The Re-engineered You

Numbers make us numb. But how big does a death count have to get before our eyes glaze over? What’s the optimum number of victims to make us care?

After a year of Covid lockdowns the news media hasn’t gotten tired of running pandemic stories. Probably because, according to Deadline, television watching has spiked during peak quarantine months. Yet our ability to feel compassion for one another, and to focus on relief bills, seems to have remained discerning bordering on stagnant. So on this episode of The Re-Engineered You we want to look into Compassion Fatigue. A well-documented phenomenon wherein numbness sets in as the death toll or victim count rises. We explore how many victims it takes before we check out, mentally. How other creatures besides humans feel compassion. And how exactly does compassion for one’s fellow man die - at the personal level, corporate level, and political level.

We’ll also discuss a critical moment in history when a depressed alcoholic butcher of a battle general sat down at the peace table, and did something nobody expected. He showed compassion, in a way that made his opposition want to believe in the possibility of peace, and in a united America.

History Links:

https://www.nps.gov/apco/the-meeting.htm

https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/commentary/how-gen-grant-helped-the-south-fight-a-silent-enemy/article_98d1bef8-38e8-11e8-968f-7b3528deba8e.html

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/10-fascinating-facts-about-robert-e-lee-and-ulysses-s-grant

https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-2017/ron-chernow-interview.html

https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Poverty_and_Poor_Relief_During_the_Civil_War

https://www.history.com/news/ulysses-s-grant-president-accomplishments-scandals-15th-amendment

Science Links:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/denying-the-grave/202011/covid-19-and-compassion-fatigue

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-minds-brains-cannot-make-sense-coronavirus-enormous-death-toll

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-10-mn-9038-story.html

https://www.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=the-truth-about-animal-grief

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201711/why-people-sometimes-care-more-about-dogs-humans

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201401/feeling-deprived-can-lead-some-illogical-behavior

How much free will do we really have? Can we choose not to be angry at the news? To not eat or drink? Can we “choose” how we feel about our boss? Or our spouse?

In this episode we’ll dive into the murky waters of free will—or the lack thereof—through the lens of popular culture, primatology, and psychology. Inspired by the haunting character of Rust Cohle from True Detective, we’ll try to answer whether or not human beings are simply “programmed” by our environments, genetics, and hormones (much like Rust suggests) or whether we have free will in a more biblical sense.

We also discuss the now-famous Sapolsky lectures about free will, and discuss the role of epigenetics, social conditioning, and evolutionary psychology in shaping our “choices.” Along the way, we’ll dissect fascinating studies on willpower and decision-making, from prison release boards deciding inmates' fates based on blood sugar levels, to how holding a warm coffee can influence your opinion of a stranger. Then we delve into how hormones like progesterone may subtly dictate mate preferences—perhaps explaining why some prefer “bad boys” while others go for the artistry David Bowie types.

The episode culminates with the big question: Are we “free agents” in our own lives? Or are we more like tourists in a theme park, picking which roller coaster we want to ride, but ultimately limited to what’s available within the park itself?

Links:

The Stanford Sapolsky Lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D&ab_channel=Stanford

Other Links:

https://www.vulture.com/2014/02/philosopher-assesses-true-detective-characters-rust-cohle-marty-hart.html

https://news.yale.edu/2008/10/23/hot-coffee-we-see-warm-heart-yale-researchers-find

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-break

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26180187

Is it love we’re feeling, or is it lust? What’s the difference, chemically? More importantly, how long can love really last, and how do we keep it going into old age?

20 years ago a group of hikers in East China discovered a mysterious set of stone steps leading up into the mountains. They followed it, not knowing if they would find the ruins of an ancient civilization or a forgotten temple. Instead, they discovered an elderly couple who ran away from civilization together, and a love story so profound it was given China’s title of “Greatest Love Story of the Year.”

On this episode we’ll cover everything from Marriage Rates in the US to Dating Apps, hormones to evolution, and everything from “I do” to “joint taxes”. All so we can answer the big question: Is love worth it? And if so, how can we tell when we’re in love? We’ll also share a few of our own anecdotes about falling into and out of love - with people, pets, and family. Then we’ll ask Professor Google if it’s statistically better to make our own choices about who we love...or leave it to arranged marriages?

