132 Enter The Dog Brain: Status, Hierarchy

Please note: This track may include some explicit language. The Dog Brain is the part of our nervous system responsible for how we perceive status, deservedness, dominance, feelings of belongingness, and many primal parts of the human experience. If we can understand the world through the eyes of our inner dog brain, we can better affect our emotional defaults.

Transcript

So there's a common science fiction premise where artificial intelligence is created to better humanity,

To solve society's problems,

To save the world or something like that.

But the AI in their problem solving attempts decide that humans are actually the problem with humans or humanity.

So the robots essentially turn on the humans,

And this is basically the premise of Terminator and The Matrix and a number of Black Mirror episodes.

And the justification that artificial intelligence uses when it gets the chance to speak is that humans are inferior or are wrong because they don't always behave rationally.

They behave selfishly,

They are emotional.

In The Matrix,

There's this monologue by Agent Smith,

Who is one of the programs,

Who speaks on behalf of the AI saying that humans are a virus that needs to be eradicated.

And of course,

This is fiction.

However,

I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately,

And I think a lot of people probably have given the state of the world right now,

The state of technology as we're approaching singularity and the unveiling of the metaverse and whatnot.

Never before in history has this fictional idea been closer to reality.

And whether the authors of this fiction believes it or not,

This does come from a rationalistic worldview that anything that's not rational is wrong or evil or inferior.

And even though this is often analyzed in the science fiction or in the science sci-fi world or technological discussions,

This rationalistic idea or value is present throughout most of our culture and society.

It's an assumption a lot of people have.

Like a lot of people,

When they're emotional,

They'll be apologetic.

Oh,

Sorry,

I was emotional for such and such,

Right?

It's even embedded in our legal system,

Which is something I became aware of recently.

The last week or so,

I've been following the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

If you're not familiar,

A young man is on trial for killing two people,

Injuring one.

Last year in the United States,

There's many riots.

Last summer in Kenosha,

Wisconsin,

There were some riots where property was being destroyed,

Some individuals came out armed to protect businesses.

And this 17-year-old kid,

Kyle Rittenhouse,

Came there with an AR-15 and a medical pack to provide medical care to people.

The intents are in dispute right now.

But what we all know that happened was he ended up in an altercation with some rioters.

He was attacked,

But he also shot three people.

A lot of people I know are following this trial because it has some pretty big political implications in the United States.

A lot of people have very strong opinions,

Either for or against him.

I have my own opinions,

But I'll hold them for right now.

But what I found was interesting was that this is the first time that I have watched a murder trial.

Prior to this,

I had never really watched anything outside of like a few good men or people's court,

Right?

So it's the first time I've watched a real murder trial.

And it was interesting listening to the prosecution and defense in their style of questioning,

Right?

And this is probably true of all legal cases,

But the prosecutors obviously were trying to make an argument that he's a murderer.

The defense is trying to paint him as an innocent guy.

But they both used questions that had the same value,

The same assumption that people should behave rationally and even the assumption that people do behave rationally.

And for instance,

I saw the prosecutor was when he was questioning Kyle directly.

He was going through the moments,

Moment by moment of that evening where he was trying to basically,

He was asking yes or no questions to show that what Kyle said was his intentions,

Which were according to him good intentions that couldn't possibly be based on his moment to moment actions.

Now,

I find myself getting very uncomfortable watching this.

I think regardless of your opinion,

Whether you want him to burn or you think he's just an innocent kid,

I think most people probably,

Unless you're a lawyer,

Probably get a little bit uncomfortable watching this style of questioning because all of us know,

Whether explicitly or inherently,

That human beings are more than just rational beings.

Like we wouldn't be human if we didn't have emotions,

If we didn't have pre-rational perceptions and behaviors.

And certainly in a high tension event like a physical confrontation,

Like a riot,

We kind of revert to these instincts,

These pre-rational behaviors.

And not just in violent situations or dangerous situations,

But any situation where our emotions are aroused,

Even in a positive way.

Like when people fall in love,

People equate falling in love with craziness sometimes because when you're in love,

You tend to abandon your rationality.

When you're maybe attracted to someone or maybe just in a high stimulation environment like a club or speaking in front of people or anything where your emotions get stirred up and activated,

We tend to not behave rationally.

Anyone who has to move beyond theory and actually engage with reality is aware of this.

I was speaking with a client recently who works in finance and we were speaking about emotions in the marketplace.

Finance is not a place where you typically think about something like empathy,

For instance,

Or like that kind of emotionality.

But anyone who actually has to make bets on the future has to be aware of at least how human emotions work.

This is what John Maynard Keynes called animal spirits driving the market.

Financial markets don't follow strict rational supply and demand as we learn in Economics 101.

They're driven by human emotions and these other forces.

If you caught my episode on physiological toughness,

I spoke about John Coates' theory that what causes stock market bubbles and crashes are actually the fluctuating hormones of young male traders who get exuberant when they have a high of dopamine and testosterone and cause crashes when their cortisol levels get high,

Both being irrational.

Human beings have a huge part of our consciousness,

Which I will define as how we perceive reality and therefore engage with it.

A huge part of that is pre-rational.

We can call this our animal nature.

For this reason,

A lot of people will look at species such as chimps or bonobos,

Other primates that are close genetic cousins to us,

To see what human nature is,

Especially in the world of relationship psychology.

There's a lot of referencing to how chimps and bonobos behave.

I would argue that there is a better species to look at to really get a sense of the human animal nature.

That is man's best friend,

Dogs.

Unlike chimps and bonobos,

Dogs have evolved specifically to interact with humans in human environments.

Chimps and bonobos live in environments that are not really relatable to humans,

Whereas dogs for at least 10,

000 years have specifically evolved to live in human environments.

Many thousands of years ago,

Certain wolves started hanging out with groups of humans.

The ones that were friendlier and can make themselves useful to humans got fed more.

Humans started artificially selecting them or breeding them for certain traits,

Physical traits and personality traits.

Flash forward many thousands of years and we have the hundreds or so of dog breeds that exist today.

I'm going to refer to in this episode the human animal nature,

Especially when it comes to our social brain,

How we interact with other members of our species when it comes to things like power and status,

Dominance and submission,

But also things like connection and the sense of belonging,

The sense of attachment,

And even some more human qualities that like something like the sense of deservedness,

Like how much you believe you deserve.

I would say all comes from this inner pre-rational animal nature,

What I'm going to call the dog brain.

And I would argue that if we can learn to see the world through the eyes of a dog,

Then we can get a much better understanding of how our pre-rational perceptions and behaviors work,

Which would allow us to have more conscious control over them and perhaps even change our default tendencies,

What we might call our imprinting.

So if you have tendencies that,

Reactions to things that you don't typically like when it comes to emotions,

Whether maybe you express your anger too much or too little,

Whether you exhibit fear around other people when there's no reason to,

Whether you believe you belong or don't belong or things like that,

These are all dog brain programmings that we're going to discuss in this episode.

And for the sake of illustration,

I'm going to be speaking about my two dogs.

About six months ago,

Nali and I adopted two puppies,

Rumble and Zena.

Rumble's male,

Zena's female.

They're siblings and so therefore they've basically been in the same environment almost all of their lives.

But what is very interesting for me,

Because this is not the first time that I have raised dogs,

But it's the first time I've raised dogs since learning many of the perspectives I have now on human consciousness and psychology.

It's also the first time I've raised dogs in a non-urban environment.

And it's been very interesting observing their personalities because even though they've been in the same environment,

They have very different personalities.

They interact with other dogs and humans very differently and based on their behavior and reactions to things,

You can kind of see that they have very different imprintings and essentially different worldviews.

And specifically when it comes to two core traits that I would attribute to the dog brain,

Which is a sense of trust and perception of status.

Rumble assumes in general that he's generally trusting and assumes he's high status.

Zena is generally distrusting and assumes low status.

Now aside from just speaking about my puppies,

I do think given that they're kind of polar opposite personality types when it comes to social personality types,

Which we'll speak about in this episode,

They do represent kind of extremes in tendencies for people.

Some people are a little bit more like Rumble,

Some people a little bit more like Zena.

There's also two other personality types that we'll talk about and I'll have some dog examples for that too.

But it's good to understand this and we're going to kind of use them as examples of how we can perhaps identify and also modify our dog brain imprints.

