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Episode 100: Special Episode Getting Personal with Dr Doug Lisle
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today we've decided to do a little bit of a different format and we're going to just take a little bit personal because a lot of our listeners really want to know it wasn't get to know dr. Doug Lyall and so I've got some questions here that we can just pick your brain on and and we'll see how this all goes so okay okay I did well we're gonna we're going to start a little soft here and just yes ask a couple of different personal questions like yeah something like you know do you do you do you follow movies what kind of movies do you enjoy dr. Lisle boy that's it that's a just a big broad question and I I would say probably I'm not big into any old dark sort of tragic movies with meaning that isn't my deal I love adventure movies romances things of that nature so we're just trying to think of some of my favorites would be things like I don't know Raiders of the Lost Ark was a favorite and I Casablanca jaws I don't know I was always a big Star Trek fan so you know things I also rub Steven Spielberg stuff Jurassic Park and and some other adventure things like that so yeah not real deep on my end Titanic I thought Titanic was magnificent Oh what did you like about it it was a it was a great romance it was a it was a it was a terrific story of of a young woman in a dilemma over essentially quote the theoretical right choice which is this rich rich handsome young man who has a bad personality and a another young man that's you know of humble origins but is clearly has great genes and a wonderful personality and and how much she's determined to what she's willing to sacrifice in order to be with the right guy it was a it was just a beautiful story I thought it was just great Wow are there any other romance romantic romantic films that you are big fan of I thought Casablanca was phenomenal and I think I've talked about Casablanca before I think that the I think the writing was so good in writing writing the dynamics between the three characters that I think it was actually above the writers heads I don't even think the writers knew how it is that they came up with something that was actually so elegant and so believable and so I consider I consider that that love triangle and the how that was played out to be to be the deepest thing I've ever seen and just just brilliant stuff I loved it fantastic Wow I've never actually seen Casablanca so I might actually have to watch it comes ahead all right well I won't say any more I was gonna say trying to analyze it when you watch it you just you let the art flow over you speaking of that that's a phrase from The Big Chill that I also thought was just outstanding but that's another one of my great favorites are you a Star Wars fan at all I start I like Star Wars that that Star Wars was a lot of fun yes I liked it I liked it a lot again great adventure just just fun fun good clean stuff good guys bad guys imagination and heroic heroic behavior all all just great also was a big fan of Clint Eastwood there was a also a quiet movie that very few people probably know about was a movie called hard times done with Charles Bronson and his wife Jill Ireland and James Coburn was just magnificent in that movie set of characters interacting over you know sort of a ancient Hollywood theme of the loan the loan great warrior the mysterious lone great warrior and that the hard times was Charles Bronson really it is best Wow well speak speaking of characters mingling together if you could wave a magic wand and basically have dinner with anybody past or present real or mythical who would it be and what kind of what kind of questions would you ask them wow that is a great question it would have to be Aristotle the I would just want to be to be asking him questions and watching him think and it just it would be it would be hugely entertaining to listen to his analysis of how he thinks the world has put together and it'd be interesting to watch his mistakes and watch where they're taking place and then correct them a little bit and say well actually here's what the evidence was two thousand years later so it doesn't quite work the way you thought now based on that now what do you think and just nobody like him as far as that goes just a deep just one of the one of the greatest deep minds in history so I would it would be an unbelievable pleasure to be to have a few hours with that guy um Darwin I would certainly be fascinated to to just listen to Darwin and and tell him tell me a story if I did get him to tell me the truth as to what he was thinking all those years when he wasn't published in The Origin I think that Robert Wright was correct in the most acute analysis that's probably ever been done of Darwin is that Darwin spent 20 years not researching the theory of evolution he actually was qualifying himself scientifically I believe by by becoming a world's leading authority in biology without an academic appointment in order to would be ready for when he did publish the origin which he planet plan to do after his death that his theory would be taken very seriously so that it would be very interesting to talk to him there'd be there's all kinds of fantastic characters throughout history but but those two those two certainly stand out to me I would obviously everybody would love to talk to I'm Stein but I wouldn't understand anything Einstein was talking about so he would the only thing that I would understand what I'd say I'd be talking about would be the violin that he played and he could play a few tunes for me but honestly nothing else would make any sense he had the other time guys I think I could follow him and I think it would be great fun hmm and so on that same topic of I'll in and I guess music is there any type of music that you prefer to listen to over others boy I think my I think my taste in music like most people it fits our personalities and so I'm introverted so most of the music that I like to