of cognitive decline and say, his case and we're just talking is genetic.
It's just that's just what was going to happen. And how much of it, Like I think about the stress, the pressure that he is under, the lack of I mean, I don't know, but I know that there's a relationship between stress, physiological stress, lack of physical fitness, lack of sleep, you know, like nervous system, endo, crime system, all of these things that are him. Like, how much of what we're saying do you think is a culmination of four years of chaos and stress or is it all just genetic?
Yeah, I'd hesitate to say that there's like some kind of genetic element here. I mean, the guy is over eighty years old, and he has one of the most demanding schedules you can imagine, and he's traveling all over the world constantly. I mean, hell, it takes me a week to recover from one trip jet lag, and this guy's flying across continents like it's like it's nobody's business. And then he's got to get up and perform in front of millions of people. I make mistakes all the time, Okay.
Of course, someone who's got that kind of pressure is going to make some simple mistakes. And then your adversary is just constantly lying, okay, and you're trying to refute some of these lies, and it's almost like a whack a Mole game. You're sure you guys familiar with that game, or the MOLTI pop up you whack it comes up in another place. That's how it is. When you're just buried in this avalanche of lies, you're almost paralyzed with
which one do I respond to first? You know, there were so many thrown out there, So I think he was a victim of a whole bunch of other things that may not really have anything to do with like genetic aging. But you know, let's face it, you know, we start to lose it as we get older, and that's going to happen to all of us some sooner rather than later. True, I feel like it's happening already to me. How long do you do if you don't mind me asking? How long are you if you don't
mind me asking? I turned fifty four back in April?
Yeah? Right? And what do you what do you do?
Like?
I'm interested, like, what what does the guy who wrote the manual? You know? Or not the manual? But what does what does that guy do to? You know? Optimize? Maximize what you Because you can't get new genes, but you can influence your Jane. You can't get more hours in a day, you can't get more innate talent. What what do you do to optimize you?
I would I try to eat as healthy as I can and as little as I can, and I exercise. My go to exercise is running. I try to do five miles a day, or at least five or six days out of the week.
Wow, what about because I'm a mate head, I'm a buffhead. What about strength stuff.
Doc, Yeah, I'm not as big on that, but I do try to do a little bit of strength training. But what I would call strength training you would probably laugh at. But it's just enough to keep, you know, to maintain.
I definitely wouldn't. I definitely wouldn't.
I enjoy the running so much more than I do the strength strength training because I just love getting outside. I love the feeling of running. You get that runners high at the end. You know. I got my tunes with me when I go. Maybe sometimes I'll put on the You Project, listen to who you talked about last time, And you know, it's just kind of a fun thing for me to do. A lot of people think it's crazy because they don't want to run around the block,
much less do with several miles. But I genuinely enjoy it. And it's not only great for your body, it's great for your mind, great for your sleep. You know, there's so many benefits associated with it.
Yeah, I've started running again. I used to run a lot as a kid, and I don't know, I'm very lucky. I think like I just I've run on and off over the years, but I've been running consistently the last few months, and so I do waits every day. But I'm doing about four days a week. Not far, definitely, not five miles, which is about eight kilometers in for us over here, but I'm running about probably the equivalent
of just two miles. But I just go out. I literally run outside and run like a crazy person for about fifteen minutes. Doc, Yeah, just get my heart rate up high. I run for me. Yeah, quite quick for me. But yeah, there's that even running that fifteen minutes every second day, or you know, four or five out of seven days. Yeah, it feels you for it. When I get home, I feel fucking amazing.
Yeah, it's It's wonderful, isn't it. Yeah, I think you know a lot of my formulas. What I don't do, you know, rather than what I do, because what I do is kind of common sense. It's what any doctor would tell you is good for you. But what I don't do. I've never smoked, never done any hard drugs. I will drink on occasion, okay, but never to excess. I don't eat highly processed foods very frequently, you know, if it just doesn't, I mean, if it's not something
our ancestors would have eaten. I usually reserve that as like a treat or a very rare food. Okay, it's just got to be real food. And what about and I don't drink any soda, no sugary drinks. I would drink water sometimes coffee.
Yeah, what about managing stress and anxiety? I can't see you as being a person that gets overly stressed too often? I used to.
