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Episode 119: How does our personality change With circumstance With age
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how are you doing this evening good about yourself I'm doing not too bad well as well I was just talking with some friends and this this topic about personality differences Forte's show very very interesting because a lot of my friends have listened to the podcast and listened to your your talks and they kind of get a little interested about evolutionary psychology and when I first meet people and we start talking about this one of the first things that people say is well is personality the same or do we change because I know that I've changed as a person since I was a kid and so mmm just from what I've learned about you but the monozygotic twin studies and various other thing various and sundry things I try to we try to discuss about how whether or not personality actually changes as we grow older and so this brings us the topic of our show today is how does our personality change as we age with circumstance and with with our age and so this is our first question is that dr. Lyle you mentioned people become more disagreeable with age as their status increases are there other traits similarly affected by variables such as status maybe not being as flaky when dealing with high status people also could you point us to some of this literature for big five tests that you could consider accurate whenever this listener looks up Big Five it seems not as integrated with evolutionary thinking as when you're talking about it all right good good they've been doing some homework the the big five is not is not integrated in evolutionary thinking the way that that I talked about this in other words it's not the big five is a theoretical so it's just an it's an empirical observation of what happens when you study the way this is done is I'm not not sure I want to get off on this tangent but I will for a second they they can tell from a mathematical technique called factor analysis that when human beings describe each other and are thinking about each other they they actually are only using a half a dozen variables almost exclusively not exclusively but almost exclusively in other words there's only six things that they really talk about and so it's really and we can tell this for example so the word smart and bright are really saying the same thing and so we're going to when we look at the language we see that with 60,000 words of the English language 18,000 of those words have to do with these six concepts so we now the what's interesting about this is it doesn't have to do with seven concepts or eight concepts or fourteen concepts it has to do with six and we call it the big five because they carve out intelligence and make it its own thing because they kind of say that and we're not really calling them out as personality variable it's kind of something different and we kind of think of it as different so when we think about attractiveness of people we think about three things we think about looks brains and personality so personality sort of has a head is somewhat to some degree independent of intelligence these are sort of artificial artificial delineations but there's some how useful conceptually on it for a number of reasons now the you know I guess where was the question maybe are they subject to change and how they change and the yeah so it's not integrated the big five is not never was integrated with any personality theory at all it's just a it's just something that was discovered by by mathematically oriented psychologists you know scientific psychologists so the and it stood the test of time in other words it keeps you keep doing the same types of studies and you keep coming up with these same variables and the now the the reason why that I integrate them with evolutionary psychology is that this was pointed out to me when I read the book spent by Jeffrey Miller and the it appears into the thinking that I have on this topic is tracking Jeffrey Miller's thinking and so it's it's somewhat premature in somewhat subject to further empirical investigation etc but it is it's very compelling and there are it's not without empiricism already so the so in any event you can you can as you think through and imagine these variables on in the big five you can see how it is that each of them it would be associated with problems that an organism would face essentially cost-benefit analysis on a timeless problem of animal behavior so just for one minute to reiterate this as I've done before the openness dimension so if you think about openness think about openness instead of inhuman openness think of it as as animal openness so animals we don't have to be thinking about whether they believe in astrology or crystals or incense or anything else or religion we can think about how far they are willing to go from there safe safe habitat and we can think of this as that there would be a cost-benefit analysis on essentially the the lore of unknown territory examined and you can of course understand that the animal must actually examine territory further than where its own feet are setting because it is not going to be able to survive or reproduce by literally not moving a muscle that's because it's an animal and it's going to have to move so an animal faces a dilemma which is how far should I move from where I know the habitat very well okay so so this is so essentially you can think of my my way of thinking about this a simple example as a rabbit and how far of a circumference if you were to put a string on that rabbit how far can he he or she go before that psychological string says hey you're now out of rope if you go one step further you are now that that investigation of the habitat at that level at 101 yards for example is now more cost than it is benefit to run that exploration so you better come closer to home so this is this is the openness that it animal must have for exploring its environment and so this is so it's no surprise to me at all or to Jeffrey Miller of course that I didn't even think of this but when I read Miller it became became clear that this was an extremely useful way of analyzing why the big five is the big five why did we not find something else well right away in openness we see hey we see a cost-benefit analysis for the exploration of environments okay so that that makes perfect sense the now other but but in rank-and-file work in in the personality research nobody's got you know nobody's integrating this they're not thinking along these lines or very a typically so so that's why