listen to is our ballad like romantic type music and not real loud noisy I'm not I'm not a total recluse and completely without rhythm so I occasionally like it spiced up more but but mostly mostly melodic melodic friendly warm romantic music that's more my speed James Taylor Carole King the obviously we have 75% the audience after those people are nineteen sixties and seventies I have a little bit of room in me for some rock and roll but mostly what I'm going to be listening to is going to be is going to be a sweet melody and you find building and a little pieces to of all kinds of things but there are none of its two cacophonous so so I will go in streaks where I end to listen to the same music over and over and over and over again even the same song maybe for a month and and then that's about all I will listen to for a month in other words you're not talking to somebody that's very open to experience so I will do that and then I will switch to something else and listen to that for a month so for the last month I've been listening to a song by maroon 5 I think it's called sunny morning the very beautiful song and I've been listening to that for about 3-4 weeks oh yeah I will one of these days I'll switch back to Chicago which I can usually listen to for a month James Taylor and then I might go to now go I'll spend a week or two with the Tijuana brass which is just an extraordinary happy sound just a wonderful sound and once in a long while or take out the Beatles and I'll tell you for for sheer desire to get up and dance that that's wholesome there's just nothing like the early Beatles so that's there's other stuff too I like but that's a that's a smattering and do you sing along you do karaoke haha rarely the price if I sing along is to Sinatra so Sinatra has certain things he sings that are in my range and and then I then I can pretend that I'm on stage and I'm really freaking cool ah this is yes or no if you sing in the shower if we were going to ask you I know no I don't I don't sing in the shower no that's uh yeah that would be classless I'm only going to sing in the car if I sang in the shower my cats would probably upset they'd wonder what all the screeching was about yeah those the cat in the intro well so you mentioned your your you're an introvert can you tell us about some some introverted some funny stories about you being introvert in society just not I mean a lot of society wants every one of the extroverts so have any fun are some stories about being an introvert well I can't even think of such stories I mean I'm just I'm just naturally that way so that's always how that goes the I will tell a story of a whole bunch of introverts that that highlighted how out of it we all were this was at the the one the one party of her held at dr. Alan Goldhamer house on a newt on New Year's Eve this was probably about the year 2000 so it just so happened that I had for a very short period of time very short period of time I had a cool chick that I was dating did for about four weeks and and so dr. Groll hammers wife dr. Goldammer is an introvert is wife's an introvert his wife got some friends they're all introverts and so I just want you to imagine and of course this is the cleanest living people that ever walked so there's course going to be no alcohol at the New Year's Eve and there's going to be healthy food with no salt no sugar no oil so you can just imagine how thrilled and excited everybody was there to be there the guests were not necessarily healthy livers but if it's in Alan Goldhamer house there is going to be no salt no sugar no oil even on New Year's Eve so so it's New Year's Eve and it's about 8 o'clock 8 or 9 o'clock and so these guests arrive and there's about probably 10 couples and every single one of them was introverted they're all friends balanced wife Alan didn't know anybody because he's too introverted and all he the only person he knew there was me the so come along about a quarter to 9:00 or so dr. John McDougall and his wife Mary show up who mcdougal and his wife are not so introverted they are medium people in that range and they are pretty cool and John marries Pleasant and relatively a little bit shy but John is not so John is easily holding court and he's not interested in talking into the shy people he's talking to me and I actually have this date with me who is a cool outgoing a guy by the name of her Linda so in her Linda knew all about healthy living so she's interacting with John and joking with them meanwhile I want everybody in the picture that around the room there's ten couples and nobody's talking it's deathly quiet there is no music on there's some healthy food no alcohol and Alan is sitting there sort of watching McDougal interact and Alan's course perfectly comfortable interrupting and putting in his two cents so this goes on for about half an hour and MacDougal John McDougall and Mary mcdougal could see that this is a dead as a doornail party so they're going to leave and my date looks at me like listen I don't know what you're doing haha I got a better party to go to so I'm out of here so my date leaves I'm essentially not invited to the cool party wherever that is and Alan looks at the situation and says why don't we do something productive so start the boat dr. Alan Goldhamer is one of the most productive human beings that ever walked so about an hour of this that his wife's New Year's party is enough and we retire to his office where we work diligently till midnight on plans for the new year that was the great New Year's party at dr. goldmember's place and that's only one of about five parties I've ever been to but but that was certainly a highlight of my life and that was that I did not stay and force myself to converse with any of the other introverts at that party it was truly dead all right what a great story so so all of question is let's say you're stranded on desert deserted tropical island while you're in introverts you obviously won't be that lonely but what are some times that you can see yourself bringing see myself bringing yeah