Before we jump in,

I have a quick quick overview of the last solo episode of The Dark Night of the Soul.

Well,

First I want to say thank you.

A couple of you guys who listened to the podcast sent me some nice messages about it.

If you did catch that episode,

I was kind of going through this challenging soul searching period when it comes to my work,

Which includes this podcast.

And it really means a lot to me that this makes a difference,

Whether it's listened to by five people or 5,

000 people,

Whatever.

But here's my humble request because if you did catch that,

You know that I deleted my Instagram and YouTube for certain value reasons,

Which means I'm a little bit less.

This podcast is a little bit less findable.

So here's my humble request.

If you enjoy this episode,

If and only if you enjoy this episode and you happen to know someone who might enjoy it too or find it interesting,

It would mean a lot to me if you shared it.

I will say on a personal note,

I mean,

All of this is a personal note,

But some of my friends who I speak with the most,

We kind of have become a lot closer by listening to some of the same podcasts and discussing it.

I think it's great food for thought.

I have many voice note threads going on different podcasts I listen to.

So anyway,

It's just a fun thing you can do and it would mean a lot to me.

So in this episode,

We're going to be working off of Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness.

I did a whole episode on that idea some time ago.

You can look it up if you're interested.

It's titled Prometheus Rising.

It's in the Rondo Podcast archives.

But for this episode,

We'll be focusing on the first two circuits.

But just for an understanding,

The eight circuit consciousness model is based on the idea that our consciousness,

How we perceive reality,

Is based on the structures of our nervous system.

That's how we take reality in.

It's also filtered through those structures and those structures evolved in discrete stages in the evolutionary timeline.

So the analogy I like to use is that the way we perceive reality is like we're taking a photo through a camera.

This camera has multiple lenses stacked on top of each other.

The image that we get,

Which is the perceptions that we have,

Is a composite of how all of these lenses filter reality.

So if there's a smudge on a lens,

It's going to distort the photo.

However these lenses filter is how we perceive things.

Now the later lenses,

The ones that are more advanced,

Obviously they can do more things,

But you can't use them without using the lower lenses too.

However,

The opposite is not true.

At times,

Especially in moments of high arousal,

High emotional arousal,

High stress,

We tend to take off the higher lenses,

Which we can equate with higher order thinking and rationality,

And revert to essentially creating the image or perceiving reality just through our lower lenses.

These archetypal moments where stress or arousal is high is where we typically think of dog brain activation,

Even though the dog brain is kind of around all the time.

We can't really escape those tendencies.

And I'm actually getting the term dog brain from Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman,

Who was on the podcast last year.

He's the author of the books On Combat and On Killing,

Really great books.

And he was speaking about in a combat setting,

He was arguing why everyone should have some sort of training when it comes to firearms is that in high stress situations,

We tend to revert to dog brain instincts.

And this is the cause of a lot of military atrocities.

It wasn't that the people were necessarily evil,

But through improper training or not the right training,

Stress gets high,

The rationality goes out the window,

Dog brain gets activated,

And then people act like dogs,

Which can have negative effects as well,

Certainly.

Mob mentality is another experience of dog brain taking over.

Even something as common as road rage.

If you're in your car and you're yelling at another person in another car,

You're essentially barking the way dogs do.

There's no rational reason why you should yell at someone in another car.

It doesn't actually do anything,

Right?

But it feels right.

It's a natural tendency,

Especially if you have an imprint around that.

So we want to understand how the dog brain works in these two circuits.

The first circuit is in Leary's model known as the bio-survival circuit.

It is defined by a very simple program,

The most fundamental program of all species that can move,

Which is move towards anything that provides nourishment,

Move away from anything that is a threat to survival.

So move towards food,

Move away from danger,

Or open for food and close or contract in response to danger.

In vertebrates,

This corresponds with our,

Or is this governed by our reptilian brain in the central nervous system,

But even invertebrates and species that have no nervous system still have some version of circuit one consciousness.

It's maybe not the right word.

We call it proto-consciousness.

Even an amoeba will move towards something that it can consume and move away from something that will consume it.

This very primal circuit governs a lot of our experiences on a physiological level.

Anything in our body that can contract,

So ring muscles,

Sphincters,

When I'm speaking about grounding on an emotional level,

I often ask people to pay attention to the state of their butthole.

People laugh,

But a lot of people,

I think men especially,

Or at least men have reported this to me more than women,

That they realize that in response to stress,

They tend to clench their butt.

It's kind of just like an unconscious reaction,

Even though it makes no sense.

What are you stopping by clenching your butt?

Also clenching your fists,

Obviously,

Is a reaction to a stress or a threat,

But even something as involuntary as your pupils.

If you are looking at something delicious and you're hungry,

Your pupils will dilate.

Same thing as if you're looking at someone who's very attractive or someone that you find very interesting,

Whereas if you look at someone who you find repulsive or you hate or you fear,

Your pupils will contract.

They open to take more light in,

They contract to take in less of that thing.

Even if you've never thought of this before or consider this,

We have this instinctual awareness that this is true.

It's even shown in cartoons.

In a cartoon,

If they want to show that a character is happy and at peace,

They draw the pupils really big.

If they want to show that a character is afraid or angry,

They make the pupils tiny.

Even if you've never thought about this,

You can recognize this.

You can make eye contact with someone with pupils big or small.

You can feel it.

This is one of the reasons why date spots always have dim lighting because dim lighting also dilates pupils,

Which makes people look more attractive and look more attracted,

Which I guess helps the human mating ritual.

If our Circuit 1 programming was perfect,

It would react with a perfect right amount of contraction for a given stressor.

If there's a predator,

Fire all your muscles to get away.

If there's a bad smell,

Maybe you just close your mouth and scrunch your face to try not to smell that thing.

But imagine you smell a bad smell and your entire body contracts as if there's a predator.

This might seem like a silly example,

But this is essentially how trauma works.

When we say someone is traumatized,

They're essentially contracting due to an old event in response to a present event or in the present.

This can be from physiological trauma.

This can be from emotional trauma.

You see this in relationships a lot,

Maybe not necessarily in a severe way,

But a lot of us,

Most of our unpleasant behavior that we exhibit to our loved ones comes from stressful times in our past and we're still reacting to it in some way.

So when it comes to Circuit 1,

Our Circuit 1s are not blank slates.

Every reaction that we've had in our lives stays with us on some level.

We would call this our imprinting.

Most of us have a tendency towards some version of imprinting or some,

If you imagine a continuum from anxiety,

Contraction,

Perceptions of scarcity to trust and openness and feelings of safety.

Most of us have a tendency to fall somewhere in this continuum.

That's our default state,

Our default level of openness.

Obviously,

What we're experiencing is contextual moment to moment,

But if you've ever noticed in yourself or someone else that they reacted with hostility,

Had a defensive reaction,

Whether it's nothing to be scared of or the flip side can also be true.

If you had a very peaceful upbringing,

The naive country bumpkin goes to the city and doesn't realize he's being conned.

He just defaults imprinting.

His default imprinting has him trust everyone.

There can also be negatives with that.

I spoke a little bit more about Circuit 1 and Circuit 1 imprinting in the episode on abundance,

The abundance model episode,

Where essentially the psychological experience of scarcity versus abundance is a Circuit 1 experience.

The experience of abundance I would define as trusting the future,

Whereas the experience of scarcity is distrusting the future,

Regardless of how much stuff you have or whether it's rational.

This experience is typically based on one's Circuit 1 imprinting.

Circuit 1 imprinting starts around infant stage,

Typically maps to your maternal upbringing,

Whoever nourished you or whether it was a good experience or bad experience.

It continues through our life when it comes to these core survival experiences.

When someone's experiencing anxiety,

Usually it's irrational.

You might be anxious about whatever it is you're anxious about.

Typically,

Even in the moments of anxiety,

You know that the stress isn't actually going to threaten your survival,

Typically.

But that doesn't matter because on this primal level,

This part of you,

The Circuit 1,

Is afraid of death in some way.

For millions of years,

This Circuit 1 programming was enough to keep many species alive and continue to pass on their genes so the species can continue to exist.

At some point in our evolutionary timeline,

Some species evolved a more advanced strategy beyond simply moving towards things that are nourishing and away from things that are dangerous.

That is the strategy of herd security,

Which is basically there is safety in numbers or you can better achieve your survival and replication goals if you hang out with a bunch of members of your species.

