Health – Page 29 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Smoking, Health, and the (Very Small) Risk of Spontaneous Combustion

“Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that. If you’re a nonsmoker, you’ll know.” – Dead Again

I sense a contradiction in these signs . . . can anyone help me figure this brain teaser out?

One of the more notable downsides to being a human is that there are numerous activities that you can do that (apparently) have no significantly bad effect on you. Smoke? Sure. You might cough some tomorrow, and your mouth might taste pretty ugly for a day or two, but everyone knows that smoking’s not bad for you, right?

Smoking even has some pretty good immediate impacts – smokers weigh less than non-smokers. And a smoker who quits – gains weight, so there’s a direct negative effect tied to giving up smoking. Plus, when you have a smoker who quits smoking, their brain has to rewire itself. Huh?

If you’ve been using nicotine regularly for any length of time your brain changes. Nicotine has an impact on almost everything you love by increasing the level of serotonin in your brain. What does serotonin do? Not much: serotonin helps to regulate mood and social behavior, appetite and digestion, sleep, memory, and sexual desire and function. Oh, and it increases your mental acuity and speed of thought processing. And (early on in using it) it gives you a nice buzzy feeling of peace.

I’m not sure about you, but if you add in football and beer, well, that’s most of life. Just “quitting” nicotine means impacting . . . everything about your life that you like. I’ve heard it said that nicotine is tougher to quit than Wonder Woman®. Oh! That’s heroin, not heroine. My bad.

Yes. Your brain has to rewire itself. Full disclosure: I’m a former tobacco user (not a smoker) so I know about this personally. I takes three days for the immediate nicotine to drop to nearly zero in the bloodstream. It takes three weeks for the brain to not be foggy every day, and three months for the brain to (more or less) completely rewire.

Second full disclosure: I really like nicotine. When I turn 65 or when the doctor gives me a short timespan on the Earth? I’m going to take in all of the tobacco. Get a tobacco suit. Bathe in tobacco water. Use it as toothpaste and underarm deodorant.

Nicotine is easy to start, easy to love, and has some great short-term properties. What’s not to like?

Well, there might be some longer term problems – not so much with nicotine (which might mess with your heart after decades – but probably isn’t much more of a risk factor than being fat) but with the delivery system. Inhaling buckets of smoke daily for thousands of days in a row might be bad for you. Who knew? And chewing tobacco and vaping appears to have (some relatively minor) increase in risk of several cancers plus some heart stuff.

But when you’re feeling that wonderful feel from tobacco, 23 year-old-you doesn’t care a bit if 65 year-old-you gets lung cancer, because 23 year-old-you is pretty sure that aging is what happens to other people, and not to 23 year-old-you.

That’s the other thing about the brain – it prioritizes things that are happening to you, right now, today over things that might happen to you in the future. And each of us values that future differently.

The “different value” of the future is apparent when we look at different deals. Would you prefer $50 today from me, or $50 from me three months from now? Everyone (except three-year-olds) will pick “now”. Tons of things can happened in 90 days. You might spontaneously combust. You might get hit by a tiny asteroid while out walking your pet penguins, poodles, and parakeets.

Okay, what if I offered you $100 in three months? That sounds like a deal many people will take. You realize that spontaneous combustion and tiny asteroids aren’t all that common. You decide that a risk is worth it to double your money. But even this deal is situationally dependent. You might really need that $50 to buy more trashbags so you can throw away all of your Star Wars® dolls action figures after that horrible last movie.

This is what economists call a “discount rate” – it’s literally how much you discount the probability of a future event versus your present needs. Most often it’s used with money and a specific percentage is used, but in the end, it’s all about how different people value the future.

Why do we value the future differently? Beats me. And, I think it beats everyone. And it’s certainly not the whole story (LINK):

The first study examines health-related variables associated with making tradeoffs between the present and future, including body mass index (BMI), exercise frequency, dieting, and smoking. The authors find that the discount rate is a significant determinant of BMI, exercise, and smoking and that it can explain 15 to 20 percent of the variation (or differences in these variables across people) in each of these measures. Interestingly, no other variable explains as much of the variation as the discount rate. When the authors create an index of these four health variables, the results are even more striking – the discount rate explains one-quarter of the variation in the index, while no other variable explains more than one-tenth.

Thankfully, our tax dollars went to study the correlation between how people do deals involving money and whether or not they exercise. In the end, the answers appear to be pretty messy. People smoke, because . . . maybe . . . they like it?

Some people might even need it.

80% of schizophrenics smoke versus 20% of the population. The one (actual, diagnosed) schizophrenic that I knew smoked constantly. It turns out that the nicotine from the cigarettes regulates the dopamine thingys in their head/brain thing, and is a pretty substantial benefit. Schizophrenics smoke a lot, and are (from everything I’ve heard – from real doctors) actually amazing good at self-dosing with cigarettes to provide themselves meaningful benefits, and, well, not be as crazy.

Humans are complicated in their behavior, even when not schizophrenic.

What is the impact of a choice today versus an outcome in the future? Does the first bite of cake care about the second? Not really, but your discount rate may tell you how much you eat.

Oh, and back to tobacco:

So why did I quit? Three reasons: to (1) see if I could, to (2) lower future health risks (self-diagnosed) and to (3) stick it to the man. Tobacco products are heavily taxed. If I can voluntarily lower tax payments and then live longer so I can drain Social Security?

Yeah, count me in!

(John Wilder is NOT a doctor, except in an amateur, Civil War doctor sort of way when extracting splinters from Pugsley and The Boy, so please don’t consider this medical advice.)

Russian Wrestlers, Pylometrics, and You’re Probably Not Trying All That Hard

“When the game is on the line, a winner wants the ball in his hands.” – The Replacements

A miniature version of The Boy prepares for a match . . . he now weighs 200 pounds.