Yeah, I actually went to the emergency room about a decade ago, thinking I was having a heart attack, right, because this was when I was trying to get tenure at my university. And for those listeners who don't know, that is an incredibly stressful ordeal to go through. And I had a new, you know, baby girl who was born with colic, and you know, it's just all kinds of stuff going on all at once. It wasn't wasn't
a heart problem at all. But it turned out to be acid reflux, a regurgitation of stomach ass into the esophagus, which was eroding it so badly that I had a constant pain in my chest in that heart area. I was mistaking that for a heart time, So it took
several months to get that under control. But since that day, I started to engage in a lot of stress reduction type of activities, learning how to do some controlled breathing, how to be mindful, take a small segment of the day and either you know, think about things you're grateful for or think about things that you could improve, but in a non stressful, you know, don't beat yourself up kind of way. And that really helped a lot. A
lot of people like journaling. I just kind of like to think it through in my mind, but sometimes people say writing it out actually helps them a lot more. And I started to learn to say no to something. You know, I just had to cut back on what was on my pleat in terms of all the activities
and stuff that I kept trying to do. You know, you got to acknowledge your limits, and even if it's stuff that you think would be interesting and fun, for the sake of your health and your sanity, you just got to put reasonable limits on it.
Yeah.
And I don't take a single supplement, Greg, I don't take anything really, Nope.
The only supplement I take is careers and it's the only supplement I take which there's some some i say, some science around the benefits of that also cognitively, but yeah, I don't. I'm like you, Doc, I've never been high, I've never been well. I've never been drunk. I've never drunk ol khol. I've never had a recreational drug. I've
said this on my show before Full Transparency. I might have taken a few things in my early twenties which might have helped me get a bit bigger, which wasn't my proudest smart But back forty, I mean that was nearly forty years ago. People would use steroids back in those days in the eighties, like people would use protein powder. Now, oh yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't It wasn't even illegal.
I'm like, no, sure, yeah, I don't think some of the health dangers were as acutely known as they became more aware of that, like in the nineties and subsequent decades. But yeah, you're you're talking about the era of Arnold Schwarzenegger and you know some of these others, Charles Atlas ads and the comic books and all that stuff.
Yeah, Lou Farino, Yeah, yeah, all those dudes that that that era of the mister Olympia when like bodybuilders started to like it was the first time we'd seen like the early days, you know, with Charles Atlas, in the very old days, you know, with the muscle builder on the back of the magazine. They were just guys that were in really good shape. And then we started to see these months disappear on stage, which were like cartoon characters. Yeah, you know, I wanted to. So you wrote an article
called is our Fate Determined by Genes? And you said something in there that was something like, there are many possible versions of you in your genome. I just wanted you to unpack that idea a little bit because I think most of my listeners kind of we kind of get the idea kind of of epigenetics and genetic variability, but can you unpack that? So there are many possible versions of you in your genome and what determines who we become and how we become?
Doc No excellent question, and you'll you'll read about some of this when you listen to Please to Meet Me. But what that statement refers to was it was inspired by studied done on identical twins that looked at this phenomenon called epigenetics. So I think most people understand that genes and code proteins that make us who we are, and most people associate genes with physical characteristics and some
behavioral profiling as well. And there's this phenomenon called genetic determinism that you know, you are your genes and you're quite limited by your genes, and there is some truth to that statement. There are some genes where you know, if you have a certain variation, you are going to get a certain disease. Okay, sickle cell is an example. Huntington's is a good example. If you have a certain mutation in that gene, you are going to get this disease.
But when you're talking about personality and behavior, that involves the activity the collaboration of tens of thousands of genes, so it can get extraordinarily implicated, and it's very very difficult to implicate a handful of genes towards behaviors. So this field of epigenetics, which really only started getting going about twenty four years ago, was the idea that genes are not on or off. Okay, they're more like a dimmer switch, and they can be regulated with exquisite sensitivity.
So One of the common epigenetic mechanisms is called DNA methylation. And I don't mean to throw a whole bunch of jargon out at you, but DNA methylation is not like a mutation, which is a change in the genetic sequence. DNA methylation is a chemical modification that takes place on the gene or near the gene, and DNA methylation is one of these modifications. The more a gene gets methylated, the more it gets shut down. Okay, so that's pretty interesting.