So this was very useful for prey animals.

If there is a zebra or a bird flocking together,

Being in a herd decreases the likelihood that a predator will pick you out.

The reasons why zebras have stripes is because it makes it harder for a lion to pick out a single one when the herd is running together.

Also,

It was beneficial to predators.

By working together,

Certain predators like wolves,

Like lions,

Can take down prey that is too big for one individual to do on its own.

So sociality,

The ability to basically cooperate and live and interact in some way with members of your species,

Was very useful.

However,

It required new equipment.

Reptiles don't have a capacity to socialize.

Like when we call someone reptilian or say someone's cold-blooded,

We are implying that they lack empathy or they're not able to have empathy,

Which is true on a literal,

Like a concrete level.

Reptiles don't have the mechanisms to experience empathy.

In the same way that when something can't be explained without context and we say,

Oh,

It's like explaining color to a blind man,

We could also say it's like explaining empathy to a reptile.

Reptiles don't have the structures to even perceive something like socialization,

Essentially.

So the species that have this circuit two,

It corresponds with what's known as the limbic system or paleomammalian complex.

This part of the brain and nervous system allows one to interact with others,

Which means it can now perceive power,

It can now perceive connection and attachment.

And this leads to two basic drives or goals due to circuit one,

Excuse me,

Due to circuit two.

Circuit one simply is move towards things that are good,

Move away from things that are bad.

Circuit two has two drives.

The first is inclusion,

Right?

Like if you're not part of the herd,

You can't benefit from herd security.

The second drive is for status.

Now these two drives for inclusion and for status,

You know,

How much one has of each of these two drives kind of determines their social personality,

Which we'll discuss in a moment,

Right?

There are some people who really have a strong drive for inclusion and a low drive,

Like maybe they don't even care about status.

So such beings,

Whether it's people or dogs or whatever,

Would probably be very agreeable,

Would be quick to do things that kept them as part of a group and wouldn't do anything that would risk it,

Even if it meant being low status.

Whereas there are other individuals who highly value status and are willing to risk exclusion for it,

Right?

These are people who are basically more disagreeable.

They're willing to fight to get their way,

Even if it means people don't like them.

In general,

I mean,

When it comes to mammals and we could say humans as well,

Even though with humans,

Maybe it becomes controversial,

Females tend to care more about inclusion and therefore tend to be more agreeable and males tend to care more about status at the risk of exclusion,

Which leads them to be more disagreeable.

Now there's evolutionary reasons for it,

Which goes down to Bateman's principle,

Which is essentially that the lowest or reproductive success varies more with males because of the adage sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive.

All females tend to reproduce regardless of status.

Whereas if you're a male,

The lowest status ones don't reproduce,

Which means from a genetic perspective,

Not reproducing is the same as death,

Right?

Like the genes don't pass on.

So this is why you typically see in males across mammal species,

Males,

Especially young males tend to engage in risky behavior that sometimes is antisocial and sometimes seems irrational in order to risk being high status,

Which leads to many opportunities.

We do see this consistent in men.

I mean in humans,

Right?

Like teenage boys,

Insurance companies,

Another place where behavior has to be quantified.

Insurance companies charge a lot more for young male drivers.

Why?

Because they're statistically the most likely to engage in risky behavior that gets themselves killed or break or destroys property,

Right?

There is a genetic reason for this.

And actually a fun fact that I only learned recently from Andrew Huberman's podcast is that testosterone correlates with how much one cares about status,

Right?

It doesn't necessarily mean necessarily how much one will fight for status,

But actually Huberman had Dr.

Robert Sapolsky on and Sapolsky gave this example that if you had a dominance hierarchy of five males,

You know,

They're ranked from one to five and you pumped testosterone into number three,

The middle guy,

He wouldn't necessarily become more competitive or challenge the higher ones.

In fact,

He would typically brown nose the higher ones more.

He would show more respect and more deference,

Whereas he would become more aggressive towards the lower ones.

It's basically like whatever his previous behaviors were in terms of status,

He would do more of them.

And this is consistent,

You know,

It's anecdotal,

But most of us can observe like teenage boys who maybe are the most in terms of their behavior,

Testosterone driven,

Not just because they have a bit basically because testosterone is new into their bodies.

So it's probably the least regulated in terms of their testosterone driven behavior.

You know,

Teenage boys get a bad rap for being destructive because they are destructive and maybe being unruly.

And actually,

So a couple of years ago,

I got lice here in Thailand.

I think I got it at jujitsu from someone.

And you know,

The way they get lice out of your head is you have to get to go twice.

I won't get into the details,

But basically they vacuum clean your head and then go through it with a fine tooth comb,

Literally.

And so I ended up,

I guess,

Spending a lot of time with the lice remover guy in Chiang Mai,

Who's this British guy.

And he was talking to me about how,

I forget the exact details,

But he's an older guy and he ended up with custody of his nephews or nephews-in-law or something like that.

Like the parents got sick or so,

I don't remember exactly.

And there's these two teenage boys and they were raising hell and they were giving him so much trouble and he was trying to appease them and speak to them logically and like convince them why they should go to school or maybe reward them with this and that.

And you know,

I didn't say this to the guy.

He was a nice guy,

But like it was very obvious.

You know,

Not that I claim to know anything about parenting necessarily,

But I do know what it's like to be a teenage boy.

And I've spoken to a lot of men.

I do feel strongly in this belief that teenage boys actually respect power and care more of,

And actually more willing to be obedient if in the presence of a more dominant male.

If not in the presence of a more dominant male,

They raise hell.

And I think on some primal instinctive level,

A teenage boy doesn't want to be the alpha,

Right?

Like a young male wants to look up to an older strong male,

But in the absence of a powerful male,

A chief,

A leader,

He raises hell because like he doesn't,

You know,

He's just,

It's like he's actually missing a need.

And this is why street gangs can recruit so easily,

Especially from fatherless homes,

Right?

This is also why,

You know,

Young boys idolize sports heroes,

Same reason,

Right?

You know,

They want to observe,

They want to follow a stronger male.

They want to be part of a dominance hierarchy more than females or older males and whatnot.

And in case anyone maybe disagrees and says,

Oh,

This is cultural programming,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Maybe on some level,

But I can even observe this with my dogs.

So Rumble,

My male dog,

He's essentially an adolescent.

I mean,

He's maybe nine months old and his testicles have recently grown big.

And it's been interesting watching his behavior change because he does enter these dominance games with other dogs now,

Which I'm going to describe as it is relevant to human beings as well.

But one thing that's interesting is that he loves big male dogs,

Right?

Like he's fairly friendly with all dogs,

But like when there's a big,

Like alpha,

Like very secure,

Physically imposing dog,

Physically imposing male,

He gets so excited and he's licking their face,

Which is like a friendly submission act.

Like he's so thrilled to be around a more powerful dog.

It's almost like a seven year old kid,

You know,

Jumping for joy because his favorite basketball player is there or whatever,

Right?

It's interesting to watch.

Now,

Individuals,

Whether they're dogs or people,

Have different ways that they approach this,

These drives for inclusionist status.

And there's a little dog story.

Couple months ago,

Oh,

No,

This is actually just last month.

Lai and I were staying in a town called Pai in Northern Thailand,

Kind of like this hippie town,

A bit rural.

And we were out in the farmlands and every morning I would take the dogs for a walk.

And being in the farm country,

The dogs got to roam free.

You don't see leashes in sight.

There's some street dogs,

But there's also the domesticated dogs,

Like all have their territory.

Like they all behave more animalistically than,

Say,

A city dog would.

And as we would approach different neighbor dogs,

Like they would come out to rush out to meet us to assess if we were a threat to their territory,

Which is something we'll talk about later this episode.

They would go through this dominance game with Rumble and then eventually they would see that they're both friendly.

They would wag their tails and they would actually join our pack.

So after the first couple of times I did this,

Every time we would walk through the area,

All the neighbor dogs would kind of join us one at a time,

Just joining the gang and walking around.

And we'd have this little pack.

This one afternoon I was walking with the Lai and the dogs and three neighbor dogs joined us and we're all walking together as a little pack.

We took this other road home and we got ambushed by this dog we had never seen before,

This huge imposing,

Kind of looked like a Great Dane.

I've been calling him Scooby-Doo for that reason.

He just jumped out of nowhere,

Was snarling,

Was growling,

Was snapping at the neighbor dogs,

Snapping at our dogs.