you're not going to see it so if you're interested in a literature that integrates this and in fact explains and and the arguments are well documented in observations that describe the big five plus intelligence I would recommend the book spent by Miller as just an outstanding presentation the the LAT the last half of the book when he has fun and goes off and talks about how he thinks the whole world lot of change in his vision he's just crazy that's okay you know that that's because Jeffrey Miller himself is open and so his his mind is so open that you know once in a while when you really open your brains they're going to fall out and it did in that in that instance but Miller in general is brilliant and spent is a is the best document I've seen to try to to help you see this now in terms of tests that are valid etc the truth is is that all those questionnaires online that you're going to see that look at the big five are probably all going to be equally about right so they're not I don't know how much how much people have done to actually test any any one document and see whether or not it correlates up to actually observe behavior or ratings of other people rating the same person etc so I don't know how good these instruments are so don't don't take them too seriously if yours comes back on one dimension thirty four percent you have a feeling that you're at the 50th percentile you know these are these are rough and ready but they are they're definitely got some validity to them as does the you know the underlying the underlying constructs all right oh okay yeah it's funny how you know when I was few maybe a decade ago I just went to the beach by myself and had my fins and you know classes are goggles and just decided that I was going to swim as far as I could and then just relax in the middle of the ocean all day long at about you know a certain distance I just started to feel this anxiety like I'm getting too far from the shore and taking offense to me because I had fins I had goggles there was you know I eaten you know I was full or anything like that then I just it was an eerie feeling that I was getting a little too far and yeah and soon the podcast listening to stuff that you've said it's like okay that that's my ancestors right there that none of my ancestors survived long enough to go too far right I have that same feeling when somebody puts a little toy shark in my backyard swimming pool that's that that's how open I am all right very good yeah all right I've met you I know I know you're more open the clothes you wear indicate your more oh God you know the first pink shirt that I bought I didn't think anything of it until someone pointed it out and I thought oh yeah there you go oh man asked me for my number then I realized there you have it all right I might get in trouble for saying that oh well okay so dear dr. Lyle if I understand correctly personalities can be viewed as strategies for gene replication for example hi agreeableness makes an individual and attractive trading partner allowing him to make many trades while low agreeableness may allow the individual to acquire more resources from individual trades so if this is true wouldn't we expect personality to be contingent on an individual's circumstances for example from individuals low on multiple dominance hierarchies being disagreeable will be dangerous and that person may be better off being agreeable similarly they may be better off being a bit more conscientious of their safety so how does this reasoning comply with the data showing that an individual's personality is relatively fixed throughout life there would be there would be more than some of the assumptions that the questions are the question is made on our are not completely accurate so I can't I can't remember can't remember was bugging me about I think he read the opening sentence again that personalities can be viewed as strategies for gene replication yeah I don't think so that's not that's not what they are okay so what what personalities are is they are variances around a there's a there's a CB analysis that the the brain has to make about given types of problems that are recurrent you know for for all animals and for example specifically humans have human problems and so a personality is not a strategy it's a there is a there's an adaptive problem about for example how open to be so a a hi openness is not a strategy versus allo openness I wouldn't call those alternative strategies precisely I'd call them variances on variances around a prototype so they're they're not types this is a this is a variation so the world doesn't make tall men and short men it makes a bell curve of and the and so it so there's a it's variations on a theme and it turns out that those variations will fall in bell curves okay so it means that now what that's going to mean of course is that that that those variations are going to have those essentially random variations around a prototype those those variations were going to have differential success depending upon what environment they find themselves in so this is probably a mechanism of how how a how life maintains itself in the face of a change that these genes there's these gene variances that are going to going to confront changes in the environment and something that for example right now is at the 75th percentile for openness you can imagine a gene for openness in that rabbit where the rabbit goes 150 yards from the rabbit hole instead of 100 yards which is what the fiftieth percentile is and therefore the most successful or the top of the bell curve frequency the now think of your think of we're now looking at a rabbit that's willing to go 150 yards and that's sitting at the 75th percentile now I want you to think about that in the habitat where where the 50th percentile goes 100 yards that there are X amount of bushes and X amount of foliage and X amount of water and X high amount of grass and so there's X amount of carrots to be had in that habitat now I want you to think about and then there's a certain amount of foxes and a certain amount of foliage for cover etc etc so now I want you to think about a significant climate change that takes place over the next thousand years and as that climate change takes place now suddenly there's less foliage and so now it turns out that the carrots are further apart and so now it's going to turn out that the little by little over the course of evolution of that thousand years the rabbits that we're all they willing to go 100 yards from the rabbit hole are being slowly wiped out relative to the ones that are surviving and making it in the new environment