It's a reversible process, and you can have enough methylation on a gene to completely shut it off, or it can be unmethylated and be completely turned on. So what this amounts to, to make a long story short, is that there's tremendous variety that's possible even in the same genome, because all of those twenty thousand genes could be on at different levels, Okay, at different points in your life. So let me go back to that identical twins study.
I think it illustrates this case very nicely. So everyone knows that identical twins have the same exact genome. They're literally clones of one another, so they make really good test subjects to kind of study inheritance and things like DNA. So when scientists compare the chromosomes of ident twins, you know that are very young okay, less than three years of age, and they have a tool where they can stain for the DNA methylation marks that I talked about
that can shut genes down. When they look at all of their chromosomes and stain with this DNA methylation marker, in the very young twins, they're all the same, okay, So not only do they have the same genetic sequence, they have the same DNA methylation patterns as well. When scientists look at twins that are fifty years old or older, again, they still have the same genes, but their DNA methylation
patterns are almost completely different. And this explains age old mystery that scientists wondered about regarding identical twins that grow up to be different as they get older. And there's many examples of this. It's called twin discordancy. And what happens is that sometimes identical twins as they get older, they can look difference different in appearance. Okay, sometimes one twin is a little taller than the other, some looks like they're aging faster. Than the other. There can also
be personality differences. As the twins get older, some will go into business, whereas others will go into construction, and yet they have the same exact genome. It raises the question, well, why don't they like the same type of job. And then one of the more striking examples is that some twins can be lean while their other twin is obese. So you can get dramatic differences in physiology, in physical attributes, and in physiological and psychological outcomes. And scientists this boggle
the mind. Because they have identical genes, they should be the same exact person carbon copies all throughout their lives. So what this is telling us is that even if they grow up in the same environment, there's nuances in their environment. There's different experiences that they have which can kind of cascade into a very dramatic difference as they
get older. And what this study showed was that one of the possible mechanisms to explain these differences in identical twins is the different DNA methylation patterns, the difference in epigenetics. So another helpful analogy that I like to use Craig is that you can think of genes as the piano keys, but the environment plays the song.
Yeah, I'm thinking, you know, like to me, the way that that DNA methylation happens, all those patterns, it's that I don't know, it seems like logical to me that that twin discordance in that well behavior you know, have its behavior as lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, environment, you know, all of those things are going to influence the way that
those genes express. So I don't really understand the surprise, Like why would they think that just because because surely they recognize that diet is going to have an impact on obesity or body composition or that stress. You know, a stressful environment versus a calm environment will have an impact on one's nervous system and anxiety levels and that sleep and that you know, if one exercises and one doesn't exercise. What I don't understand the surprise, Well.
What you're what you're you're looking at it in terms of studying the different behaviors that the twins had. But what the mystery was is why should they have different habits at the get go? Because they have identical genes, so they should be having the same appetite, the same you know, right, sires for certain foods or and that's and they grew up in the same environment in most cases, so.
The divergence happen once they start to live apart more.
That's that varies from case to case, right, So you'll say for people that same environment, right, right, Even if you're in the same environment, though, you're going to be exposed to different things. You know, one twin might get mugged whereas the other did not. The other one might have a bully and the other one doesn't. Sometimes they watch different shows or get exposed to different people, and that can sometimes that can make a very profound difference in a life.
So if we could create a simulation doc where until I was say twenty years old, if everything was identical, everything experiences situation people they met schooling, I wonder if there would be any divergence. Then I wonder if if we would say, any differences if all the stimuli with a sign.
Well, in theory, if they were exposed to all the same stimuli and they have the same genes, you should
minimize the different epigenetic changes that take place. Because these epigenetic changes that I've been trying to explain come from the environment, and there's been a lot of studies done now that can show how trauma can affect the epigenome the landscape of these marks, yes, and how exercise can do it, how certain foods can change epigenetics, and even how things like meditation can change the epigenetic landscape on
your genes. It's a really remarkable science and I don't want to blow it out of proportion because it is new and there's a lot more research to be done. But what it does tell us is that our environment, our experiences, the things we expose get exposed to affect genetic activity. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind because it undermines genetic determinism to
a degree. Yes, and it says, you know, our feets really aren't written by putting ourselves in different environment or making changes in our habits. We really can control the activity of our genes and become, you know, either a slightly different person or even a dramatically different person, depending on the nature of the circumstances.