And this was a big dog.

It was at least 100 pounds.

So I was pushing it like an offensive lineman,

Trying to keep it off of my puppies,

Grabbing it by the collar.

It was a big dog,

So it took a lot of effort.

And this was like nonstop pandemonium for almost two minutes.

And then all of a sudden it just stopped and all the tails were wagging.

And then he actually joined us and then he walked in the front and we all walked together as a unified pack.

We had that herd security.

And,

You know,

Lai and I looked at each other like,

Wow,

That was an intense two minutes,

Right?

Because we were 15 minutes from home.

It would have been,

I don't know if I've been able to fight,

You know,

Wrestle this dog essentially for 15 straight minutes.

But essentially all he was doing was inserting himself into the pack.

But unlike the other neighbor dogs,

He was not willing to be anything but top dog.

So he came in with hostility,

Threatened aggression,

Used aggression against each dog until he got submission so that they saw him as the alpha and then the group could basically be unified and act together as a pack.

Now humans have done this a lot throughout history.

In fact,

If you look at many of the civilization creating kings that are still celebrated by many cultures like Cyrus the Great or Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan and his descendants who say unified India and stuff,

They basically did the same thing on a human small group level.

Like they went around these kings who eventually unified the countries and are considered fathers of nations.

They went around,

Threatened violence on the individual entities,

The smaller tribes or smaller nations,

And maybe they fought them,

Maybe they got submission,

And then they unified them into one group so that they can act together as a more powerful nation and identity.

And it's interesting that these cultures,

These peoples,

I should say,

That got conquered eventually identify with the conqueror and celebrate him as the father of the nation.

You see this in Greece,

You see this in Iran with Cyrus the Great,

You see this anywhere where there's a king who unified the country.

Even though it's done through violence and aggression,

Whether with dogs or with people,

There is a function to it,

There is a benefit in that it unifies disparate groups and then the group becomes more powerful.

Like a lot of our modern nations were started in some way in this form.

And this even occurs in modern day,

Not just in a violent way.

The violent version is less common in the modern era and hopefully it stays that way,

Although you never know with the political climate these days.

This still happens today though on an ideological,

Political basis.

Ideological groups are often absorbing other ones to become bigger and more unified,

Which gives them more power.

In the United States,

Nowadays we have two major parties,

But in 1776 there were many political parties.

Eventually they started merging and being absorbed by others,

And now we have Democrats and Republicans,

Which are such powerful forces that a third party can barely exist.

The dominance hierarchy creates order.

However,

Obviously the hierarchy means that people are not equal,

Dogs are not equal.

And the reason why this is,

Is that this is perhaps the only way that a pre-rational being can unify,

Because dogs can't get together and have a democratic convention where they discuss,

Oh yeah,

How should things – obviously they can't do that,

Right?

But they can get in line.

Birds can have a pecking order.

I raised chickens last year,

Partly because it was a gift,

But partly because as a meat-eater I wanted to know what it was like to raise and slaughter my own food.

I did an episode on that.

It was a very important,

Useful experience.

But honestly,

I should say and honestly,

I don't feel bad about eating chickens after raising them and seeing how they are so aggressive to each other.

They are not nice animals.

The pecking order is really real.

We had this one chicken who was a little smaller.

All the other chickens would basically mess it up all the time,

Pecking its neck.

It was really terrible.

These birds are nasty.

And while it's certainly not nice,

There is a function for it because by having a clear order,

It takes away one infighting,

Right?

Because if they didn't have an order,

When a given resource would become available,

There would be too much ambiguity or there would be inner contention of who should eat first,

Who should get the first mating opportunity.

So having an order takes away the ambiguity,

Removes the requirement for constant infighting over things and there's a clear order of what happens.

I can even see this in my two dogs,

My two dog hierarchy.

Rumble is the alpha,

Xena is the beta.

They both have enough food to eat,

But when I put the first bowl of food down,

Rumble always gets it.

There's a part of me that thinks from a rational perspective like,

Oh,

I should make it fair,

Right?

I should feed Xena first sometimes.

But even if I put the food bowl right in front of Xena,

She will not eat until Rumble eats.

This might not seem fair or nice or equal,

But it does take away the ambiguity between the two of them,

Right?

She gets the second bowl.

We can see that in human organizations where dominance hierarchies are very important,

For instance,

The military is one.

The reason is a very practical reason why this has to be,

Right?

Critics of the military might say,

Oh,

The dominance hierarchy and the rankings is all because only power hungry people join the military.

There might be cases of that,

Of course,

But the practical reason is it takes away ambiguity because if two groups of combatants were in a battle with each other and one had a clear chain of command and the other one was trying to vote on things democratically,

Like should we attack them from the front,

We should be flanked them,

Et cetera,

Obviously the one with a clear chain of command would operate more efficiently as a single unit and would probably win.

Especially in a high stress situation like a battle,

Humans certainly revert down to their dog brain.

Actually,

I remember when I was in Marines OCS,

And just to be clear,

I did not serve,

But I went through Officer Canada's school there.

They would teach us when we pack our pack,

Everyone has to pack their pack exactly the same.

You have to put your batteries in the same pack,

Your ammunition in this pocket.

The reason being that if you become a casualty,

The other people don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out where things go.

Everything could be like,

Okay,

His ammunition is there.

In high stress environments,

We end up reverting to our training.

We have limited ability to make quick decisions.

Just like circuit one has a certain,

We all have imprinting or tendencies around our perceptions of trust versus distrust,

Circuit two also has this.

If we imagine our circuit one imprinting continuum,

You can imagine a horizontal line where on the left side is distrust,

Hostility,

Defensiveness,

Anxiety,

Contraction.

On the right side is trust and assumed safety and friendliness.

You can imagine that one line.

Then you can imagine a vertical axis now for dominance and submission.

The top is dominance,

High status.

The bottom is submission.

Now we can imagine this grid where everyone falls somewhere in terms of their imprinting tendency on these two axes.

Then we also can see now four basic personality types when it comes to the dog brain,

When it comes to how one fits into a group.

There's the friendly dominant,

There's the hostile dominant,

There's the friendly submissive,

And the hostile submissive.

A friendly dominant would be like Rumble.

You can see through his behaviors,

His dog worldview is essentially that he's always safe,

He's always loved,

And he's always deserving.

He's not always the alpha.

He's a relatively smaller dog.

He's about 40 pounds.

He very rarely backs down and assumes that,

I've actually never seen him go belly up with the submission signal,

Which Xena does all the time.

He just assumes that he's high status.

This is probably how most of us would want to be,

Want our dog brain instincts to default to.

We just assume that we're safe and we assume that we're deserving of high status.

Whereas another personality type would be the hostile dominant,

Which is like Scooby-Doo.

So Scooby-Doo was unwilling to be a part of the group unless he was top dog.

He came in,

He acted with aggression.

We can imagine probably,

I'm sure you've met human beings who default to hostile dominance.

Maybe you've had a jerk boss who acted this way.

Maybe you've dated someone who defaulted to hostile dominance.

Maybe you default to hostile dominance and there are times in our lives where hostility is useful and called for.

We're going to speak about proper hostile expression of emotions later this episode.

But it's not the most pleasant person to be around because this person is only happy if they're getting their way.

Next we have friendly submissive.

This would be like the neighbor dogs.

They were kind of happy to follow.

They didn't really care so much about being top dog and they just want to be a part of the pack.

They were very eager as long as they were safe,

They were happy to be a part of the pack and get along with everyone.

This is kind of like,

I'm not going to go into political direction here.

I'm actually saving that for the next episode on the rational circuit.

But the friendly submissive behavior type is kind of what society rewards the most as described in books like Fight Club and whatnot.

This is the most useful to the society.

One could argue that this is what conventional education rewards and whatnot.

At times,

It's kind of like the slave morality type,

The friendly submissive gets along with people.

It's also nice guy syndrome like a guy who defaults to friendly submissive or as I said,

A guy who has nice guy syndrome essentially defaults to really wanting to be liked and willing to give up all his status in order to be liked.

The reason why there's a term nice guy syndrome is that this experience,

While perhaps not useful to women as well,

Typically leads men to having some pretty terrible feelings.

On an instinctual level,

Our primal emotional reward system recognizes that even though we're getting liked,

If we're super low status and abandoning ourselves for it,

It's really bad on a genetic level.