History Links:

https://www.weirdasianews.com/2007/12/15/man-carves-wife-a-6000-stair-path-in-mountain/

http://www.china.org.cn/travel/2012-11/06/content_27019583.htm

http://english.sina.com/china/2012/1104/523029.html

https://www.alamy.com/file-chinese-man-liu-guojiang-and-his-wife-xu-chaoqing-walk-downstairs-along-the-love-ladder-he-built-for-her-on-a-mountain-in-gaotan-village-yuan-image263851509.html

https://www.trip.com/travel-guide/chongqing/ladder-of-love-18231657/

Science Links:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-adults-especially-men-having-sex-less-frequently

https://www.today.com/tmrw/dating-during-coronavirus-how-pandemic-has-affected-dating-t186385

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/#:~:text=Testosterone%20and%20estrogen%20drive%20lust,oxytocin%20and%20vasopressin%20mediate%20attachment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/science/dogs-love-evolution.html

https://medium.com/illumination/is-it-love-9ab82633930e

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-high-price-of-being-single-in-america/267043/?single_page=true

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-love/201208/arranged-vs-love-based-marriages-in-the-us-how-different-are-they

How do we push ourselves to start hustling? Vision boards? Goals? Motivational videos every morning? Well, we have some stats...

The world of motivational speaking seems to agree: goal-setting is king when it comes to getting your hustle on. But on today’s episode we’ll explore precisely what types of goals produce the best results, and how those goals, vision boards, and bucket lists, should fit into your life realistically. We also discuss a surprising type of habit-setting behavior called Keystone Habits. And we break down the research on why Keystone Habits (broad quality-of-life habits like working out and meditation) work better than goals. And how something as simple as jogging or meditation can start a domino effect of positive behaviors. All according to science.

As our example of someone who really got his hustle on, we’ll talk about the quirky story of William Coltharp - a banker without a bank. Who, in 1916, decided if he couldn’t buy the bank materials he needed locally, he would have the bank shipped to him by parcel post and laboriously assemble the pieces. Brick by brick. Like the world’s most frustrating IKEA purchase.

What does the perfect corporate team look like? Is it all introverts? All Extroverts? Is it a team full of all-stars? Google found the answer...and it’s surprising.

Google has licked a lot of interesting problems within its corporate structure. By turning its vast analytics network (not to mention a lot of capital and resources) onto its human resources problems, Google has found solutions to the optimum time for maternity leave, th perfect number of new hiree interviews, the best employee perks, and whether meddlesome middle managers are actually helpful. You name it - anything within the corporate structure, Google has developed a model for it. Except for one thing: how to build the perfect corporate team.

To discover both the best team composition, and the best structure for a corporate meeting, Google had to dig deep and develop new methods within its People Operations division - AKA Google’s human resources. After all, maybe it does take a rocket scientist to answer the question; do we get straight down to business in the boardroom, or do we engage in pre-meeting small-talk?

During the episode Todd and Joe will also share their own boardroom horror stories. Compare best and worst team-building exercises. And discuss why high-fives and ass-slaps make NBA teams score more points, according to science.

When is the prime of our life? Is it when we’re our healthiest? Our strongest? Our best-looking? Is it when we’re financially secure?

The Bee Gees showed up late to the disco scene, but they made it their own - practically branding themselves onto disco by staying #1 on Billboard for four weeks straight. That should have proven to the world that the Bee Gees were geniuses who were just hitting their prime. Instead, it convinced all of America to rise up and reject disco, chasing the Bee Gees back to Britain with T-Shirts that said “Shoot the Bee Gees”

Today on the Re-Engineered You, we want to be able to recognize when our prime is. So we don’t end up like the Bee Gees - lost and confused after the ship has gone down under our feet. So we’re looking at statistics to tell us when all of our various primes might hit us in our life. When is our health prime? Our sports prime? When will we hit the prime of our career? Our finances? Or what about our creative prime? When should we expect to put out our magnum opus symphony, or our award-winning novel.
History:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rattlesnakes_(1955_band)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAJfOcnYYEQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97lgR41qZC8

https://www.ft.com/content/f9a09975-03b1-44c2-9673-b772ecf6ff4f

https://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-the-bee-gees-went-from-no-1-to-national-pariahs/

https://www.startribune.com/bee-gees-fever-barry-gibb-explains-why-he-s-gone-country-but-won-t-watch-the-acclaimed-documentary/600008366/

Science:

https://time.com/63500/brain-aging-at-24/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094215

https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2016/fitness-aging-physical-decline-cs.html#:~:text=New%20study%20says%20decline%20begins%20in%20our%2050s&text=By%20the%20time%20you%20reach,according%20to%20a%20new%20study.