The other day I was on Amazon. Yes, I know. The fact that I cannot walk into my living room because of all the little boxes shows I might spend too much time there. Anyway, I was looking for hair regrowth tonic that actually works and carbohydrate free sugar cookies options for fitness equipment for Pugsley and The Boy. One of the things that I saw was . . . a box. You can buy it here (LINK).

I don’t get any money if you buy a box. But you do get a box. One box.

The idea of the box is that you . . . jump on it. That’s it.

What led me to the box I was watching a video of Александр Александрович Карелин. Oh, sorry, you don’t speak Russian – that’s Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Karelin spelled out in the strange chickenscratch that Russians use as a secret code that Putin and Trump devised so we can’t decipher their messages. Karelin was an internationally ranked wrestler for a while. Like for five Olympics. In fact, his career record is 887 wins and two losses. His nickname is “The Experiment.” Because he could do 42 pullups. And he weighed 285 pounds. His signature move? Lifting 285 pound people off the mat and tossing them up into the air so they landed on their shoulders.

The Experiment.

Yeah.

A quote from Aleksandr: “They call me The Experiment because they cannot conceive that every day I train harder than they have ever trained in their lives.” He might be just a bit intense.

Aleksandr was being interviewed in the YouTube® video I saw, and they showed the obligatory clip of him working out. One of the exercises he was doing was repeatedly jumping on a box that was 24” or 30” high. I was impressed. 285 pound guy jumping that high? Wow.

Here’s a picture of Aleksandr. Yeah, that’s a 285 pound human he’s going to toss into the air like a ragdoll. Not sure why they need tanks if the Russians have more guys like this around. Oh, and he’s buddies with Putin and has both a doctorate and a law degree. Don’t you feel like an underachiever now?

It turns out that “jumping on boxes” is known by the $250 per hour consultant word, “pylometrics.” From the Latin root Pylo for “pile of” and the ancient Greek word “metron” which means “communist measurement system.” Pylometrics came to world attention when the Soviet track and field teams of the 1970’s were turning in absolutely amazing performances. One trainer thought, “hey, it must be all of the jumping on boxes stuff that they’re doing,” and completely disregarding the simpler theory of, “win Olympic medals or we’ll shoot your family.”

Regardless, as noted above, he renamed it pylometrics so he could charge $250 per hour to talk about it.

Well, if one of the best wrestlers ever to live thought that pylometrics should be a part of his routine, well, why not? (Previous post: Pugsley decided he wanted to be an NCAA champion in wrestling. (LINK)) If you’re going to try to be the best, you emulate everything you can about the very best people you can find. Everything. Pugsley even has a poster of Putin up on his wall now.

So, I was on Amazon, totally not looking for hair tonic when I found the boxes shown above. Did I say boxes? Yeah. I saw the picture and expected three. Turns out that a cube exists in three dimensions, so they delivered just one box with three heights – 16 inches, 20 inches, and 24 inches. It turns out if you rotate the box . . . well, you get the picture now.

The Boy put it together when it arrived, but then he had to leave, so that left Pugsley and I in the wrestling room with the cube. To be frank, I was concerned that Pugsley wouldn’t be able to jump up on the 16” side and we’d have to get something smaller. I was hoping that it wouldn’t hurt his confidence to have to jump on the “short box.”

He set it with the 16” side facing up. He jumped, and stuck the landing on top of the box like an Olympic® gymnast.

John Wilder: “That was awesome. Okay, try 20 inches!”

He tried once, twice, and was up on top on the third side.

John Wilder: “That was amazing!! Try 24 inches!

Pugsley: “No, I can’t do that.”

John Wilder: “Try.”

He jumped up. Not quite.

Again. A miss.

Third time? He stuck to the top of the box like there were magnets in his feet.

Also this month, friend was doing Crossfit®.

Things you never need to guess about a person: if they are vegan, if they drive a Prius®, or if they are in Crossfit©. Now if you find an actual human that does all three of these things, you might have found a smug singularity – beware or you might get sucked into the smug . . . . (my friend isn’t smug, just often sore after working out).

Anyhow . . . when working up to a max in the deadlift (the king of all lifts) my friend tried to stop at 100 pounds. She thought that was enough. Too hard.

Her coach encouraged her – and she maxed out at 180 pounds.

Most days we have no idea of the things that we are capable of, if only we try. The thing that generally limits your life is . . . you. If you want to be the best, you have to start by working like the best. And believing in yourself.

You might not get there, but you’ll know that you didn’t hold back. You’ve put the game in your hands.

I know where you could go to buy a box . . .

Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings

“I thought I alone considered your boyfriend a narcissistic moron, but the whole galaxy does.” – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Tribe begins its annual war, an ancient rite known as “dodge ball.”

What if we’ve been looking at mental health . . . all wrong? This may be the most interesting thing you read all month, maybe all year. But that’s just what a narcissist would say . . .

I was thinking the other day (a dangerous thing to do, I know, thinking is something to be left to those that work at universities and in congress) and had an idea. Maybe (some) mental illness has a purpose. I’ll explain, but first I have to explain Dunbar’s Number, which, of course, is named after Kim Kardashian. I’m kidding. Dunbar’s Number is named after Caitlyn Jenner.

Robin Dunbar, British Psychologist, looked over the size of the human neocortex (not Neo-Cortez, who would take over the Neo-Aztec) and after playing with a particularly plump and pleasant neocortex, decided that brains just might have something to do with how humans relate to each other. The neocortex is actually the newest (in a biological sense) portion of the brain, and allows humans to do complex things, like talking, snorkeling, and making microwave ramen.

Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? Because people are tough to deal with. And it takes time to deal with people, rather than strangle them.

One potential reason that the “Dunbar” number for people could be higher than predicted is language. Whereas other primates have to use non-verbal cues like body-slamming them, people, after the advent of language, can talk to each other so they can explain why they are body-slamming you. For that reason, especially when dealing with modern (the last 12,000 years or so) humans, I favor a Dunbar number in the 250 range.