We're not going to pass on our genes.

No one wants to sleep with the nice guy,

Etc.

Finally,

We have hostile submission,

Which as much as I love my other dog,

Zena,

She does fall into this hostile submissive type where you can see by her behavior,

Unfortunately,

Even though she lives in a happy,

Loving home where she gets enough food and love and all that stuff,

She tends to distrust everything.

She barks a little.

I mean,

She barks,

Whereas Rumble pretty rarely barks.

She barks at everybody.

She's threatened by everything.

She's afraid of all dogs.

And unlike Scooby-Doo who will fight to fight other dogs,

Maybe unnecessarily,

Zena is very quick to submit.

She'll bark,

She'll bark,

But if someone invades your territory,

If someone gets in her face,

She'll immediately go into submission.

As we can imagine,

Whether it's a dog or a human,

Someone who defaults to hostile submission probably isn't having as good a time.

Friendly dominance can have its negatives too.

Even Rumble,

He has gotten himself into trouble.

He actually got attacked by a dog this morning because given that he always assumes that he's dominant and safe,

Sometimes he does some foolish things like wandering onto a big dog's territory,

Which is not great.

But Zena's experience,

Her experience of reality is more unfortunate.

And if you're a person who experiences this default assumption that you're not safe and people are out to get you,

Obviously that's not a very pleasant reality to live in.

Because while the dominance hierarchy is useful to the group,

It's great for group survival,

It's also great for the gene pool in that it prioritizes the fittest.

Like if there's limited food to go around,

The top dogs,

The most fit members of the group will eat first and survive,

Whereas the lower ones won't survive.

For the individual,

Unless you're at the top of the hierarchy,

You're not having a good time.

It's not great.

So when it comes to our individual experiences as human beings,

Certainly if we recognize that we're not in a more desirable,

If we don't have desirable tendencies when it comes to our social personality,

We would certainly want to change that.

Because in most social situations,

Most people aren't thinking directly about things like status.

And truthfully,

It is kind of an insecure way of looking at,

Let's say your friends,

To constantly be thinking like,

Am I higher status or lower status or anything?

But on some implicit level,

We all experience this.

And this experience of low status perception on a subconscious level or on a mass collective level can be seen in what we might call a sense of deservedness.

So this is something I actually learned from some of my friends who've been through Al-Anon or ACA,

These 12-step programs for children of alcoholics.

One of my friends was telling me that a trait that children of alcoholics tend to have is that they assume that they don't deserve the good version of things.

He was telling me that a child of an alcoholic,

Typically if they're in a grocery store and there's a cereal they want,

There's two boxes,

One that's intact and one that's damaged,

They'll tend to pick the damaged one and then they'll leave the nice one for someone else.

It's irrational behavior,

But it's a tendency that people who are imprinted in a certain way tend to have.

And again,

You can see this again with dogs in that Xena will never eat the first food.

She always leaves it for rumble,

Which is nice for the peace of our society.

It's not the best for someone in Xena's situation.

So before we speak about changing our personal imprints because recognizing and admitting to flaws in yourself requires some awareness and humility,

We can talk about observing in other people,

Which requires very little awareness and humility.

And actually recently I've had a couple of friends,

They're dating each other.

I'm friends with both.

They've been going through kind of a typical in the macro sense,

In the relational sense issue where they both have their defensive reactions from,

We can call it traumas,

Past relationship traumas being mistreated by past partners or maybe in their family.

I don't know their entire histories.

And they're kind of going back and forth reacting defensively to the last person's defensive reaction.

And this is like this negative feedback loop where from the outside it's clear like they're both just like punishing each other for the last thing is going back and forth and actually escalating and not a good way.

Whereas like they could flip it around.

And I've actually told both of them the best thing they can do is not react defensively to the other person's defense,

Which is hard when someone feels like they're mistreated.

It's kind of like your typical relationship issue.

We could almost say that all relationship issues come down to something like this,

Particularly when it comes to two people who otherwise love each other.

Because what I've told both of my friends is that the only way,

Because currently they're both complaining about the other person's meanness.

Like I'll say this relationship principle and be like,

Yeah,

You should tell that to my partner.

They're not doing such and such.

But what I've been telling each of them is that the only way to move through this,

To get someone essentially out of their negative dog brain tendency.

I don't use this language when I speak to my friends,

But this is the idea.

For one,

Recognizing that they have this defensive tendency,

A person has a defensive tendency or an assumption of hostility that they're not safe because at some point maybe they weren't safe.

They had this experience maybe when they were young or an early relationship with their parents or whatever.

They gave them this need,

This necessity to have a defensive reaction,

Which is now unpleasant to you.

If that could happen,

If that could be imprinted into them,

The opposite can also be true.

It can be a little bit more difficult when you're trying to teach an old dog new tricks.

But when someone's acting out essentially,

If you give them positive feedback,

If you let them know that they are essentially loved and safe,

Maybe they won't do the first reaction.

They might do the second reaction,

But at least this is my relationship belief or my relationship strategy that I offer anyone is that you might as well try doing everything you can to respond to their venom with love.

You do this enough times,

They recognize,

Hey,

I'm actually safe.

I don't need this defensive reaction.

They can let their guard down and then you can enter a positive feedback loop.

Is that going to happen in every relationship?

Maybe not.

Maybe some people's traumas are so deep that they're always going to respond with hostility even despite your best efforts or it would require so many years of responding with love for them to get on track.

But if you're in a relationship,

I always think it's worth it to try because you're already there.

And if this seems like a little bit too mushy,

We can also quantify this because it's actually been proven in game theory,

In the game theory world.

I'm a game theory nerd.

Through the game Prisoner's Dilemma,

Prisoner's Dilemma is a simple game.

I won't go through the details but essentially,

It's a two-player game where each person has a decision to either cooperate or defect.

So mutual cooperation leads to the best outcome.

But if you cooperate and the other person defects,

You get the sucker's payoff.

You get screwed over.

So most people in say relationships will defect,

Will try to defend themselves to make sure that they don't get the sucker's payoff.

However,

When both people defect,

They both are essentially punishing each other.

So some game theory nerds who are even more nerdy about game theory than me,

Mathematicians I should say,

That there have been game theory,

Excuse me,

Prisoner's Dilemma strategy competitions where they would compute different strategies to see what allows one to get the highest value in terms of points.

Because obviously,

If you're cooperating all the time,

You're going to get screwed over a lot.

If you're defecting all the time,

You're being hostile all the time,

You might not get screwed over but you'll never get that big payoff of mutual cooperation.

So for a while in the game theory world,

The belief was that the best strategy is what's known as tit for tat.

Like whatever you,

It's essentially the golden rule in reverse.

Whatever you do to me,

I'll do to you.

If you cooperate with me,

I'll cooperate with you.

But if you screw me over,

Next time I'm going to screw you over.

The problem with tit for tat is that it can only go in one direction.

It's great when both people are cooperating.

But if someone messes up,

If someone feels fear and defects,

Then the other person is going to react with defecting and they're always going to go back and forth being hostile.

In game theory,

In notation,

It stays static with a lower payoff.

But in real life,

In relationships,

But also in warfare,

In most physical altercations or invasions of states,

This escalation to hostility usually happens because of this.

This negative feedback loop of tit for tat.

But it's usually two tit for tat.

People usually escalate by acting a little more aggressively than what's done to them.

So we get this negative feedback loop where things basically escalate into huge harm off of what maybe was a misunderstanding.

So the game theorists found that the best strategy was something known as tit for tat with forgiveness,

Which means if you cooperate with me,

I'll cooperate with you.

But if you're mean to me,

I'm going to be mean to you.

However,

After a couple turns,

I will forgive you and go back to being cooperating with the hope that you'll cooperate with me.

It's been shown through many simulations that the highest value strategy in Prisoner's Dilemma is this tit for tat with forgiveness,

Which means in a relationship,

And maybe this is a little bit harder on the foreign policy level,

But certainly within a two-person intimate relationship,

If you can do your best to not have a defensive reaction and respond with love to the unpleasant behavior,

There's at least a chance that you can re-imprint the other person to recognize that they're safe.

This doesn't always work,

But it's worth a try.

The same principle applies in re-imprinting yourself.

So actually,

We tend to have more control over ourselves than anyone else,

Certainly,

So it does require a little bit more attention.

So actually,

I have an example.