You know what else is I love that so interesting, But also it makes me think about I've spoken about this a bit lately, where you know, like I've got friends of mine that go to meditation and they love it, and you know, it calms the farm.
It's which is on their parasympathetic nervous system, their heart rate, their breathing, their blood pressure, everything comes down and they come out of it like you know, the Dalai Lama or I don't know, some suitable kind of figure. But I've done and I don't hate it, but I just and I'm the problem.
It's not the class. But I go in there, I've done quite a few meditations. I'm like, oh fuck, this is uncomfortable on my back. I better get another cushion. Oh my knees, I can't get in this much inflection. And then it's halfway through and I'm more stressed than when I went in, and I think about the purpose. Yeah, And it's like, for example, I love motorbikes. I've had motorbikes since I was a kid growing up in the country, and most of my travel is done on a motorbike,
not in a car. But the funny thing is when I'm riding a bike, most of the time, I'm somewhere between happy and really happy and comfortable and having fun and relaxed. And I don't know, producing a bit of dopamine because I really enjoy that experience. But the funny thing is I can have someone on the back of the same bike at the same time and they're having the worst experience of all time.
Yeah, yeah, you know, and you have different DNA methyleation patterns, is what they he Well, you think.
About someone who loves dogs versus someone who hates dogs, like the dog lovers on the floor with a dog. All of a sudden, you know, they're they're getting licked and they're padding and they're spooning, and they're having the best time ever, and their physiology is a certain way. And then somebody else who hates dogs is sitting on a chair and a dog walks in the room and
their physiology goes nuts. But it ain't about whether or not dogs create this or that versus how that individual responds to that exact same.
Thing, right right, You know that was part of that.
Differently, even though I know I'm really digressing here, but I think about, like I'm interested in the psychology of getting offended, doc. You know, It's like if I'm in a room like the other day, I literally did gig and this lady that employed me. I was about to I was presenting, and I was about to swear, and I said, oh, is this a swearing or a non swearing event? And she goes swear away, right, And I don't swear for effect. I just swear because that's how
I talk. And it's probably probably I shouldn't, but I'm a little too sweary. But anyway, the funny thing is you might say, I might say fuck to a room of one hundred people and one person gets offended, but ninety nine people don't. And then I think, ah, so what causes the offense? Is it the word? Well, clearly not, because ninety nine people didn't get offended, So what is
that about? And then this whole thing of like, and I'm not trying to get into the political correctness space, but who do we cater to?
Like?
Do we cater to the one that might get offended and then the nine none that think it's funny? We discount them? Or you know, like you think about like life is really an ongoing process of how me, the individual, interacts with the world around me and responds to the world around me. I don't know where I'm going with this. By the way.
No, that's quite all right. That's what I love some of these conversations. But yeah, offense, taking offense to something is clearly on the person who took the offense, because they could be a minority in the audience, as you're suggesting, it can sometimes only be one person, and it's because they've had a unique set of experiences that changes how they are perceiving either the word or the act that
is creating discomfort in their mind. Yeah, and I'm of the mind where we need to stop being so easily offended. I think we need to educate people to because it's kind of egotistical to be offended, right, you know, it's kind of like, well, the world revolves around me. You said something that I don't like, so I'm going to tell you I'm offended by it in hopes that you change your behavior, that you be more like me. Yes, I find that egotistical. What you should do is just
let these things slide right off you. What's the big deal. They're not physically hurting you in any way, and any psychological damage you incur is what you bring on yourself. Okay, Like you said, it's how you're reacting. And I understand, and I sympathize with it. But there are tools out there, There are psychologists out there that can train you to change your perception. Okay, yes, and I think that the onus is on the offended to do that, you know.
And it doesn't mean that they can't get behind a cause, you know, to rally to change, yes, whatever it was that offended them. But to sit there and suffer and accuse someone of making you suffer because of your thought patterns, I find that fundamentally wrong.
Yeah, I I don't know. Somebody sent me this thing yesterday. Doc. I'm gonna this is not a great thing to do in the middle of a podcast, but I'm going to try and find it quickly. This this American pastor what's his name, Bishop Bronner.