There is some validity to the number. Anecdotally, I’ve been involved with a company that had two divisions in the same area. One had 120 or so employees. The other? It had far greater than 500 employees. I observed that the smaller division operated as a single unit. Every employee knew every other employee – and they knew about their families, their hobbies, and their history. Did that consume time? Sure. You couldn’t just go over to talk with one of them – the entire social greeting took at least 10 minutes. You had to catch up. And that’s the way that close relationships work – you can’t just say “hi” and walk on, you have to catch up with each other. That explains why when I come home, The Mrs. wants to talk and stuff. We’re engaging in a practice that’s at least thousands of years old.

The larger division had broken up into various factions based on job functions. These factions looked like little tribes – each had a leader, an agenda, and they fought against each other regularly, often over nothing. And each of these fights ended up hurting the company. Gore-Tex® found the same thing – they built buildings for 150 people. When the building filled up? They built a new one. They tried to keep the trust, the positive aspects of the tribes predicted by Dunbar from spilling over into intertribal warfare that happens at larger group sizes.

But ancient tribes didn’t have kid’s soccer, and FaceBorg®, and the myriad of connections that occur outside of work. So, the Gore-Tex™ number is smaller than the “actual” tribe size. Again, 250 seems about right.

So what does this have to do with mental illness?

Well, for a tribe to survive over time, while most members would be able to act as general “tribal” members most of the time (i.e., hunting, gathering) there would also be the need for specialist skills and attributes. Situations the tribe might encounter (and overall group cohesiveness) require different talents.

Let’s take schizophrenia. It’s prevalent in about 0.4% of the population. It often manifests with being able to hear things that aren’t there, see things that don’t exist, and believe in a reality that others can’t see.

Sounds like a Shaman to me. Every good tribe needs one, right? Well, 0.4% is 1 person out of 250. I got goosebumps when I did that calculation – the number seemed like a nice fit for the theory right off the bat.

Okay, what about another common mental condition? Anxiety. Anxiety is found in about 10.6% of the population. So, in our tribe of about 250 we’d have about 26 planners. 26 people worrying on a daily basis about how the whole tribe would die. These people are a pain in the butt, but this ability to dream up a constant set of disasters that the tribe could anticipate and avoid has huge survival value. In today’s world, not so much. Back 8,000 years ago? This was an amazingly important skill.

About 6 of our 250 tribe would be obsessive-compulsive. Mainly older folks. I can see the meticulousness compulsion of the older, wiser tribal member being infectious – and leading to greater spread of learning throughout the tribe. There are certain things you have to do right, you have to double check (think food poisoning) or else the tribe will die. Having these super process-driven people might have been quite a help.

About 6 would of the tribe would be paranoid. Again, like planning, it serves a purpose – but in this case the paranoia is about what other groups are doing and thinking. Very helpful to have someone looking for the hints that the tribe will be attacked from outside. Or, from inside. Are you threatening me?

Narcissism? About 1%. Only so much room for leaders. This would have about 2 of them in the tribe.

Psychopath/Sociopath? About 1.2%. So, 3 bold, direct, mean leaders of raiding parties/war parties. It takes a village to kill another village.

Pictured: Psychopath. I like the cut of his jib!

Outside of oral history, our hypothetical tribe had only one way to pass on information about required roles and how to do them – genetics. Genetics matter – many of these conditions are at least partially inherited, making it more likely that the leader was . . . the son of the leader. The shaman was . . . the son or daughter of the last shaman.

This genetic tendency to replace the leader with the leader is (likely) the source of the concept of hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility. And, genetically, those people were likely the best leaders around at that time, and they kept breeding . . . so, there was (at least for a while) some good reason to think that the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs might be pretty good choices for kings. They were bred to be kings. Now: perhaps a bit too much cousin-lovin’ (LINK)?

So, yeah, all of the roles required for a self-sufficient band are built within our genetic profiles – but some of them aren’t valued so much in our current society – we don’t need a half-dozen war-band leaders in every high school. And, as far as I know, this is an idea I developed (more or less) independently. Which is also something a narcissist would say . . . hmmm.

Time Goes By Too Fast? Blue Öyster Cult, Pascal, and Ben Affleck May Save Us Yet

“All Rome rejoices in your return, Caesar. There are many matters that require your attention.” – Gladiator

Memes – a tool of attention control? Or cats with eated cookies?

One curse of modern life is . . . always being in a rush. A hurry. Where is the time? How do you expect to do that? It’ll take hours to do that?

And it’s a constant refrain now – we end up at midnight wondering . . . where did the day go? The rush? It adds to stress, and stress clearly causes health problems over time.

Yeah, that time we don’t have enough of. Where did all of our time go, anyway?

I seem to remember that Blue Öyster Cult (in the song Burning for You) promised me . . . “Time everlasting, time to play B-sides . . . “

So, where is my time to play B-sides? (Historical note: In order to hear a stupid song you liked, it was required to buy either a full album, or to buy a “single.” The “single” cost less, and had the song you really wanted to hear. On the other side of the popular song was the “b-side” – generally a song that wasn’t very popular, and never would be very popular. Thus, if you had time to play b-sides, you were wealthy with time. Now you can just go to the Internet and have any song ever recorded played for you instantaneously.)

Television

The real issue now is that every moment of every day can be filled with media: YouTube®, Netflix©, Amazon Prime Video™, Hulu©, HBOGO®. Those are just the video services, which doesn’t include the television your television has recorded for you to watch later.

But if it were just videos, we’d be okay. Virtually every time I type this, either YouTube® is providing background music, or one of the movies that I watch as background noise (The Accountant® is one that I like a lot, and Batman vs. Superman™ is another – don’t judge me for my Affleck Affection Affliction – my doctors says it might be curable).

Now, however, we can watch an entire television season (via binge watching) in several days – creating an immersive event that can be disorienting.

When The Mrs. and I first started watching “Lost” on DVD, well, there were several 3AM nights because we couldn’t stop watching. “Just one more episode . . .”