or the ones that are willing to go further so now we find that the bell curve is in a whole heart in whole hog it is slowly shifting to the right and so a thousand years later we now have 100 150 yards is sitting at the middle of the bell curve about a hundred okay so the personalities I wouldn't call the personalities being our turn ative strategies I would consider the personality domain of interest to be a environmental problem of which the the most adaptive strategy for that is in the middle of the bell curve and there's random variation around that prototype okay all right that's way too much talking on this thing but I'm just trying to just trying to sort of get it clear in my own mind what they're asking now the but now sorry about that now what did they what were they asking at the end say that again well the end is if the person's personality is relatively fixed throughout life how is it that they're they can basically essentially adapt different situations and allo a great person may may appear to be highly highly agreeable right okay the way to think about this is that all behavior it's not personality okay all behavior is context dependent so you're you know there's a time there's a time to raise your eyebrows and flirt and there's a time to lower your eyelids and look submissive okay it all depends on the cost-benefit analysis and so what you're going to have is you're going to have the so the environmental inputs are going to determine what behavior you're going to get as they interact with with the genes so let's suppose for example that all people had exactly the same identical genetic code when it came to there there was no personality variance they all look the same and they all they all had exactly the same amount of reactivity to X amount of threat ie same amount of disagreeableness same amount of openness etc etc so we're going to assume that they're all the same but now we're going to throw them all over the globe and they're going to have to interact with other animals and they have highly varied habitats so we're going to find that they're going to have very different life experiences and if we were to measure how angry they were how many minutes they spent angry in this life we're going to find a lot of variation because one of them is putting up with some really obnoxious llamas okay that their that their life livelihood is dependent upon wherever it is that llamas are okay and so that so those people spend a lot of time swearing and cursing and threatening llamas somebody else lives in a place where they don't have to do that and it's all we know and they sit around in the lotus position and you know have some bird that's been trained drop grapes in their mouths okay so they have it good so what we're going to see is you're going to see that despite the fact that there was no variation in personality whatsoever genetically we're going to actually see differences in behavior and there it's going to look characteristic of the individuals but but even without any memory systems to alter these things literally a cataloguing or a Martian you know scientists watching this would say well people over there on llama land are more disagreeable than the people that are over there in in bizarre bird Grapeland okay and so they're they're going to think that that's true but really we know that genetically it's not true but what's causing this is gene environment interaction so the way to think about anything that you see in life whether it's a physical thing like a finger or sunburn or whether you're thinking about a behavior of an animal a twitch of a whisker or a laugh or submissive gesture all of these things are going to be what we call phenotypes so the what you have is a genotype or the or the genetic code code for in building a structure and then you have environmental inputs so in the simplistic equation that is sometimes used in biology classes just it doesn't mean what it looks like but it's just sort of a simple way of saying this they'll say g plus e equals the phenotype okay so the genetics plus the environment is what causes you to see what you're seeing so and the animal itself is a phenotype so the genes had a little genetic code built in there and then it had to have food and had to have a mom and it had to have you know to grow this organism and then what we see is a rabbit and the rabbits the phenotype okay because the rabbits ears are the phenotype and the so it's the gene environment interaction is what it is that you see now we're not typically thinking when you talk to two biologists generally they don't think of behaviors as phenotypes but you can and you basically should so behavior is an interaction of the the genetic code and the environmental inputs so it's going to turn out that there's going to be sources of variance here that are going to be tricky to tease apart so let's for example so it isn't as simple as IE the genes of personality that are going to determine somebody's behavior it's going to be highly context dependent upon environmental circumstances it's going to get very tricky very fast so let me give you an example let's take a hundred men who are all equally down the middle of the bell curve for how agreeable they are every single one of these guys absolutely at the fiftieth percentile and we're going to just go ahead and have some fun and say we're all 50th percentile right down the middle of every single characteristic since we've got a hundred of these guys but now we're going to change one variable okay and that variable is going to be how strong they are so we're going to make them all 25 years old and we're going to make we're going to we're going to assume that these hundred men we're going to distribute them on a bell curve that it just turns out that the hundred men we selected are perfectly representative of every single percentile from from 1 to 100 so there's a guy that is the the is a first percentile in the population for weakness there's the one right next to him is 2nd percentile all the way up to 50th who is a guy who is absolutely average all the way to a guide that's 100 that is effectively at the 99.9 percent tile for strength in the population now we're going to put these guys all in the same 15 challenging situations in an environment where there's some level of conflicts of interest and there's some cost-benefit about what the risk reward ratio is for winning or losing this conflict okay and now what we're going to do is we're going to find out whether or not their strength predicts their assertiveness and the answer is is that it does and in fact it's a pretty big predictor of