what three things would you bring with you if you got stranded on a deserted tropical island now assume that there's a tropical island so there's enough food for you to survive there aren't any dangerous predators that are going to near you oh man three things that I would bring I guess I I guess yeah robotics female is out I guess that's out I guess we're not I just gently say that on the air can wait all right thing would think what else that we could have boy see so we would look at we've got enough food we're going to be looking for three things that we're going to be bringing obviously the in principle what you would want to bring which you would would you want to bring something that could provide novelty and stimulation for your mind for as long as you could live and so if you could bring you know a Kindle it was loaded with a ton of a ton of stuff kind of ability to to read things that that's what you would that's what I would bring one me I'm trying to think what else I would bring that would be important that it would be information to keep my mind a lot obviously were you would always be scheming how to get off of there but assuming that it was hopeless that there was no way to do it but you could survive that's what I would that's what I would want the most is I would just want a way to to challenge and learn and continue to grow the obviously music would be a nice thing but that that would seem frivolous so I'm I'm not sure what else I'd have to think about it and so when you say sliver frivolous what are you well fast to me yeah I'm trying to think about I mean the I I think about the moods of happiness as being caused by by certain essentially the your mind is like a jukebox it's it has existing or sort of like piano that that has existing capacities and we're certain input essentially like if a piano player is playing the piano certain notes are going to be hit and there's going to be emotional reactions as a result of those and your mind is similar so your mind is has the capacity for a certain range of emotional reactions and there are infinite permutations of a limited number of human values that can give rise to those feelings and so music can hit you know can literally is one set of stimuli that can hit the tickle the circuits of human beings and it it's nice but if I had to choose between for example reading a superbly crafted novel and listening to music the music would be delicious but I would rather read the novel and so if I was stranded on a desert island and I there's only a limited things that I could bring I would want to bring you know the Library of Congress yeah you know in a Kindle so that I could could spend the rest of my days there reading the great thinking and great imagination in people fascinating fascinating so you've talked a great deal about high conscientiousness essentially people who overestimate the worst-case scenario yeah what do you think about people who overestimate the best-case-scenario that's really good I don't think about that much the that's very interesting the the I that that's actually tricky that's an upside down way of looking at something that I have had rarely thought about the usually people you could you could look at it from a slightly different angle and that would be people who underestimate the worst-case scenario and those people are flakes okay so those are irresponsible people but you're describing something which is that essentially people that that overestimate I think you said the best-case scenario they essentially overestimate the likelihood of good things happening these are inherent optimists and what's interesting about such individuals is that they are going to be much more adventurous and they're going to persevere at a lot of things that they believe should that should be able to be achievable even though statistically based on the objective analysis of evidence they should not be spending as much time and energy on as they do these individuals are responsible for a great deal of human achievement more than their share of human achievements because they essentially are investing in high-risk behaviors and by investing at all they sometimes wind up with spectacular payoffs so the way to think about this would be that - if you were to thinking looking at a list of stocks that you were thinking that one out of a hundred of these stocks would be a phenomenal winner but really it's more like one in a thousand but because you think it's one in a hundred you go ahead and you know you put out a lot of chips as many as you can get put on on these hundred stocks thinking that one in 100 of these is going to get a spectacular payoff maybe a thousand to one payoff but the truth is it's one of the thousand we'll have a thousand and one payoff so overall the path will be nothing nothing decent at all but because you believe that it's 1 in 100 you put your chips on these hundreds and it turns out if you if you happen to be lucky you wind up with a spectacular payoff that is the life history of the optimist so more optimist wind up broke and wasting resources than pessimists well however once in a while an optimist will be phenomenally successful because they will be investing time and energy in places where nobody with any brains would do it and that's the history of human race is that people that would would invest in very low percentage payoffs occasionally spectacularly scoring have been responsible for pushing back the boundaries of human ignorance because smarter people were not willing to put put forth the effort to explore places where these people will would do so they're fun they're interesting but when I when I hear someone that is very optimistic and they've got some big ideas I put my hand over my wallet okay so in the pleasure trap and then various different articles and lectures that I've heard you speak at you talked about several people their life stories their life experiences in the modern world specifically people like Elvis Ray Kroc and founder of McDonald's and John Woodman yeah also credit people like John