Social Media

Then we add in interactive online experiences – FaceBorg®, Twitttttterrrr©, SnapGram™. These are experiences engineered to grab your attention. Twitter shows you a notification when it wants you to see the notification to maximize your engagement. There’s nothing random about these web services. And you’ve probably heard this before, but if they’re not charging you to do it, you’re the product. With these social media services, you are completely the product. FaceBird© expected to make $27 from the data it harvested . . . from each user. Who paid? Who knows? Let’s just say your late night searches have drawn . . . some attention)

Not pictured: Cambridge or Stanford.

Cambridge and Stanford (the universities, not the two dudes named Cambridge and Stanford that were Muppets®) did a study, and found that with 10 likes FaceBlog© knows you better than a work colleague. 150 likes? They know you better than your parents know you. 300 likes? They can beat the Persians at Thermopylae. Just kidding. They do, however, know you better than your spouse. And everyone knows the Persians are still on MySpace®.

Only this many likes and then FaceBlock® says . . . THIS IS SPARTA!

And if they know you better than your spouse? They can certainly figure out your moods, the things that will get and keep your attention. Why? Their income depends on your attention.

The News

The news is becoming ever less based in truth and more and more polarized. So, the news isn’t only fake, it’s biased. Examples? After Trump was nominated for President, a news reporter did a straight news story that Trump had asked a woman with a crying baby to leave a campaign rally. Did he do it? Yes. Was he kidding? Well, yes. Humor is a powerful way to connect with a crowd – watching video of the event later, it was pretty obvious that it was a joke.

Both sides do it. It was reported that a “doctor” had reviewed Hillary Clinton and found that she had some form of cerebral palsy. Clearly, that would be devastating for her bid for the presidency. Clearly, there’s no evidence of the palsy post-election.

So, the news becomes polarized like a 120 volt outlet, all charged up to make you care passionately about things you’ve never heard about before.

Availability

All of the above are available to you everywhere and anytime. I can watch a movie on a tablet in bed while I check my phone to see how many people liked my last Tweeet®. It used to be (in the long-before time) that this level of immersive and up to date media was available only in limited locations. Now? Anywhere. Work. Working out. Driving to work. Driving home. At dinner. And throw your work e-mail on top of that so you can read the thought your boss had at 2am when he woke up to let the dog out.

Result?

You feel rushed – you have eliminated downtime. Back during the Revolutionary War, learning about the results of a battle might take weeks. Now? When ISIS was attacking in Iran halfway around the world from here, there were nearly-live videos uploaded to YouTube®. And we can watch the Kardashians doing . . . well, whatever parasitical thing they’re doing today. (I’m not saying that they’re exactly like human tapeworms, but there are a lot of unsettling coincidences . . . .)
Your ideas never have time to develop? How could they? They’re always being trampled by the ideas and opinions of others, couched in the most emotional manner possible to elicit the largest surge of anger or fear they can muster.
You lose the ability to focus and concentrate – there’s always some media begging for your attention at the periphery of your consciousness. Check that email – it might be important! (Hint: it might be important once a month.)
Shopping – for anything, anytime. Your commercial desires can be met instantly. Need to order ammunition for an AK at 8AM? Sure! Need to order posters for a protest parade at a podium? Sure!
Boredom with the mundane. Mundane literally means “Earthly.” I can co-pilot a TIE® fighter with Darth Vader©. I can grab a YouTube© video showing Russian teens at the top of the tallest building in Moscow. Live view a rocket launch? What can awe and inspire a generation that has experienced so many events virtually? Oh, wait, you search for ever more esoteric adventures. And you’ll find them – but none of them will occur around your location.
Video games, where you can expend hours achieving great goals, saving civilizations, destroying enemy fleets, founding empires. Great, pre-programmed goals. Other people’s goals. Goals that aren’t yours, and, when accomplished, aren’t at all real.
Preoccupation with news that has no impact on you, and that you have no control over, yet about which you are made to feel deeply that you’re willing to fight the other side to the death. Seems legit.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

This is Blaise Pascal – who had a nose larger than any ship in the current Canadian Navy, but wasn’t quite as smart as Newton. This irritates the French. Note the Blue Öyster Cult symbol in the background . . . Pascal was a rocker!

Mindset that our activity is our accomplishment. Our accomplishment is our accomplishment.
The mathematician Blaise Pascal said (roughly, this is my translation of what I remember he said in French because I’m too lazy to go to my library to look it up – heck, I even marked this passage when I first read it and am too lazy to go and check, but I’ll get close enough because, well, I’m John Wilder) “Activity distracts us, which removes our attention from how wretched we are.”
We’re being manipulated (not in a tinfoil hat way, but in a shareholder value way). FaceBrick® makes money off of you. Off of your eyes. Off of your attention. Off of your habits. It’s not a conspiracy that businesses will do whatever they can to make more money from you, even if the long term consequences aren’t in your best interest. But it is in their best interest to put in front of you the stimulus that they figure will give them the proper response.

Coping – How do I deal with it?

I don’t listen to the radio during my daily commute. That leaves over an hour without any media – any static. It took about a week to get used to it, but now I use that time to think – to plan for the day or night ahead. To think about the next post. To think about . . . anything. But the thoughts are my own.
When we go out to eat as a family, phones in a pile on the table. We’re there and discuss what each other think.
At work, I’ll sometimes take e-mail breaks – where I won’t review them for hours at a time.
Sitting without distraction to focus on a single problem or task. I find that, for me, music helps with the focus.
Writing daily the list of things that I really have to do. This will probably be its own post in the future. But I use and actual pen and pencil, and put it on actual paper. It makes a difference.

The trends are clear – barring a global war, great depression, currency collapse, or regional war near here, our attention span will be fought over on a daily basis. If you want to accomplish anything real in your life, if you want to avoid the stress that comes with the constant emotional treadmill, you have to come up with a strategy.