Just happened from there.
Just happened to me anyway. He said, stay away from people who act like a victim and a problem that they created.
Ah. Yeah, So that's kind of speaking to that same point, isn't it. Yeah, And again I'm not trying to be little in anybody's feelings. They're real, yes, okay, Yes, and I sympathize, of course, But by the same token, you can't demand that the world can form to your views. We live in a very diverse population with people who have had incredibly different experiences, and I think it is actually harmful to tell people to stop talking, okay, or
expressing an opinion because you're offended. They have every right to say it. They have every right to their opinion, and you know, you're entitled to your feelings. But I do think you're entitled to cancel someone or to shut them down because of the way it made you feel. I think, you know, the way you feel is kind of your responsibility.
It's yeah, it's like an individual response to a particular stimulus. And I think Ricky Gervais says something frequently like, it's not my job to look after your feelings. It's not It's not my job to manage your emotions. That's yours. You know.
He's a wonderful comedian, and I think he would. He's giving advice that a lot of psychologists would give one hundred percent.
Hey, just quickly, before we move on from twins, I just want to know is there something they kind of infer I've seen a few docos where we're very very close, I mean identical twins who are pretty much intertwined. Their lives are intertwined. You know, these twins that end up marrying two brothers and they live in houses next door to each other or two sisters and whatever. But they they they maintain that they have like basically a form
of telepathy. Now you know that that is probably just a byproduct of the fact that they are identical twins.
Right, Yeah, there's no hookus pocus about that at all. I mean, if you have the same genes and they build roughly the same brain, and let's see, their epigenetic landscape is pretty identical, and yeah, you're going to be thinking the same things. I would presume that in those cases, those sorts of twins had very similar experiences growing up, nothing dramatically different, So it would be yeah, it's not surprising to me that they would be on the same wavelength, if you will.
I know, this is like a too big a question for a however many minute answer, But people listening to this now they're getting the head around. Okay, my genetics are my genetics, but the way that those genes are expressed is a variable that I can influence to some extent. And even though Dad had a heart attack and even though mum got diabetes, that doesn't mean that I have to have either. If we're interested in opening the door personally on exploring, I mean, well, reading your book is
a great start. But other than that, like how to optimize everything? How do I get the best chance of optimizing my genetic potential? Is there a bit of a stepping off point? I well, you know what I would.
Tell my kids, you know, in order to grow up as as healthy and you know, with a with a good well being as possible, you can go a long long way by doing simple, common sense things. And I know this is boring, trite advice, but if you eat right and you exercise, and you don't put toxins into your body, yeah, you know, I talk toxins like hard drugs and smoking and things like that, you're going to you know, by and large, you know, have a very happy life and a state of you know, a good
state of well being. Now, that doesn't always work for people who have like some kind of genetic aberration that leads them into clinical depression. I'm not saying that patients who suffer that magnitude of mental health condition can simply eat their way out of it or something like that.
But for most most people who are struggling with with happiness and aren't clinically depressed, it's probably just an imbalance in you know, these these processed foods and what they're messing up in your body in terms of gene expression, in terms of microbiome content, and in just in terms of brain health. You know, how they're how they're messing up your brain chemistry. So I always try to think
in the context of our ancient ancestors. Okay, not necessarily paleo diet per se, but we evolved for tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers, eating real food, foraging a lot of plant, a lot of roots, probably insects, but I don't necessarily advocate that, and then occasionally some meat, okay, And that's what we that's what our bodies are programmed to ingest and function off of. You know, for tens of thousands of years. All these processed foods are just
a few decades old. We really have no idea what they might be doing long term to our health. We certainly know it isn't helping with the obesity problem. Yeah, So we just got to be really careful about what we're putting into our bodies. So that's that's what I would tell my kids, and that's how I would advise your listeners. I know it's boring, but that's it.
I'm boring. That's what I'm boring. We've got to wind it up. But before we go, you wrote another article which I read everyone. That's great. It's called you Don't need a lot of money to read a Rich Life, So go to author Bill Sullivan dot com. But just quickly, one of the takeaways from that was that a lot of global kind of surveys around happiness don't usually include people living in low income communities, which I never even
thought about that. And that also one of the studies showed that people from low income indigenous societies often report, you know, higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, or as high levels as what we would think as people living in a privileged situation. I found that really interesting.