to be leda cosmides Richard Dawkins David buss and Jeffrey Miller just to name a few or for having such a major influence on your thinking and your ideas so if you can tell us what is it about these people that inspires and influences you about these people uh I think I'd have to look at each of them differently yeah so I admire great many people and in my actually the people that I admire have who those people have been have sort of changed over my life even even in terms of genre so when I was a young person the the people that I probably quietly most admired were the really really smart mathematicians that's because I could sense that they were better than I you know better than I am at that craft of which I'm quite good and so I recognize sort of how rare great mathematical abilities were and so it was a little intimidating and I was in in all of such individuals from time to time the I I didn't being a little bit of the nourish sort I didn't I didn't have a lot of appreciation for artists and I just really didn't think much of it art seemed frivolous to me and I didn't really I came from a household and from a genetic tree that is very practical in origin and my dad was essentially a mathematician and the my mother was a schoolteacher and so they were they were not folks with much with much right brain action and it would take a long time and I would have to run into people particularly a very very good friend eventually in my 40s I would meet a man by the name of Larry Gatlin and his wife Cheryl who are very artistic and they they exposed me to a lot of thinking and an experiences in art and really an appreciation that both of them being artists themselves that I for the first time I really appreciated the extraordinary effort and risk-taking that goes on in the production of of an artist and the production of art and so at this point I have I have more now admiration for people's process than the not necessarily the specific domains of which they may be a highly competent the in my own field there there's been a few people whose thinking has been so extraordinary that as soon as I was exposed to it it was breathtaking for me and it laid out a treasure map of ability to find insights for the rest of my life the first was Richard Dawkins and it was it was clear from the first few pages of The Selfish Gene that this guy was totally unusual and and then later John Tibby and leda cosmides the the crispness of their logic very very tight very Aristotelian and brilliant and so the two of them are something just incredibly special Steven Pinker is in that genre Jeffrey Miller very imaginative very bold individual and also spectacular thinker so these people I just learned so much from them and I was impressed with their their daring and their their determination that no matter how much crap that they were going to receive from academic psychology or anybody else for for their thinking they they knew they were sitting right on the compass that would direct them to the truth and so I have great admiration for people that do that sort of thing in any field and so that those people I admire them because I'm not just admiring their smarts I'm also admiring their intellectual courage and so that that's a whole set of people there that John Wooden is a is no genius John Wooden was a fantastic basketball coach he was a essentially like a little minister and he what he did was he he would synthesize some very important principles of motivation and life into some essentially some very simple mantras that could be taught and it could be continually rehearsed and reinforced over and over again it was it was a fascinating way to try to essentially hand down the best that he could to the young people under his tutelage and in in many ways I'm trying to do the same thing so what I'm trying to do is the things that I'm thinking about the pictures that I'm trying to put together clinically are obviously much deeper and more complicated and into the heart of human life much more comprehensive than John Wooden because John Wooden was never going to talk to some one of his kids about problems with their girlfriend or casual mating strategy or or you know any of this kind of stuff or this is not he was not a clinical psychologist and so this wasn't his job his job was to bring a team together and in a you know in a fashion where they would do something remarkable which is to work cohesively together even though there was the desire on every single individual on that team to shine individually at the expense of the team basketball is unique in all sports with respect to this there is no sport like basketball where one individual can showboat and they can do so in a fashion that would make them much more sexually attractive but it's in fact in the best interest of the team for them not to do so and so baseball does not have this football does not have this there is no sport as tempting as basketball for the individual to step out of line five percent ten percent or 50 percent to make themselves look better in order for them to personally advance their own genetic best interest Wooden was a master at reeling that instinct in and making people be cohesive as a team and essentially drawing out of that team the very best performance that he could and and the the pride that would come with that self discipline for doing that is is a pride like like no letter and in Wooden's players you know 50 years later forty years later will still tell you that they had no time on earth like the time that they spent there the so I admired his his mastery of that domain and many the principles that he identified the ideas that he identified were extremely useful and I think are translatable to all kinds of human problems including many of the problems that I deal with people in my practice on a daily basis so so essentially I admire the systems of thinking that he used and and I begged and borrowed and stolen from everybody that I could in order to put together the most comprehensive useful set of philosophy that it for people to use