Thankfully? I have my willpower. That, and Ben Affleck movies. I can mostly ignore them. Hey – is Ben Affleck . . . my B-side?

If so, that makes me wealthy, indeed!

Friendship and Health – and When Friendships are Made . . .

“How come you don’t hang out with your friends no more?” – Repo Man

Kermit knows that friends don’t tell friends to drive into the mouth of an active volcano.

I read a joke the other day: “Why don’t we read about Jesus’ other miracle very often? I mean, what guy has 12 close friends after the age of 30?”

It’s true. And it’s the post topic for healthy Friday. Why? Because we need friends to be healthy. And we need friends to help us hide the bodies. What bodies? Who said anything about bodies? My lawyer certainly says I don’t.

This post was originally going to be the second part of my post from Monday (LINK), but when I tried to put them together, it was sloppy, horrible, and I ended up having my hands stuck to my eyebrows with literary Super Glue®. The parts just didn’t fit. Or they didn’t fit when I tried to smash them together last Sunday night. The nouns, gerunds and library paste wouldn’t keep it together. At least not at 2AM. But it’s important to talk about. Why?

There’s a huge connection.

Something about the friendships you make when you are between the ages of 10 and 16 is . . . magic. And I think the thing that makes it magic is the years from 10 to 16, those six years . . . are (on average) about 50% of your life. And the specific 50% where you learn how to be mean. How to be hurt. How to feel shame. How to feel triumph. How to buy beer when underage at the 7-11© at the outskirts of town . . . .

The Mrs. and I (okay, mainly The Mrs.) used to watch a show where addicts would be confronted by their family in order to convince them to not be addicts. They went through the lives of the addicts – in almost every case, the addict had insufficient parental support (or some sort of tragedy) between the ages of 11 and 14. Very specific. Each story didn’t rhyme – it was nearly life plagiarism.

Something happens in that part of your life. That really, really long part of your life.

Hormones kick in. And every emotion is fresh. New. The crisp morning air? That first morning when you walk out to your car and, for the first time, see frost on the window? HOW COOL IS THAT? After a few thousand times, the frost becomes . . . another thing you have to deal with. Again.

You only get one first kiss. You only get one first walk hand in hand (or hands in tentacle if you’re a Lovecraftian monstrosity) with your girlfriend. The newness is huge. And the friendships are closer. Why? How many times will you climb the water tower in your town to paint it? Well, not at all now, because Homeland Security would probably take you to Gitmo® for putting your name on the water tower. Because . . . terrorism?

First dates. First breakups. First . . . everything.

Anyway – your life is so very full of firsts. The psychological impacts are massive – and the need for parental support is likewise massive. It’s nice to have the support of people that are genetically connected to you (LINK) and understand you. Probably. We Post-Modern-Vikings seem to be somewhat erratic. I digress.

This time of your life was difficult. It was new. It was a struggle. But it was yours. And your friends from this time had several attributes – they didn’t want anything from you. They just wanted you. They wanted to jump in your car and head to the party place and find the guys who couldn’t let go of high school and had a keg of beer. And why not? Life stretched out forever.

Until it didn’t.

I have had several rare opportunities – I’ve reached out to friends from the past who I finally found due to Internet searches (I’m not a bit Facebook® fan) and talked to them. And we restarted right where we left off.

The Mrs. talked about some psychological theory where people related to their friends . . . forever, in the same way they related to each other when they first formed their relationship. So, you’d always be tied into that same social hierarchy. You’d always be friends in the same way you were when you first formed that friendship.

Amazing. Psychological ties to your friends are rooted in multiple dimensions – they are rooted in your common origin story (like when Wolverine® met Cinderella™!) and your common goofiness. Also? Your love of songs that were popular when you were at your absolutely stupidest. Like 13.

Thankfully, nobody remembers where those bodies are . . . .

Human Beings, Are We Awesome Creatures With Cool Senses, or What? (Hint: We’re Awesome)

“I see dead people.” – The Sixth Sense

I find this picture . . . disturbing. Should this be the XY-Files?

I think that a lot of times, we have no ideas of the capability of humanity. From the ability to understand subatomic particles from the basis of equations and thought experiments that we constructed to the ability to build pyramids and land on the Moon, we continually do lots of stuff the warning label said not to do. And we make bratwurst. Which is, when cooked right, the Best of All Possible Foods®.

Human senses are apparently much more finely tuned than we ever expected and we’ve managed to gather data that we’re way smarter than we ever thought we were. Human senses are adequate to:

Around 60% of the time, judge from a photo if a man or woman is gay or straight. For some reason, this gives gay people the heebee-geebees.
Determine which student came from a rich or poor family with about 53% accuracy. Not super accurate, but better than chance. Perhaps it was because Ivana Trump was in the photo stack?
Determine if people are sick from looking at a picture of their stupid sick face – 81% of the time.
And we might have even more amazing skills:

That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.

Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

This is from National Geographic . . . you can view the article here (LINK). It’s not a great article, but I’ll cite the source . . . .

Sick people and well people, I’m not sure who is who, mainly because I don’t care about other people. (Audrey Henderson/St Andrews University)

Yeah, humans can smell diseases. Or, at least old British women can smell Parkinson’s disease, and some people can see them, at least some of the time.

And AI shows that what our brains are doing is processing subtle biological cues that are actual, physical patterns. An AI was set up to determine the whole gay/straight question by feeding it tons of pictures of gay and straight people, and the accuracy of the algorithm was in the high 80% level, if you gave it five facial images per person. Me? My ability to judge gay people vs. straight people is totally non-existent unless I “accidently” open the door when they’re having sex. My ability is zero.

Here’s what the AI figured out: both Gay and Straight people are blurry. NYTimes was where I found this, but it was originally from the original study.

One thing I’ve noted – generally just watching two wrestlers walking onto a mat, I can guess the winning wrestler about 80% of the time. And I can tell which two bratwurst will be tastiest when I grill them. Even if it’s a tie. (It’s always a tie – they’re bratwurst.)