Personally,

I started this new business with Kudra,

The Adaptogen thing.

I've been kind of fumbling around.

This is new for me.

I have an acquaintance who has been in a similar business for a really long time.

I was reaching out to him basically with an offer to work together,

Which just because he's established and I'm not in this industry,

Really benefits me and it's not that big deal to him.

So I noticed that in messaging him,

I've known him for a while socially,

But in this context I started to feel pretty inferior.

I started to feel insecure.

And then I was actually getting into this negative spiral within myself where I was feeling ashamed of feeling insecure because I have this podcast where I talk about security among other things.

And here I was getting nervous about texting a guy.

It reminded me of when I was younger and insecure with women and I would think too long about what to text a woman and I was like,

Man,

This became a spiral.

Thankfully,

I caught myself in the spiral and I recognized,

Okay,

This is irrational.

But the funny thing was while I was in this kind of inferior feeling state,

I could not think of a normal,

Secure way to text him,

This kind of simple sentence.

Every set of words that came to mind were kind of needy beta sentences.

I could recognize that it was the wrong thing to text,

But I could not for the life of me think of what is the normal way to communicate between two men.

It was not in my head.

Thankfully,

I've advised guys on what to do in a dating situation where there's guides online for how to message women on Tinder or text game or whatever and I'm generally against those things because even if you use a proven joke or flirty message that someone else deemed was correct,

If it's not coming from you,

Eventually you're going to be found out.

Eventually,

The real feelings,

The neediness will bleed into the communication and it's not going to be sustainable.

What I recommend to guys when they're essentially feeling needy,

Which is another version of feeling inferior,

Which is basically always irrational in human situations,

Is to address the feeling first.

So I did a very simple essentially releasing technique where I recognized in my body,

Okay,

I can't think my way out of this needy beta feeling,

But I can feel it.

And I noticed in my body that I felt a very clear knot in my body,

In my solar plexus area that kind of felt like this mild nausea.

And I noticed that I was trying to get away from the feeling.

I was trying to think about other things.

I was trying to go up into my head and think,

Let me just text this guy and get it over with.

But this essentially contracted beta feeling was leading to contracted beta thoughts.

So I very simply paid attention to this feeling.

I did my best to engage with it,

Put all my attention on this feeling.

And after less than a minute,

It kind of released,

It kind of relaxed.

And then the obvious words to message this guy just popped in my head.

It was like this very simple,

Essentially a releasing body scan technique to let go of this thing.

And it made me,

One,

All of a sudden not feel inferior and then be able to communicate like a normal person.

There's many other versions of this type of somatic awareness thing,

But essentially it's what we would call self-soothing.

In the same way that you can give your relationship partner feedback that they're safe,

You can do this for yourself.

In fact,

You have a little bit more agency when it comes to yourself in allowing yourself to feel safe to interrupt maybe old conditioning telling you that you're not safe and that you're inferior to people.

So I have a little more on status now too because if you look up,

Men tend to be more interested in this for the reasons I described.

There's a lot said online about status and how to demonstrate power through power poses and there's various checklists of how to come off as a dominant male or a dominant person.

So again,

Just like the texting thing,

I think if you're thinking about all those things all the time,

One,

You're putting yourself in your head and two,

Only a low status person thinks that much about it.

Like,

You know,

Just thinking about a checklist and whatnot.

But in the same way,

As is the thesis of this entire episode,

If we can understand how dogs,

How our dog brain perceives status,

We can get a little bit better control over this perception of status as well.

So Timothy Leary actually calls circuit two the emotional territorial circuit.

It's responsible for more nuanced emotions,

But it's also tied to territory.

Animals and especially circuit two animals like mammals and birds to some degree care a lot about territory.

And from a human perspective,

Sometimes it doesn't make sense,

Right?

Like when I walk around with my dogs,

If we cross some land that has a dog,

The dog always comes out to charge or if it's a little bit afraid of my bark.

Like the dog every time confronts anybody who enters his property.

Now part of this might be that many dogs have been bred to protect their human property.

But the other part of this is that the way that the dog brain maps reality is through space.

I mean,

The circuit two consciousness is known as space binding consciousness.

According to Alfred Korzybski,

Who I'm going to,

His ideas in terms of reality perception,

I'm going to share it probably in the next episode.

But he calls animals space binders.

Animals map reality to physical space.

So territory really matters to a dog or animals like dogs because if another dog were to encroach on his territory and was hostile,

Right?

He did not do not to defer,

Did not accept,

Okay,

I know this is your territory,

But tried to take it.

That other dog's reality would literally become smaller,

Right?

In the sense that,

You know,

Obviously the dog knows there's a world beyond his territory,

But its ability to move freely,

The ability to have autonomy and,

You know,

Access the resources,

The food that's in the area where it is safe has now become smaller.

And for a dog who,

You know,

Doesn't think beyond this,

This is everything,

Right?

This matters more than anything,

Right?

To lose territory is to make your literal world smaller.

I actually saw this recently with,

Actually in Chiang Mai,

My neighbors have a cat,

A very cool cat named Sparky.

And another person moved into the neighborhood with another kind of alpha cat.

Sparky,

For a long time,

Was the alpha cat in the neighborhood.

He's an outdoor cat.

He would roam around everywhere.

You'd see him all over the place.

But his other cat moved into the neighborhood,

Another male,

And immediately for almost a week every single day,

Sparky and this new cat would fight.

And,

You know,

And it was like I couldn't see it,

But we all could hear it.

Like these cats were going at it like all day.

And finally,

Sparky,

Unfortunately,

Lost.

And afterwards,

You know,

One,

He became very depressed.

He probably experienced the loser effect where his testosterone dropped and his cortisol spiked.

But ever since,

Sparky no longer roams beyond like his territory,

His area where he roams became way smaller,

Right?

Essentially,

The other cat had taken away most of his world.

Like Sparky,

Because he respects the Domino's hierarchy and perhaps knows he can't beat the other cat,

Just doesn't leave the smaller area now.

And this is why it matters from such an animal's perspective.

Actually,

A funny example with humans.

A couple of years ago,

I worked on a film.

Actually,

If you look me up on IMDb,

I have exactly one acting credit,

One screenwriter credit,

One assistant director credit.

It's all from the same film.

I was working with this great guy.

You know,

It was a small crew.

He's a little older than us.

We all kind of looked at him as a big brother and he was the director so that,

You know,

Obviously,

He should be the dominant person in that small group.

But he and I would meet every morning for a while to work on the script together.

And we always had breakfast together.

And he had this funny idiosyncrasy where—and I don't think he did this intentionally.

I think it was just like maybe just like a random thing he did—was that throughout our meal,

He would constantly fiddle with the stuff on the table,

Like the salt and pepper shaker,

His napkin,

His plate.

And every time,

Like in small movements,

He would push things away from him and towards me.

So whereas when the food came,

You know,

We'd both be taking out maybe half the table,

By the end of the meal,

His stuff would be taking up like more than three-fourths of the table and my plate would be up on the edge.

And you know,

I didn't really notice it in the beginning.

I actually only noticed it later on and I never got to ask him if he did it intentionally.

But I don't think he did.

I think he actually grew up in a war zone.

I think he was naturally just a dominant guy because he was on a personality level.

And this was just like an unconscious natural tick or tendency he had to keep taking up more and more and more space.

I don't think it was hostile.

In fact,

In that setting,

I was happy to defer to him.

But this is just funny that space and power has such a great—has such a direct relationship.

Another human dog brain example,

I remember when I was young,

I read the autobiography of a Crip named Monster Cody,

A gang member.

And he wrote an autobiography of his time on the streets.

And I remember this one line or this—where he was describing his day-to-day life when he was a gang banger,

Where every day all he lived for was to wake up,

Drive around with his set members and kill enemies and defend their turf.

And this was like incompetent.

And then he was defending some block radius.

That's what he lived for,

In his words.

And I always thought that was really interesting in that he joined a gang,

Not for reasons of money necessarily.

His day-to-day life is defending his territory for this gang.

But because he joined the gang,

He has to do it.

It's kind of like this circular thing of why does he care?

Why did he choose to be in that reality where he does that?

And you can have your judgments of this and that.

But this is essentially his dog brain.

He certainly was experiencing some level of fulfillment and purpose from it,

Because essentially he was doing what dogs do when they prowl their territory,

Which is defend it from enemies.

