Your Personality Is Genetic. Here’s What That Actually Means for Your Life.
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 7 I grew up watching my grandmother pull out her astrology books every time me or my sisters mentioned someone we were interested in. She had charts, tables, the whole setup. By the time she finished reading the their sign, she had usually already […]
Why Men and Women Are Psychologically Different: What Evolutionary Psychology Actually Says
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 6 In 2005, the president of Harvard lost his job for saying something Dr. Lisle describes as scientifically, utterly, completely non-controversial. Lawrence Summers stood at a conference on gender diversity in science and engineering and suggested that behavioral differences between men and women might […]
Why Liberals and Conservatives Can’t Agree: The Stone Age Village Explanation
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 5 Every election cycle, I watch friends, family, and coworkers turn on each other over politics. Smart people who agree on almost everything else suddenly can’t stand one another. I brought this to Dr. Lisle years ago because I genuinely thought I could argue […]
The “Last Man on Earth” Trap: Why Women Stay With Men Who Aren’t Right For Them
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 4 If you are four or five months into a relationship and something feels off, but you can’t bring yourself to leave, you are not broken. You are running a Stone Age algorithm that is doing exactly what it was designed to do, in […]
The High Cost of High Expectations: Why Praise Is Quietly Killing Your Motivation
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 3 I grew up watching the same movies most of us did. The hero gets the speech. You can be anything. Just believe in yourself and work hard enough. Even as a kid, I remember thinking something about the pitch felt off. I was […]
Why Positive Affirmations Fail: The Evolutionary Psychology of Real Self-Esteem
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 2 I grew up in the era of “you can be anything you want to be.” Gold stars for everyone. Stand in the mirror and tell yourself you are worthy. If you had low self-esteem, the fix was more praise and more affirmations. When […]
What Is the Goal of Life? Why Dr. Doug Lisle Says It’s Not Happiness
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 1 Ten years ago, I picked up a book called The Pleasure Trap, and it rearranged how I thought about almost everything. The book made a claim that sounded obvious on the surface but turned out to be radical underneath it: pleasure and happiness […]
Why You Can’t Just Stop Being Annoyed: Dr. Lisle on Habit Irritation, Anger, and Problem Solving
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 380 If you’ve ever found yourself increasingly irritated by someone’s habits, even habits that don’t really hurt anything, you’re not imagining the frustration. And no, you probably can’t just “decide” to stop being annoyed. Dr. Lisle explains why, and what you can actually do […]
Why Do People Have Affairs? What Dr. Doug Lisle Actually Says
By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast One of our listeners recently sent in a question that I think a lot of people quietly wonder about but rarely say out loud. She had been happily married for over 15 years, had no evidence her husband had ever been unfaithful, and yet she […]