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.

Steve Martin, Bob Segar, and Interviewing; or How I Met The Mrs.

Five Year Old: Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me.

Doctor: Three years of nursery school, and you think you know it all! Well, you’re still wet behind the ears. It’s not a subdural hematoma it’s epidural!

–The Man With Two Brains

Steve Martin does not officially endorse my marriage. Officially. And the restraining order says I can’t show up at his house at 4am to ask him to endorse it anymore. I’m sure his advisors aren’t aware that we are really best friends.

It’s Friday, so technically this should be a health post. It’s about health because married couples try to live longer so they can win that final argument, like two old pythons arguing about who is older and has more wrinkles from squeezing Mongolian herdsmen. So, there.

What follows is a mostly true story, except for the exaggerations for the sake of humor or whimsy, I’ll point out when some of the more incredible facts are Really Odd But Amazingly True with the flag (ROBAT). And ROBAT makes me think of a robot bat superhero who texts in ALL CAPS JUST LIKE THIS. But, it’s still amazing because he’s a bat who texts.

Anyhow.

Let’s rewind our clocks back to when Bill Clinton was still indicating that he did not have sex with that woman, and The X-Files® was not starring some wrinkly old people. Cell phones were for the rich and insecure. iMac® was a thing, but iPod© wasn’t and iPhone meant you were talking with someone for whom spelling had little meaning.

I was in the basement of Casa Wilder 2.0 (I’m on 5.0 now) on a stair climber. This particular stair climber was one of my favorite pieces of exercise equipment I’ve ever owned: it used hydraulic pistons that look like shock absorbers for resistance. After about 20 minutes on the climber if a drop of sweat fell off my intensely furrowed brow and hit on of the hydraulic pistons, it would immediately boil off with a sizzling sound and the smell of boiling sweat. And it had cables and rollers that could easily chop off a toddler’s finger. Sadly, they don’t make them anymore.

It might have something to do with all of those nine fingered toddlers.

I was nearly divorced. I’d been separated for over two years, and the paperwork was finally winding its way through the courts for final approval. Why do divorces take so long?

Because good things happen to patient people.

I’d dated several girls, but none of the relationships had gone particularly well. Nothing horrible, mind you, except for the married Internet girl (honestly, it’s like we’re roommates,) and the other married Internet girl (we never even see each other). I stopped the relationships pretty soon after those facts came out.

I had, in fact, said in a prayer one night (in frustration), “Okay, I give up. You figure it out.” I assumed (and assume) that God has a sense of humor. It was a Monday in March, about this time of year.

Recently I’d gotten very, very tired of the same twenty classic rock songs on a seemingly permanent repeat cycle, especially Bob Segar. I can’t listen to any of his music anymore: it was on a rotation of about 2 Bob Segar songs an hour . . . . the same old cliche, is that a woman or a man . . . . No, Bob, if you have such a problem with people making fun of your long hair, cut it.

Sheesh.

The result was I started listening to the post-Nirvana® 1990;s rock on station B which was entirely Segar-Free. It might not have been metal, but it certainly had the virtue of not being Bob Segar. Seriously, you have no idea the depth of my loathing for Bob Segar.

But yet I owe him something . . . .

So, listening to Station B on a Tuesday the day after my cheeky prayer. Every night there was a game show or giveaway. And on Tuesday, the game show was Hollywood Movie Trivia® – the DJ would play a clip from a movie, and you’d have to have to call in first to name the movie. And this one was (for a super-genius like me) ridiculously easy: it’s the movie quote at the top of the post.

The DJ played the clip and then went to a commercial.

I called in. Note that my phone at this point was still corded. Stuck to the wall.

Busy signal.

I hit redial. Busy signal.

I hit redial once more.

Still busy.

The commercial break was almost over, so I gave up and went back to sweating on superheated pistons.

“We still don’t have a winner . . . ”

Redial.

Phone answered . . . “this is Station X. What’s the name of the movie?”

“The Man With Two Brains.”

“We have a winner.” Queue sound effect of ringing bell and applause.

I’d won a CD. White Town, “ Women in Technology. Yeah, it’s not real memorable.

https://youtu.be/_-rbS70uufA?si=MNAOAzswqtRvLu-H

Also, Iâ€™d won a free photo session at Glamour ShotsÂ©.Â Glamour ShotsÂ® was a strange phenomenon in the 1980â€™s and 1990â€™s.Â Essentially you went and the photographer would gussy you up with feather boas, makeup, soft fuzzy light and background.Â Essentially time consuming selfies.

Not pictured: Me. I’d attribute this if I could, but I have no idea of where it came from.

After reveling in my newfound photographic and CD wealth, I started talking to the DJ.Â Seemed kinda cool, we talked for 10 minutes or so. We never would have had the chance to talk for those 10 minutes if the DJ would have had to dump me after the commercials. As it was, the only chance to talk to her and not sound creepy was on that one conversation. (ROBAT – Really Odd But Amazingly True)

The next morning I went to work (city of about a million people) and mentioned to two of them that I thought the DJ was neat. Oh, the DJ was a girl. One of the two friends replied: “I know her, she’s not dating anyone. I’ll set you two up for St. Patrick’s Day.” And she did. (ROBAT)

On St. Patrick’s Day we were to meet at 10 or so. I got to the bar about 9:30. The place was packed, and my friend was spinning mad tunes (is that even a phrase?) and she mentioned that the DJ would be there soon, soon being 10:30 or so. I had some friends there as wingmen, and soon enough I was introduced to the DJ, or, The Mrs. To Be.

I immediately called her by the name she used on the radio.

The Mrs. To Be: “No, it’s really REDACTED.”

John Wilder: “Why don’t you use your real name?”

The Mrs. To Be: “You know . . . stalkers.”

John Wilder: “Oh. (long pause) My friends told me not to bring up stalking on the first date.” (Yes, I really said that.)

We danced. We both realized that neither of us were dancers. We picked out a booth in another room where the music wasn’t so loud.