to make decisions to make the most of their lives so I pay attention to people who I believe have made advances that are significant in in thinking and in in system tation analysis of any kind of problem of life and I I try to grab those and build as comprehensive and useful model as possible so that I can be as useful as possible to others excellent now with all this thinking that you've done and we really thank you for sharing everything with us on the podcast as much as possible and so I know that when I go to bed almost every night I have a little rundown of some thoughts that I have and every once in a while I have little things that come in my head that say oh I haven't figured this out and so that's when I come to the podcast and I ask you or I send you an e-mail or you know I can figure that out the question for you is there's something about the world to you that continues to stump you or something you feel that doesn't quite have an adequate explanation yet that's really good no actually I don't I I don't I don't walk around with any dissonance of little nagging open loops I believe that at this point now I have been thinking along evolutionary lines for for about 30 years not quite about 20 26 27 28 years and so as a result I think I have I thought to every major question that my mind would naturally bump into and I believe I have a very comprehensive map of understanding the motivation of myself and others and it's it's complicated but it's it's finite now what happens is something different so I'm not saying that I know everything I'm just saying that I don't have any dissonance I don't have any open loops in my own mind what happens is that people will point out to me open loops or once in a while I'll have some little reaction or I'll watch some little reaction someone else and my immediate thinking is why is that happening and I've done this a hundred thousand times in the last 30 years and so as a result most of the time I can very quickly trip my way through the explanation I can find my way back to the distal Stone Age evolution of that circuit the the and of course I'm doing this so often because I'm spending my days doing that with other people as they're as they're calling to me and talking to me or I'm seeing them in person and I'm walking my way through mind after mind after mind essentially I'm like a an early person studying Anatomy I get you know nobody else gets to cut the cut the other cut the people open because the church won't allow it but but if you if you do it in secret and you're Leonardo da Vinci you'll find out more about how the body works than anybody else and so in the same way as a clinical psychologist arm theory of evolution I'm literally getting to x-ray people's motivational system day after day after day after day and as a result the the map my my understanding of where people are coming from it it's very filled in now what happens is once in a while somebody will tap me on the shoulder and say what about this and and I want to thought of it and it'll be that's delightful there's nothing more fun than that is to you know I would say nine times out of ten I quickly know what the answer is but one time out of ten I don't and so that's when I get to dig a little deeper and in question and think and think through alternative hypotheses and what could be causing whatever it is and we we find something new one of the this happened this happens all the time I have a my very best friend in this life is used to be used to be a romantic partner she's now my best friend her name is Melissa and Melissa is now at this point very well educated in evolutionary psychology and is vigilant about always watching for interesting anomalies that don't fit something that she would have expected and one time she she made a comment about screaming children on the playground and she sat there and looked at it and thought about it and then told me she goes here's what I think and she says I think that these kids you know six seven eight year old kids are screaming and then they'll start laughing and this would be a way to constantly draw the attention of their mothers in the Stone Age and the mothers if you can imagine would have the divided attention between watching their kids looking out for predators gossiping with the woman that they're picking fruit from and watching the fruit on the vine and moving their hands coordinated fashion and as efficiently as possible so that brain would have divided attention and the children would be designed by nature to pull as much of that mother's attention as possible not to sit under her feet but but to make sure that she was over investing in them to make sure that they were safe more so than the mother would ordinarily want the mother would be ordinarily balancing her attention between various options but be have some desire for to have anxiety to be on the lookout for predators with respect to her kids but by constantly screening every 28 seconds these kids keep forcing the mother to look because it sounds like they're being attacked by a predator even when two seconds later you hear him start laughing and so I'm I thought about this and then I went to a schoolyard sure enough it's unbelievably noisy but it's not anything like you see in junior high school so there's a this developmental period where children don't quote just have boundless energy what you're watching is you're watching a day clearly a an evolved circuit it was designed by nature to compete for mom's attention for predator protection this is this kind of thing I never would have thought about it that it's beautiful to to listen to other people as they run into these very questions my mind is kind of out of questions after thirty years of this but other people would rush to these ideas will have their own dissonance where they will they will have some hangnail it doesn't make sense to them and when they ask me once in a while I don't know and there's nothing more fun than not knowing because one thing you know for sure is there is an explanation and the explanation