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/10/23/majority-of-americans-say-parents-are-doing-too-much-for-their-young-adult-children/#:~:text=A%20new%20Pew%20Research%20Center%20analysis%20of%20Census%20Bureau%20data,largely%20stable%20in%20recent%20decades.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2019/04/18/how-young-adults-feel-about-financial-independence-from-their-parents/?sh=17ebb65862b0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/23/when-you-will-most-likely-hit-your-creative-peak-according-to-science/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160

Food companies, advertising, and the medical system are conspiring to make you fat. So is taking Ozempic cheating? Or is it merely evening the odds?

For decades the show South Park has preached personal responsibility in all matters, and shamed and mocked the characters who reject that responsibility - so much so that the creators have been accused of hiding libertarian messages in their art. However, perhaps for the first time, South Park ended a recent culture episode with a more Jesus take the wheel kind of attitude. During their episode about Ozempic, The End of Obesity, show creators demonstrate that between food cartels selling us addictive food, and a crooked medical system trying to keep us unhealthy, the only way to win the game might be to cheat. Which brings us to our question for today…is taking Ozempic a moral failing? A vanity? A miracle cure that can free us of our dependence on addictive foods?

In this conversation, Joe and Todd also talk about their personal experiences with Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs. We discuss how it’s being sold to the public (whether they need it or not), who Ozempic was originally intended for, and who should be shamed for injecting themselves for purposes of vanity, rather than health. We’ll also discuss why state medical coverage of Ozempic is being revoked for low-income Americans, creating a system where unhealthy patients who need the drug to improve their health are being cut off, whereas wealthy patients who want it to cut a few pounds for swimsuit season are “prescription shopping” and going out of pocket.

Or, as the creators of South Park put it; wealthy people get Ozempic, poor people get Body Positivity.

Links:

https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-174491/ozempic-subcutaneous/details

https://www.paramountplus.com/movies/video/Cd3Fse6Xve3v7e69nMKZmNchXwEHGvll/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_The_End_of_Obesity

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/16/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-medicaid-coverage-glp-1

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/-weight-loss-drugs-wegovy-zepbound-out-of-reach-rcna142763

We talk a lot about mega-success stories like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, but what about winners who measure success without using money as their yardstick?

There are a few fundamental rules to being a success in America. You should make more money than your father did. You simply must set goals to be a success. And you should end your career at an upward arc. But what if, statistically, very few of us are likely to do these things? How then are we to assess our successes, our happiness, if we never make more money than our parents? Or, if envisioning our goals can be counter-productive, how do we track our aspirations?

Today we’ll talk about how goal-setting and goal-visualizing can actually hamstring our desires. And we’ll explore the career trajectory of music icon Dan Fogelberg, whose mark on America was a bit more subtle than our usual episode subjects. However, we would be hard pressed to find a better model for someone who found their own measure of success in life, or who lived up to it so spectacularly, than Dan Fogelberg.

History Links:

https://www.danfogelberg.com/paul-zollo

https://variety.com/2007/music/markets-festivals/singer-dan-fogelberg-dies-at-56-1117977824/

https://fromthehistoryroom.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/leader-of-the-band-lawrence-fogelberg/

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/06/arts/dan-fogelberg-s-time-has-arrived.html

Science Links:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/08/07/youll-probably-make-less-than-your-parents/?sh=47a6df5e4b1e

https://medium.com/@chadbockius/life-lessons-on-goals-9cdbc76f1d27#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20Harvard%20study,bother%20to%20write%20them%20down.&text=If%20I%20bother%20to%20set,more%20successful%20than%20those%20without.

https://hbr.org/2015/02/increase-the-odds-of-achieving-your-goals-by-setting-them-with-your-spouse

https://buffer.com/resources/how-our-brains-stop-us-achieving-our-goals-and-how-to-fight-back/

https://time.com/5373095/self-esteem-highest-study/

https://www.businessinsider.com/winning-powerball-lottery-happiness-2017-8#:~:text=A%20classic%201978%20study%20on,a%202.96%20out%20of%205.