I got beers for us. We sat down, and the interview started. Yes, I did this (LINK) and interviewed her.

But a really good interviewer (and I was in top form back then) can make an interview seem like a pleasant conversation by a person that’s interested in you. And it was pleasant. And I was interested in her. But I needed to weed out the kinds of crazy that would conflict with my kinds of crazy. And also make sure that the person shared the same core values I did. (ROBAT)

I was pleasantly surprised that The Mrs. To Be was much less neurotic (in the ways that mattered to me) than most of the crazy moonbat girls from my previous relationships. And she wasn’t married.

Yet.

We stayed until they kicked us out of the bar. Why did they kick us out of the bar? Because everyone else had already left and we had been talking for three hours, and it seemed like 15 minutes. (ROBAT)

We walked out of the bar. There had been hundreds of cars there when I’d gotten there I’d been lucky to find a good spot. The Mrs. To Be had showed up nearly an hour later. Yet, there were only two cars left in the lot. And they were parked side by side, with matching dents on the driver-side door. (ROBAT)

Apparently, God does have a sense of humor, and thankfully for me He’s not subtle when He kicks a message out. I walked her to the door, and leaned in for the kiss. (ROBAT)

Which she wasn’t expecting, but, you know, when you’ve got the sign from the Big Coach to run like hell for first base, you run like hell for first base. She kissed me right back. (ROBAT)

139 days later, The Mrs. and I were married in a mall in Bally’s® Casino in Vegas on a Sunday morning. (ROBAT)

Bob Segar, who brought together two people who were utterly tired of his music. Thanks, Bob for bringing us together in mutual hatred! (Image by Adam Freese, CC BY 2.0, Attribution)

DNA Testing, Cousin Lovin’, and Khannnnn!

“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys

I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?

So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.

The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.

How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.

The results are:

Europe West 40%
Great Britain 24%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
Scandinavia 17%

Low Confidence Regions

Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Iberian Peninsula < 1%

None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.

What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.

The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:

Population
South Asian	–
Caucasus	4.89
Southwest Asian	1.56
North Amerindian + Arctic	0.57
Siberian	–
Mediterranean	9.72
East Asian	–
West African	–
Volga-Ural	7.66
South Baltic	13.09
Western European	26.41
North Sea	36.10

Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:

For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!

This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.

But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?

No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).

Huh?

Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.

If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!

Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.

Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).

But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.

And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).

Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.

Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.

“Sit down, John.”

Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.

Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.

I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.

Now I have to go see this.

But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.

Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:

“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?

12 Rules For Life: Return of the Jordan (Final Part of the Review Trilogy), Charles Atlas, The Simpsons . . . and Being a Man, The Definitive Review

“No. Not yet. One thing remains. Vader. You must confront Vader. Then, only then, a Jedi will you be. And confront him you will.” – Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

The Boy in full Vader get up. He looked at me and said, “You are my Father, John Wilder. Can I have more cake?” and then force-choked me when I said no, three pieces was enough. So I cut off his hand. That’s good parenting where I come from . . .

As promised, this is the final part of my book review for Dr. Jordan Peterson’s new bestseller, “12 Rules for Life.” You can find the first part here (LINK) and the second part here (LINK). Quotes, if not otherwise noted, are Peterson from the book. Sorry for the delay – the flu was busy attempting to eat my lungs. I’m better now.

I strongly recommend this book – and get no money if you buy it at this time – in the future, who knows?

Rule 9: Assume That The Person You’re Listening To Knows Something You Don’t

If you listen, most people are really not boring. Okay, some are. But they are mainly parents of children who haven’t graduated from high school and anyone from Iowa. Everybody else is interesting. Dr. Peterson talks about how he sat down with a woman, and within minutes she was telling him she was a witch. And not only that, a witch whose coven regularly got together and prayed for global peace – a world peace witch. By day? She was a minor bureaucrat; I imagined a driver’s license lady. Not who you’d size up to be a witch. Oh, wait. EXACTLY who you’d size up to be a witch.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve interviewed lots and lots of people for my job. I was never bored once. But I had people blurt out amazing things in the interview. “I got fired for stealing.” I was hiring for a position that had lots of financial responsibility, and maybe kinda lax oversight. No job there. “I hated my co-workers.” Yup. Big points for working well with others. Again, people will tell you amazing things if you just shut up and listen. Dates were interesting, too. Had one date where the girl’s plan was to go off and find herself in the Peace Corps after she’d just gotten out of a relationship with her husband who had buried a bus so he could grow illegal weed. Yeah, that night was an early exit.

But few enough actually listen (I’ve been guilty of that myself, lots of times) without responding – i.e., defining the problem for the speaker. Even worse is defining the situation for the speaker – Peterson discussed a woman who was unsure if she had been raped after continually getting drunk and going home with guys. He could have defined it as “yes” or “no” for her but that would have prevented her from sorting it out herself, which was crucial to helping her. He used this example to point out that being too intrusive in a conversation often warps it in a manner that changes the framework for the other person . . . and prevents them from getting better.

Peterson listens, because his theory is that people talk to simulate their reality. Humans are the only critters that do that – simulate entire worlds with our words and model the results of present actions into the future. When we run these simulations, we often simulate the words and behavior of others – I know I have a pretty accurate simulation of The Mrs. running. It’s over 98% accurate. The Mrs. likewise has one of me, too. We have tons of conversations with each other without even speaking to each other, because the other just our simulation.

Honest listening – turning off the simulator – is required for real conversation. Our filters and feedback contaminate the discussion. Once we get to that honest listening stage, we can have Real Conversations – Conversations where we truly hear each other and can create new knowledge, and sometimes solve our own problem.