I found it interesting too, and I was surprised that a lot of these happiness researchers did not look at happiness levels in other societies. They usually focused on the developed countries. Yes, but there was a study that I wrote about in this article that specifically looked at people who still live either as hunter gatherer tribes or in low income societies, meaning they're making less than one thousand
dollars per year. Okay, And the way the happiness scale works, it's out of one to ten being the most happy. A lot of these societies were ranking up there at seven out of ten, which is some of the happiest measurements on that scale ever seen. You know, they're compatible with the Scandinavian countries, you know, like Denmark and Norway that usually score very high. And most people chalk that
up to you know, universal healthcare, universal college. You know, the government has a very strong safety net, and that's why these countries do so well. And I think that's a good argument to be made. But what this new study tells us is that you don't need a lot of wealth or money to just be happy. Okay. So and it kind of makes a lot of sense if you watch any of these documentaries about some of these societies. They don't look sad, they don't look depressed, they're not
moping around. They have smiles on their faces. They're laughing, they're joking, they're teasing, they're having fun. They look like they're genuinely enjoying life. Not that I'm going to go join one of these tribes, Greg, but I think it has some important lessons that we are chasing ghosts of happiness in this country. We are going after the wrong things. Now, the study doesn't address what does make these people happy.
It just tells us that they are, And it tells us that you don't need a lot of wealth or material things or fancy cars or anything like that in order to be happy. And I think a lot of us could probably by stress reduction, simplify our lives and avoid chasing after some of these things that might make
us feel good momentarily okay, but don't sustain happiness. So I think that's what we need to reframe the question around is to what do you really need at the most basic life level and you find out that it's not that much. You know, you need food, shelter, and you know, some community safety and community. Yeah, if you can get, if you can learn to be grateful for that, it goes a long way in building sustained contentment.
Yeah. I think it's a really good idea to question the stories that we have, like in Australia anyway, success for the most part is about what you have and what you earn and what you own and what you drive and where you live and what you look like and what people think are you and your brand and your money, and not that any of those things are bad things, but you know, we have this story that this external thing will give me this internal state.
When I have that, I'll be happy when I look like that. I'll be happy when I weigh that. I'll be happy when I've got tenure. I'll be happy when I own another gym. I'll be happy when my biceps are bigger.
You know. In my case, like I spent my life trying to find happiness until I was about thirty. And it's not like I've figured it all out now and I'm the bad one, but you know, so much of my belief system was built around this idea that what was going to make me less anxious, more fulfilled, more calm, more happy was all of these external acquisitions and achievements.
And the more shit I got, the more stuff I got, it was almost I'm not saying that was the cause, but I think I became more and more despondent because I thought, well, maybe I don't need two motorbikes. Maybe I need four. Maybe I don't need a fifty inch TV, I need one hundred inch to or you know, and it wasn't that, but it wasn't far from that. And then you get to the point and you go, oh, maybe what's not Maybe the problem is not what I have or don't have, but rather who I am or who I'm not.
Right now.
I know that's a bit philosophical, but we're a very externally focused culture. We worry like, we worry about what people who don't even like us think exactly, Like, what's that about? Well, I really like that.
You mentioned the whole external internal thing, because the way to happiness is, as these studies are suggesting, is to flip that script. Happiness is not going to be found in externals because there's always one more wrong hire on that ladder. Okay, you can't stop claiming you're always going
to want more. Whereas if you can train your internal systems, your inner monologue to be grateful for the bounty that you already do have, yeah, you're you're going to be in a much you know, better mental health state than someone who keeps chasing after you know, more of this fool's gold and then I like about these So is the charity aspect, you know, and this stems from internal feelings.
A lot of studies support that the more you help people and the more generous you are, you know, not necessarily with your money, but with your time and with your compassion, the happier you yourself become.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense. I love chatting to you. Author Bill Sullivan dot com. The book is called Please to Meet Me. Last question before we go. I don't think you're going to like the question, but I don't care. Who's going to be the next president?
The next president of the US. Wow, what a great question, Alfred E. Newman. I'm going to rate him.
There you wish? Hey, mate, Well say goodbye O fair but for the moment. Thanks again, I appreciate you.
Always a pleasure. Greg