Most genres are drifting away from their storytelling roots. So who do we blame for convincing our artists to make poppy, empty-calorie music?

The top-rated hits on Spotify aren’t new artists or breakout albums anymore. In fact, less than 5% of Spotofy’s Top 200 are new music. Instead, the Top 200 are mostly old bands, like The Police and Creedence Clearwater Revival. This isn’t a case of all new artists sucking, either. It’s a flaw in the pay structure for online musicians. The current pay scale goes something like this; established names get the biggest piece of the streaming pie, and new creators making radio-worthy music get to live off Top Ramen and Kool Aid packets.

Today’s episode is Part 2 in our series about the death of storytelling and writing in rap, as well as other musical genres. In the last episode we talked about “punching in” and the technology that led most rappers to stop writing altogether, choosing to freestyle their lyrics over tedious note-taking. Today we’ll talk about why Dua Lipa is using this same method, and how generic-sounding knockoff artists use punching in to produce twenty cash-grab songs in the time it takes Dua Lipa to produce one mega-hit.

Finally, we’ll talk about the CEO of Spotify, and why his pay structure in particular has encouraged this model of quantity over quality. We’ll also talk about his response to countries like France, who are changing laws to guarantee equitable artist pay. Spoiler: the CEO who’s worth $5 Billion because he under-paid new artists…isn’t a fan of equitable payment structures. His response to starving artists who are quitting the industry early? Work harder, dummies.

Links:

https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/the-official-top-100-biggest-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time__18789/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSgl95BEmd0&ab_channel=TheNewYorkTimes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoBCZYQBWdQ&ab_channel=VanityFair

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/when-do-we-stop-finding-new-music

https://songexploder.net/dua-lipa https://www.newsweek.com/hip-hop-decline-music-billboard-1896490

https://www.theregreview.org/2024/05/30/stern-the-inequalities-of-digital-music-streaming/

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/08/should-streaming-services-change-how-artists-are-paid/

Is there any way to prove, with data, that rap is straying from its storytelling roots? What about Country music? Or Rock? Are all music genres leaving storytelling behind?

In 2018 Kendrick Lamar became the first rapper in history to win a Pulitzer prize for writing, putting him on the same level as novelists like Harper Lee and Cormac McCarthy. His album DAMN was poetry and metaphor in motion, set to music. But even after proving how crucial storytelling is to rap, more rappers than ever are using a freestyling technique called “punching in” which is showing up to the studio and making up lyrics off the top of their heads.

Today’s question is: if the Kendrick method of storytelling results in Pulitzer-level lyrics, and punching in results in meaningless phrases strung together in loose themes…then why is punching in winning the rap game? And why are more and more rappers abandoning pen and paper altogether?

In this episode we’ll talk about the seismic shift occurring in music. A shift which started in rap, but quickly carried over into all musical genres. If you’ve ever suspected that new music is worse than the stuff you used to hear on the radio…you may be right. And it has less to do with getting older and hating on younger music, and a lot more to do with how we pay musicians and artists, and what kind of art we incentivise with our clicks.

Links:

https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/the-official-top-100-biggest-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time__18789/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSgl95BEmd0&ab_channel=TheNewYorkTimes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoBCZYQBWdQ&ab_channel=VanityFair

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/when-do-we-stop-finding-new-music

https://songexploder.net/dua-lipa https://www.newsweek.com/hip-hop-decline-music-billboard-1896490

https://www.theregreview.org/2024/05/30/stern-the-inequalities-of-digital-music-streaming/

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/08/should-streaming-services-change-how-artists-are-paid/

https://hypebeast.com/2020/7/spotify-ceo-tells-musicians-to-work-harder-record-more-stop-complaining