will fit within the matrix of what it is that we understand to be true and so it's just a matter of putting one's mind to work in grinding and sooner or later we'll find the answer well speaking of putting the work in grinding in one of your most famous introductions to some of your talks you talked about your father which I know you've told me before and you just said earlier that he was basically a mathematician so this is from dr. Wiles pleasure trap talk on YouTube I'm Doug Lyall I'm a psychologist wasn't my first choice [Applause] want to be an artist and should have been but my father refused to give me the emotional support more importantly the financial support that my my talent so richly deserved history will judge him as much as I'd like to process my issues about that this morning which believe me I would that's not what I'm here to do I'm here to do this psychology thing so what was interesting is I first heard you speak at the the original Center for progressive therapy which turned into the True North health center and I never heard that introduction until a couple of years later after I had read your book watched when your TED talk watch watch the TED talk and I thought man I just loved love that introduction at first when I first watched it I thought man what's this guy complaining about his childhood for just another one of those psychologists who just can't stop talking about his dad and how you know complaining and then but I listened a little more carefully and realized what it is that you were doing so the question I have is what did your dad think about this introduction and did you discuss it with him and was this kind of a joke as you were growing up or or was just something with your art artistic talents that you came up with later yeah my dad got a big kick out of that the he only heard it once live I gave the talk in Los Angeles at bedsores and my dad happened to be there and so that's the only time he saw it on video which is good the yeah yeah it was just that that's just pure joke and pure fun my dad my dad actually thought that psychologists were we're kind of a bunch of wimps and more or less worthless except he knew that I was on to something and he he certainly even all through grad school he knew that I was trying to do something big that I wanted to I was grinding hard and I had no grand theory but I was I was certainly I had my dad's mathematical chops and I had I had the desire to see things orderly and to have the was very logical and psychology was not very much that way I mean certainly there's a science there science was all kind of mushy and not integrated and had no great theory as TV and cosmides would say later the the incorrect theory which was social learning theory was was so fundamentally flawed that it nearly defeated 20th century psychology so I was in the the last group generation that was going to school with the most mature social learning theory there and essentially psychodynamic there is pretty well buried in terms of the science so we were staring at a fractured science little frecks fragmented the little science of psychology it was get busy gathering up little bits of studies one of the time that weren't very important or impressive building nothing essentially building a mound of sand but they weren't building a castle and and because they were they had the wrong theory they didn't know how to do it and so I knew this I could smell it and I felt a little bit demoralized and that but I was determined though to come away with something one day some place to to put our lever to move the world and I didn't know what is going to be and so my dad knew that I wasn't somebody that was just going to swallow anybody else's theory and I I would just come home every Christmas and be like hey I don't know what the hell is going on but here's a little piece and here's a little piece and when I found The Selfish gin which I found about a year before my I finished my PhD and I shared it with my parents they were electrified my parents are both quite intellectual and and my dad was in love with Dawkins and he could not get enough and neither could my mother couldn't get enough of me explaining the thinking that I was having and the ideas that I was coming into contact with and I was sharing with them pretty soon to being cosmides thinking and then David buss and it they just loved it they liked nothing better than when I would come home and I would give them quote a seminar and I would talk for an hour and a half about everything under the Sun that I was thinking and God bless my parents the they enjoyed listened to me so much that if I was telling a story when they needed to go to the bathroom they would say don't let him talk till I get back and that was the kind of relationship we all had so make in front of my dad like that was was just an entertaining and fun but we actually had a fantastic relationship well fantastic I mean is you know I usually just hold it when I have to go to the bathroom and I'm doing the podcast it's so fascinating but but but that's just fascinating so I want to turn the compass a little bit and get a little bit more personal with you you've mentioned before that you used to be married yes and a lot of our listeners have have wrote to me and posted in the Facebook group wondering what the story is about that so tell us the story what happened yeah it's it's an it's an important story for me clinically because it's a story I've seen repeated by a lot of people and in it it tells a lot about oh there's so much to learn about marriage and relationships and relationship dynamics and and so certainly you know I lived through some some significant mistakes and there was other mistakes that people can make and their mistakes aren't mistakes aren't art a disaster particularly if if you learn from them John Wooden said famously to build Welton when you lose don't lose the lesson and so this is this is certainly the story for me on this issue I met a wonderful young lady that's an undergraduate UC San Diego and she one of the things