And on some primal level,

He was getting satisfaction from it.

Now most of us,

Unless you're in a war zone or something,

Don't have this direct experience where we're defending our territory or our land so that we have freedom of movement.

But people follow the same exact principles when it comes to intellectual arguments.

I mean,

You can see this online when people fight about ideology.

I mean,

You can see this in our language when we speak about defending a point.

People will say,

This is the hill I will die on when they say that they're going to defend the point no matter what,

An idea no matter what.

And in the same exact way that a dog will have to confront someone over their territory,

Because a loss of territory means a loss of reality,

People,

Even though it's not rational,

This is kind of a dog brain application of the rationality circuit where people will essentially treat their ideas as if someone proves them wrong,

Their reality is becoming smaller.

I mean,

In some ways it is.

And well,

Actually in next episode,

I'll speak about the ideological side of one's perceived reality.

But people treat their reality the same way as if it's territory that they have to fight for in order for them to continue to exist.

This is why people get so fired up,

Obviously,

About religion and politics.

Religion nowadays is something that is not exactly common that people argue about anymore.

We see this in politics.

You even see this in things like nutrition or parenting.

I often bring up the paleo versus vegan arguments because sometimes you're like,

Man,

Why are these people getting so heated about food?

It's not that big a deal.

But to someone who is subscribing to a certain ideology,

That is their territory that they have to fight for.

Because if they didn't defend their space,

They would have some sort of emotional consequence.

So the dog brain in us determines status essentially through a game of chicken.

Like who is willing to take up more space at the risk of fighting?

And this kind of dominance play between dogs,

It's been very interesting because as Rumbel has gone through puberty and grown testicles,

I've seen him engage in this behavior more and more with other dogs.

Essentially and I never noticed this before,

Actually.

My last dog was neutered pretty young,

So he never really engaged in this at all.

But when Rumbel comes across another dog,

Especially if it's a male,

And especially if they're close enough in size,

If the other dog is huge or tiny,

This doesn't necessarily happen.

It's obvious who's the dominant one.

But when it's not clear who's the dominant one,

What the two dogs will do is that they'll put their noses in each other's face.

They'll sniff each other and it looks very cute at first.

What inevitably happens is that one of the dogs will turn their head away.

One of the dogs won't be willing to essentially like a game of chicken where they're both like seeing who's going to turn away first.

Whichever dog turns away,

That's essentially submission.

And this actually happened recently where we were at a dog park area,

Kind of like this family area where there's a children's playground and a lot of people bring their dogs and whatnot.

And for the first time,

Rumbel really won one of these dominance games.

It was against a male dog that was neutered.

So he's playing with performance enhancing drugs.

But Rumbel got his nose into the face of a slightly bigger dog.

This dog,

Surprisingly,

Turned his head away really quickly.

And then Rumbel took this as a cue of,

Oh,

I'm the dominant one.

And he proceeded to hump the crap out of this dog.

Thankfully,

The owner of this dog thought it was funny and didn't get upset.

But actually,

While this was happening,

I thought this was just a funny juxtaposition,

There was this children's playground right there as well.

And I was eating a sandwich or something like that.

So I was watching on one end,

My dog was humping this other dog.

And in the children's playground,

There was a bunch of little kids.

And something similar was happening between two kids.

Not humping,

But there was a kid who was obviously hostile dominance.

And then there was another kid who was maybe more friendly submissive.

And they were in this essentially the same thing of determining status where the hostile dominant one was hoarding all the toys and taking them away from the friendly submissive kid.

And of course,

This created,

In the same way that I felt a little bit awkward that my dog was humping this other person's dog,

It was obviously a little more awkward for the people with the human children.

I did feel bad for the father of the mean kid because obviously no one was getting hurt.

The parents of the submissive kid probably wanted him to share and they were muttering things like,

Oh yeah,

That kid's mean,

Don't worry about him.

But I felt bad for the father of the mean,

The hostile kid,

Because he obviously wasn't sure what to do.

And I don't know exactly what should be done in such a situation where he didn't want to seem like he was condoning of the hostile behavior,

But he didn't know what to do.

So he was kind of yelling at his three-year-old son and punishing him,

Which made it a little more uncomfortable for all of us because even though the kid was a little bit mean,

He's three.

He didn't really care that much.

It wasn't that big a deal.

But the father didn't really know what to do because he wanted to demonstrate that he wasn't a mean dad.

And one could maybe postulate that the father's aggression led to the kid's aggression.

It won't necessarily go there.

To the dog brain,

Status is determined by the willingness to take up space,

Which means a willingness to risk exclusion.

There's a transgressive quality by taking space.

That's just the way it is.

Rumble was taking space from the other dog.

The kid was taking space from the other kid.

And actually on the same afternoon,

The alpha of this area was actually a street dog,

Which funny enough,

His name was Covid.

This is a really mean dog.

I don't think he even belongs to anyone,

But he kind of just controls the area and the cafes in the area feed him.

And he's generally okay with people,

But he's really mean to dogs.

He's known for biting dogs and stuff.

And we had been to this part of town many times,

And every time Covid would basically assault our two dogs,

Who were initially quite small puppies.

But on this afternoon,

After Rumble humped Yoda,

Covid came over,

But he obviously had witnessed this.

And for the first time,

He didn't try to invade the space of Rumble.

He actually respected Rumble because he saw Rumble dominate another animal and actually was now willing to share space with Rumble.

Now,

While all of this status seeking behavior in dogs and often in people can seem aggressive and it is transgressive and there is like a necessity of hostility on this level,

With human beings,

We can equate this with simply being willing to express your real emotions.

And Gaber Mate has this great talk.

It's on YouTube where he actually speaks about some of the negative health effects of being a submissive personality or being a people pleaser.

And actually,

He told all of these stories about people who essentially live for other people and suppress their own emotions.

And in his words,

It actually caused cancer in these people.

He was saying like,

This is the selfless people pleaser is actually making themselves sick and depressing their nervous system.

Whereas the healthy thing is to express your emotions.

And he actually says in that talk that the purpose of one of the emotions that people often suppress,

Which is anger,

The purpose of anger specifically is to take up space,

Is to like get people out of your space.

If someone invades your space,

You react with anger,

You push them away verbally or physically.

And actually,

Interestingly,

The word for anger in Chinese is yang chi,

Which is a combination of the word yang as in yin and yang,

Like masculine,

Penetrative,

Forceful,

And chi,

Which is,

As we understand the West,

Like energy.

Although my Chinese speaking friends have told me that this is a mistranslation,

Chi actually means stuff,

But we'll get into that.

Essentially,

The word for anger in Chinese is male energy or outward yang energy.

Now the thing is,

And this is something I think we can learn from dogs because while this looks like very aggressive and some part of us might be like,

Oh,

Couldn't there be a better way to determine status or prove that you're not to be walked on and whatnot or interact with other people.

The thing with dogs though is that their aggressive behavior,

Whether they're growling,

They're snarling,

Even if fighting,

Even fighting if it comes down to it,

It never lasts forever.

Dogs don't show grudges.

In fact,

And I learned this from a dog trainer,

They growl,

They show displeasure when they don't like what you're doing and they wag their tail and show pleasure when you're doing what they want.

It can flip in a second,

Just like Scooby-Doo flipped his switch once he got the submission from everyone.

You can see this with any dogs,

They growl and then they go back to wagging their tails immediately.

It is humans because of our rational consciousness,

Actually what we could blame our rationality on that we hold on to grudges.

We allow feuds to go on for generations and escalate and escalate,

Whereas dogs are simply happy once you start doing what they want.

Dogs are very quick to return to homeostasis.

They respond to a threat and they go back to normalcy,

Which is,

If you caught the episode of physiological toughness,

Essentially what defines a person as physiologically tough.

Your body reacts aggressively against a threat and then quickly goes back to homeostasis,

Whereas a physiologically weak person doesn't react enough.

We can say emotionally,

The emotional equivalent of this is like suppressing your emotions and not expressing it in real time so they linger.

This causes a stress reaction because your stress response is lasting much longer than the event.

This is essentially what trauma is,

Where a person with chronic anxiety is still reacting to things that are not there because they're basically on some primal level fearing their survival.

One exception to this with dogs,

Because dogs actually,

Even when it comes down to fighting or real shows of aggression,

They almost never kill each other unless they're trained to be fighting dogs or something.