Rule 10: Be Precise In Your Speech

Dr. Peterson begins with a discussion of the coming obsolescence of laptops. Most of our laptop experience is located outside of the laptop – it’s only a “single leaf, on a tree, in a forest . . .” Our laptops feed from all of the other computers out there – from the Facebook© servers to the wonderful servers that bring you Wilder, Wealthy and Wise and that Japanese cooking site you don’t want your wife to see that you’ve been to visit after she goes to bed so you can dream about sushi. Those exist outside of your laptop – and your laptop only pulls information from them.

But we don’t inhabit that forest. We inhabit a simplification of that world. In our world where we give objects purpose and meaning – we don’t let them simply exist – we give a car purpose – it must take us from one place to another. A light switch ceases to just exist – it gives us light, and in a blackout part of us is shocked (pun intended) when the switch doesn’t bring us light. Peterson feels that precision is required so we down drown in the vast amount of detail that surrounds us.

Our model gums up when violated. I used a light switch – Peterson uses a cheating spouse – inviting Chaos in. Peterson then pops some Yeats in the CD player for good measure:

The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Speech is required to sort this chaos out, to make sense of it, to dispel it. A night light might also be nice to scare the rough beast away?

“Say what you mean so you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say so you can find out what happens.”

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

Skateboarders are pretty talented, and Peterson spends some time discussing their skill, and the methods by which they optimize risks, which is crucial, Peterson felt, to growing as a man. Unfortunately (in Peterson’s opinion) there are adults who what to spoil all the fun by putting in features that make skateboarding impossible while also looking ugly at the same time.

Those adults are then (at least by proximity in the chapter) compared to a friend that Peterson had. Peterson’s friend (also discussed in earlier chapters) had a problem: he hated mankind. He came to no good, making himself a victim at every turn, and learning to hate beautiful, successful people. They seemed to make him even madder. Dr. Peterson then followed up with a description of a TEDx talk by a professor . . . who also hated the human race. These self-appointed judges spoil the fun . . . and the risk.

And the result? Boys are being pushed out. 25% of college degrees granted are in the fields of healthcare, psychology, education, and public administration. 80% of these degrees go to women. Peterson feels that this is Not Good. If projections hold, there will be very few men in non-STEM fields in the next few years. And this is bad for women.

Huh?

How many college-educated women consider, say, a plumber a great catch? Some, to be sure, but not many. When it comes to marriage, women tend to marry someone either at the same social/economic status or of a higher status. As those guys disappear?

Marriage becomes something for the rich. The rest of the girls get hookups in their twenties, and a basket of cats when they hit 33. If they have kids, the results are similarly grim – because single parent families are statistically inferior in every way to dual parent families. So those rich kids? Yeah, life will be better for them. Because they have two parents.

Maybe patriarchy isn’t so bad? Feminism is a creation of Marxism (per Jordan), and between that and post-modernist thought – we’re trying to fundamentally remake civilization in ways that may not be as stable as civilization created over the last 11,000 years or so. And Marxism led to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. And that idea became the most deadly idea of the entire 20^th century – killing more people, primarily their own citizens than any other idea.

Peterson REALLY doesn’t like Post Modernism, either, since it’s a philosophy that says there’s no truth and makes the claim “that logic itself is a merely a part of the oppressive patriarchal system.”

Boys are boys, but society is trying to force them to be girls, per Peterson. Which is really, really wrong. Biology is a huge part of what makes a boy act like a boy, and a girl act like a girl. Then, a large amount of (enjoyable) discussion about ancient gods and Disney© animated movies.

Then we get back to Peterson, talking about when he worked on a railway crew. Peterson uses these (amusing) stories about men and how they want particular behavior from other men: Do your job. Don’t whine. Don’t be a suck up. What to men want and value from other men? “Be tough, entertaining, competent and reliable.”

The above ad is from comic books, literally all comics books, of the 1950’s and 1960’s. I sent away for as similar set of books. You, too can learn Karate for only $19.95. If you can learn karate by yourself from a book. With a poor work ethic.

Peterson (really) feels that the Charles Atlas ad captures a lot of human sexuality in seven panels. Women want tough men. It’s here that he combines The Simpsons and Fifty Shades of Grey in the same hilarious paragraph. Lisa Simpson doesn’t want Milhouse, dude, she wants a kinky billionaire. Or that bad kid from Springfield Elementary. Or a dude that will keep you safe on the beach.

Because women want men. Tough men. And you get men through risk. Through . . . skateboarding.

Rule 12: Pet A Cat When You Encounter One On The Street

Peterson baits and switches here – starting with a discussion on dogs. But he brings back to cats, and also to the theme of the chapter – human suffering. It will literally suck to be a human. People die. People suffer, sometimes horribly and inexplicably. But, somehow, Superman™ needs Kryptonite© – this suffering makes life, well, not interesting, but certainly not fake.

It’s a worthy chapter, and my summary is short because I’m not one to use Peterson’s tough times, and I rarely write about my own. I’ll give you my bullet point summary:

Dogs are Happy
Cats have Terms and Conditions for Love
Enjoy Both Dogs and Cats – They Have Purity of Being
Because Life Sucks

CODA: Not The Led Zeppelin Album

Peterson caps it off – again, buy the book. I’ll just ask you – what do you want for yourself tomorrow? What about next year? Who could you be if you really tried?

So, that’s it. It’s a pretty long review, and I’m glad you stuck it out this far.

Pluses of the book? Amazing philosophical content. Easy read. Original thoughts.

Downside? Chapters could be more evenly edited to tie the content together, and follow the old rule – tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em. There are several chapters that I read a second time after about a week to write this review, and being prepped with the previous read and knowing what to look for, I enjoyed the chapters much more. Maybe this review will act as a guide you can use when you go through it to look for more content that sparks your interest.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Peterson also dictated this book – many of the passages sound like speech turned into text, though I might be wrong since I’ve heard a LOT of Peterson speaking but very little of his written stuff.

Overall verdict: totally recommend it. Best way ever to confront Vader. And then the Ewoks burned my copy – because they stopped making Star Wars® in 1983. Wonder what would have happened if they had made a sequel or two? I’m glad they never did.