she said when we were just walk around together I said well what do you want to do you know for career and she says I want to be a famous psychoanalyst I remember that like it was yesterday and I was I was delighted because I was course thinking the same thing and so it turned out that we both studied very hard and did well and we both wound up at the same graduate school the University of Virginia in the 1980s both getting a PhD in clinical psychology and so the however we were friends and we were not romantic partners and that that was the fundamental issue so sometimes to agreeable people that really like each other as people it if they they can they can follow a bunch of expectations and social pressures right to the altar when they have no business doing so and that that was the story of my of my 20s and my relationship with my first wife and so my first and only wife and so the that was a it was it was a wonderful friendship and it was much many good things happen so those years were not a laughs but they they certainly were not the experience that people are seeking and so that so that that took care of 13 years of my life is what that was so that took me all the way to my mid-30s and there was no no no hard feelings and no really no negative fallout and I considered it I got very clear about where we were and what the situation was by reading David bus's evolution of desire I was aware of David bus's exceptional research and I had I had read his work in the jealousy mechanism that he published in the early 90s it was one of the earliest and best pieces of work in evolutionary theory and and I recognized that that we the two of us either one of us did not have any jealousy there was no and I actually considered jealousy to be sort of I had had a feeling that maybe it was an immature sort of a thing and that's incorrect so as dr. buses exceptional thinking and research made this very clear and so I I came to realize in reading buses work that there was a horrible footprints were in the sand it was very clear that that we were missing out on a great potential in human life and that we were making a mistake and so once we faced that and got through it one of the most gratifying things that ever happened to me was my wife finding love for life within a couple of years after our parting and then later she had a couple of kids and and I am that I am actually charged with the task that she should she and her husband pass in an accident that when these kids were growing up I was take care of them those kids are now all grown up so they don't need that anymore but that was an extremely flattering and very warm responsibility really a testimony to how good friends my first wife and I were absolutely fascinating absolutely fascinating okay so now we change the dial a little bit to now your your current single life and you've joked with us on the show about your dating life and we often joke up you and I about matcom experiences of online reading long before the podcast I had a dating profile OkCupid comm now the way OkCupid works was you answer a bunch of questions and then they show you a percentage of how close of a match you are depending on the girl the higher damage the higher compatibility so one thing I'm sitting there looking at profiles and I saw a girl who just hit all of my circuits physically I look at 90% yeah yes so look at her match percentage unfortunately it was like 12% so I spent the next you know 30 minutes an hour trying to Rianne sir all the questions to score higher but it just wasn't enough right so I decided that maybe I can sweet talk my way into datin you know hopefully the the algorithm is just wrong mmm yeah so my I sent a message sir and the message was hey I've never actually been out with someone with such a low match percentage maybe we should meet up for drinks or dinner just to see how badly we can annoy each other that's great I admire you well done her reply her reply was we don't even have to meet it's already happening Oh God done so dr. Lyle tell us a funny or memorable way that you have been rejected online or in person oh my god I can't even can't even think about that online rejection you you get it at first in the early days I was there for the early days of match.com and late 90s at first you take it personally and then then after it happens so often you realize it's just no problem you don't even think about it the kind of like striking out in the major leagues you know your first strikeout you probably all bent out of shape and you have a game where you strike throughout three times and you're all depressed and wondering if you're gonna go wind up back in Visalia and to a ball but you know after you've been up there and the majors for a while you didn't bother you strike got you striped out so anyway get to strikeout that's the beauty of the modern dating environment you get to strike out more than anybody in history is ever struck out so the yeah but the the memorable memorable ones I I don't know I had a I had one thing that I did that this is a slightly outrageous story we won't laugh I see I'm almost I'm almost off this this thing we only got have a few minutes to go I only have to survive alright tell you okay a great story so this is a few years ago I I see a an online profile a attractive lady and clearly she's got some fancy degrees seems very intelligent says that she speaks some foreign language doesn't say what it is so I'm of course immediately thinking she's she looks she looks northern European and I'm thinking a Russian so if you're Russian you might not want to admit that you're Russian whereas if you're norwegian or italian you you would of course be willing to admit that so Oh anyway I'm thinking Russian and and so I decided I'm going to try to meet her and so I a miraculously get an email back from her and so I I said well let's you know could I take you to dinner I'm always interested in going to dinner because I want to pin them down for two hours if I get it ever get a chance to have a date so you know I'm gonna give it a shot