Two dogs will typically determine their status and then they just go back to peace,

Even if one is more fearful than the other.

The only time this is not so true is when dogs get into packs.

When they're physically in a pack,

They develop what we would call with humans is mob mentality.

The reason why dogs don't typically kill each other one on one is that even if a dog has a huge advantage over another dog,

Fighting is dangerous.

One on one fighting is dangerous.

Even if you win,

You're likely to get hurt.

Instinctively,

The dog brain has a break in it.

Once the threat is gone,

It'll go back to peace.

This is not the case when it comes to packs of dogs.

If you've ever seen a pack of wild dogs,

Which I've seen quite a bit here in Asia,

Especially at night,

They can be very aggressive.

Dogs that during the day,

I'd be happy to pet,

If I see them at night snarling in a pack,

That same dog,

I would stay clear of because in a pack,

Just like people entering mob mentality,

In numbers,

They feel way more safe.

They're way more willing to engage in fighting because with that herd security,

There's a less likely chance they'll be physically harmed.

This happens also on the ideological level.

If you look at where people get super violent and dehumanizing the other and so righteous and aggressive and willing to fight,

Essentially,

This rarely happens one-on-one.

This happens when people band together with others and essentially a part of their dog brain is now activated,

Where they're now feeling extra bold and extra aggressive.

This is something I think as we give in the political climate of the world,

And maybe this has been true during all eras,

It's good to recognize that you and I and all of us have a dog brain and a lot of our emotions are tied to these environmental cues.

So if you find yourself being aggressively angry at the other side,

Maybe consider that this is some vestigial dog brain programming that is not that useful and not actually what we might call objective reality.

There's no reason to go up in arms over something.

Not to go back to the Rittenhouse trial,

But if you do take a peek at some of the things that people say on both sides with the amount of emotional vigor that they say,

And I'm guilty of this too,

I have my opinion about what may happen,

It's very easy to be roused to unnecessary feelings of violence.

Because bringing it back to an individual level,

The most secure default personality,

The most high status,

Friendly,

Dominant personality doesn't spend its time trying to attack.

This perhaps is my last dog story.

So right when we first got the dogs,

This was back in June or something,

They were fairly tiny puppies.

Nalaiah and I went to a resort.

Actually if you did catch my Orpheus episode that weekend,

I proposed to her.

She said yes.

And we went to this resort with our two puppies and we didn't know this,

But there were like 12 dogs that lived on and around the resort.

And right when we got out of the car,

This big boxer looking dog,

Pit bull-ish,

Was super aggressive and mean and charged at my puppies.

Similar thing with the Scooby-Doo.

We asked,

Oh shit,

Am I going to have to defend our dogs nonstop?

Are we going to have to keep them inside the hotel room all the time?

And we were carrying them and it was annoying because this dog was so up in their face.

But then out of nowhere,

This other dog appeared,

Kind of looked like Balto,

If you remember that cartoon,

Popped out of nowhere,

Charged at this mean pit bull-ish dog,

Knocked it over and then left.

He basically was just slapping the mean dog into shape and then he went to go do his thing.

Because we realized,

This is one of my first dog lessons since getting dogs,

Is that the actual alpha,

Like the real secure default alpha,

The true friendly,

True dominant,

Doesn't waste time trying to prove it,

Essentially.

I've been calling him Balto.

This true alpha dog has his attention outwards in other things,

Defending the territory,

Mating with his mating opportunities,

Which I assume he has because it's the alpha.

He only turns his attention inward to deal with threats on the inside,

Like when his subjects,

When his betas are acting out of line,

He comes in and polices them and he goes back to doing his thing.

Because actually,

We were there for four days.

The only time we ever saw this alpha dog was when he was coming into police the mean betas.

Whereas betas,

They don't have anything to do.

If you're not the alpha dog,

You're not getting so many mating opportunities,

You don't have the responsibility of defending the territory.

So what do they do with their time?

They attack downwards to ensure,

Okay,

I might not be the top,

But everyone should know that I'm higher than the rest of you.

Actually,

This is consistent with what Robert Sapolsky shared about how a high testosterone,

Not alpha male,

Will become aggressive to the lower ones.

Even John Coates in his book,

Speaking about his experience on Wall Street,

He would say how he noticed when there was bad market news or when the higher ups were chastising the middle managers,

The middle managers would become super aggressive to the lower ones.

And he was equating this to chimpanzees,

Actually.

When a chimpanzee is dominated by a more alpha chimpanzee,

His next reaction will be to dominate a smaller chimpanzee,

Like a female or a smaller male.

This is kind of just like how a beta soothes himself by passing on the hostility.

And to bring this to the human level,

This is kind of like essentially someone taking out their traumas on other people or taking out their insecurities or hostilities on other people because they're too afraid to confront the person or the source of their actual stress.

Where is the highest response,

Whether you're dealing with another,

A relationship partner,

People in general,

Or especially with yourself,

Is to respond again with positive feedback,

With safety,

With love.

And actually,

I said the last one was my last dog story.

This is my last dog story because throughout this whole episode,

I've been speaking about my two dogs and basically with the understanding that most of us would rather be like Rumble,

Friendly,

Dominant,

And less like Xena,

Hostile.

And as a dog owner,

One of my sources of stress specifically with Xena is that because she feels so much fear all the time,

She barks a lot.

I mean,

Maybe not so much as like,

I mean,

Some dogs really bark a lot,

But she barks much more than Rumble.

She barks in unnecessary amounts.

She just behaves hostilely to people,

Unfortunately.

And initially,

I tried to dominate that behavior out of her the way that our dog trainer explained,

Just smack her on the head or yell at her just so she knows that that's not okay behavior.

Don't bark.

And I tried that for a while.

But the problem with that is that I was basically trying to dominate her on a circuit two level for behavior that exists on circuit one.

It was a little bit more primal.

So she knows that I hate when she barks.

When she barks and I say her name,

Her tail goes between her legs because she knows I don't like that.

But she still can't help barking because her feelings of fear and her hostility imprinting is even more primal than her submission to me as like her pack leader.

So I tried smacking her for a while.

Not only do I not like smacking her,

But I do honestly get angry sometimes when she's barking when she's actually safe.

So we've been trying this other approach recently,

Which is instead of yelling at her when she's barking,

I just say like I just do like use my nice dog parent voice.

I'm not going to do it now.

It's embarrassing.

But like,

You know,

I just like I talk to her like everything's great.

Right.

I basically am trying to give her a lot of feedback in the moment that she is safe and that she is loved and she has no reason to feel threatening.

And I've only been doing this for a little bit,

But already we've noticed her barking has reduced greatly.

And this is the final final dog lesson is that,

You know,

It's really important and good to understand the competitive side of the dog brain and status and dominance and hostility and all these things.

I think it's useful to understand,

Understand people you interact with,

Understand people you're close with,

Understand the groups you're a part of,

Understand yourself.

But ultimately,

Your role in engaging with dog brains is to guide it into a more healthy imprinting,

Again,

Whether with other people or within yourself.

And the most effective thing is not ruled by force,

But it's essentially giving that person positive imprinting,

Which essentially is the kind of cliche,

Mushy thing of responding with love instead of pressure or love instead of hate,

Essentially.

And that is the most effective strategy when it comes to re-imprinting yourself because on the highest level,

Basically all unpleasant behaviors in humans and in dogs comes from fear or something unpleasant happening.

And if you can maintain that perspective,

You can have a little bit more sympathy for anyone that causes your own hostility reaction.

Because ultimately,

While the dog brain is an incredibly important to understand,

It is only one part of human consciousness.

It's not a part we can delete in any attempt to suppress.

Our instincts always backfires.

But you as a conscious human,

Us humans,

Can guide our inner dog brain.

You can be basically a good dog trainer to yourself in understanding your inner dog,

Empathizing with it,

And guiding it towards better reactions.

Thank you for listening.

If you've enjoyed this episode,

Please share it with someone who may enjoy it as well.

Next episode,

Probably what will be the next episode,

Is on circuit three consciousness,

Which is the rationality circuit,

Where I'll be speaking about Alfred Korzybski,

Who is the originator of the often quoted phrase,

Language creates reality.

Stay tuned.

Recepti The truth ain't black and white,

Even acting right,

Right?

There's still a little gray,

I'm coming from Brooklyn Straight to your headphones,

I'm in your.

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