so it turns out that she says no what's me for drinks which is interesting because that already tells you that she's possibly somewhat disagreeable so I'm thinking you know right I bet she's disagreeable so then so I said she wants to go somewhere quiet with good parking in San Francisco so I'm already thinking entitled pain in the neck you know I mean but I'm thinking you know what I'm still right now right now I'm curious so I believe I'm trying to read my own ability to calibrate personalities from a few simple interactions this is very very interesting like a fortune-teller so I'm believing that I have a disagreeable human and so so I say fine how about st. Francis there's parking structure right there nice place quiet she writes back - too crowded too noisy so now we've got a series of disagreements extremely unusual in the dating world and so I already I'm almost positive I've got a very disagreeable human so now I'm intrigued now I want to find out just how disagreeable so I write back to her and I say James Bond himself can't find a quiet place with good parking in San Francisco so how about if we meet at the top of the mark top of the more cop goods hotel and you go to use valet and I'll take care of it she writes back and says I heard it's closed for renovations oh I can't believe this so I call up the Mark Hopkins and I say are you guys closed for renovations gal says no I said have you ever been closed for renovations and she says I've been here five years it's never been closed so I write back and I say good news they're open so how about we need so we need it was a quite an event and I won't tell her the story but suffice to say that when the waiter came to offer her wine she said yeah Barringer's and the guy says yes she says yes I see this on the menu you understand that it has arsenic and this is very bad and I'm sitting there like you can't believe it's been a steady stream of Miette yet yeah it's like negotiating with the Russians and during the Cold War and the young man was very taken aback but he was class act and he says ma'am best of my knowledge you know it's all good and she says no I'm telling you I'm trying to help you people so you don't get sued there's arsenic in the wine anyway I decided to not tell her too much about evolutionary psychology I thought I would talk to her about water fasting which is kind of interesting and she said oh I know all about it suffice to say that she contradicted everything that I had to say about water fasting that apparently this woman is an expert on everything under the Sun and in ten minutes that date was dead what died and I it was it was the most hostile most disagreeable human in a very attractive show and I thought there it is there's someone who's very attractive very bright you got looks and you got brains but you have no personality and that is why that woman is single and undoubtedly single to this day so that that was Dean grant oh by the way it was Russian yes in case anybody wanted to know that's a beautiful story do you remember how much the ballet cost Divya I don't I actually put a hundred dollars on a table I stood up I put a hundred dollars on the table and I said I I'm leaving and she got up with an extraordinary look on her face she was contrite which was amazing to me my mind was quickly registering what must be going on behind those eyeballs and I realized that this woman had not intended to be a hostile bitch so this was literally she was doing the best she could she was in no way trying to be difficult this is just the personality and I thought wow now you know I have now seen 99th percentile disagreeable and you know I've seen some sociopaths in prison there were 99 percentile but they were 99 percentile with terrible conscientiousness some horrible character I have no doubt that this woman's character was fine she had some PhD and some fancy microbiology this you know she was she was hot stuff but man ala Mancha we I have now witnessed what 99 percentile looks like in a functional human and it's something to see when they object three times to your pitches don't even bother going on the date that's my that's my new rule wonderful wonderful well we're just about wrapping up of any final thoughts final words well hopefully not final but in the end last words for the podcast for for some of our listeners in this special episode I would say about this podcast and about about the adventure this evolutionary psychology and taking it into - into into this next century in its future and its vision and that is that to me in a special way this is the apex of the human experiment that human beings have spent centuries finally arriving at science at which point they picked apart atoms and they picked apart cells and they picked apart you know continental drift and in other words what they know has been extraordinary but the apex of the the investigation of the universe has got to be turning the mind on itself it's using the mind to actually look back in its own self and say what are you constructed up how is it you're constructed why are you constructed that way how do you work and I feel unbelievably blessed to live in the time that I live in and to have had the great fortune to to run into the works of brilliant people that have influenced me and and made me able to be competent at what it is that I do and and so this is I invite up any and all people to join in the adventure and to read some of the some of the great works of our time the moral animal by Robert Wright's pelvis Jean by Richard Dawkins the mating mind by Jeffrey Miller the blank slate by Steven Pinker the you know why we feel by Johnson these are these are just the blind watchmaker by Dawkins there are just extraordinary books that have the adapted mind to being cosmides as an anthology these people have blazed a trail into this process of human self-awareness that that will reverberate through our time and for centuries to come and light is just going to get better as we understand ourselves better
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