their sort of us okay so now you see that okay it's getting more complicated it isn't just individual variation and the personality dimension the builds the brain about how agreeable you are it is also and it's not even in variances of the environment that are involved it's literally the fact that we have to understand that each individual's environment even if they're staring at exactly the same situations the situations are not exactly the same for them because of who it is that they are the environment itself is actually a relationship between the person and what they believe to be true about the features of the environment and that is how the quote environment impacts the individual the environment is not some inert thing that just impacts every individual similarly or the same it doesn't at all it actually is the in quote environment is a relationship between that individual and the environment okay so similarly if you were to look at women and we would do the same thing and we would put women a hundred women at the get percentile and every personality dimension including the most important one under observation here which would be agreeableness and we were trying to steady quote assertiveness okay if we were to then have the variable B how beautiful they are and we were to have an objective measure of this and we had a hundred women who happen to be representative of every single percentile the our prediction for my standpoint would be that the woman that would be at the hundredth or 99th percentile that person would be on average far more assertive than the person that's at the first percentile okay even though the genetics of the personality are identical and the people that they're interacting with on our trials and the situation mistakes were exactly the same we would find a highly attractive person to be far more sort of okay and we do so that's because cost-benefit analysis is speaking up standing your ground demand what you expect what you in other words highly attracted people do not expect to wait as long in line and so as that's because people have generally hustled up to them to take take care of business and take care of what it is that what they want okay so if you're a highly attractive person and you've waited for 26 seconds and nobody's coming until 36 seconds you're a little bit annoyed it doesn't mean that you're a bitch or an sob it means that this you are getting evidence that somebody is is not doing their job because typically it's only 26 seconds whereas if you are highly unattractive you're used to wait five minutes so when it goes two minutes you're like not upset at all okay so it looks like the highly attractive woman is quick quote a bitch and that the other one is quote more easygoing but in fact what you're seeing is nothing of the kind okay so you think you might be looking at variances and agreeableness on a genetic level but you're not you're actually looking at a computation that's much more complex so this is a this is a great question that the person is asking and so hopefully I've answered it that the gene variances in these issues is only part of the equation now it turns out it is a each part of the equation and of course that's what was missed by the standard social science model of the 20th century in psychology they they couldn't see it and didn't see it and wouldn't look forward and it was politically incorrect to look forward and it's still politically incorrect to even talk about it so the they still have their heads largely in the sand but that that that's neither for here nor there but the the answer to the question of this is that yes these are highly there's all kind of context cost-benefit analysis and dynamics that are going on here it's been my observation and I could be totally wrong about this but and I don't know that I think somebody had data on this somewhere that I that my eyes glanced over but I could be completely wrong it may have been just a fantasy in my own head but I have a feeling that overweight women tend to be more agreeable on average and of course this would make sense because they are they're finding that they are quote not worth as much and so therefore they would be looking to make up for that deficit and not get kicked out of coalition's by sweetening the pot on the cost-benefit analysis for keeping them in the coalition so I think that that is true but I'm not sure and maybe somebody will email me this week with a study that says yeah this this was found but this I believe that that's the case so it would certainly fit with the more general concept that the higher status you are the less you have the risk by being assertive and therefore disagreeable and the lower status you are the less you have the less you can afford those risks and you better be submissive so it goes along the lines of general dominant and submissive dynamics alright alright with that we've got a caller we've got a couple oh we got a caller here Dave from Los Angeles welcome to the show hey mate how's it going hey there how you doing hey dr. lo all right it's Dave from Los Angeles yes okay all right Dave what going on what are you working on and what are we trying to get better all right I guess it's a situation and involves three people myself my wife and a former friend who used to be also a business associate so but maybe about three years ago we we went on a plant-based diet and our health improved and I think our life and our family I mean our marriage and everything improved and we're so we're in good health and we rarely have fights anymore but we just had a fight the other day about something and I just wanted to ask you your opinion but from your write your show your rights tells us wrong okay so I would go ahead your show I'm agreeable and she's disagreeable okay so I had this friend and a real estate guy who he got us into some deals which worked out very well for us and continued to work out very well for us but he also became a personal friend but over the last few years I guess his uh his abilities have been sort of declining and with his help and so he had made some mistakes but the mistakes that he made I didn't see them as you know fireable offenses but she had real issues with him and she wanted to fire him but then she came out and she said well she said I don't like them I don't like the things he says about his ethnic comment she would say you know Chinese are cheap and you say stuff like that to her to us you know he would always you start by saying hey no offense but but you know how that is and so when she told me that I said I said okay you know what for that I will fire him for that mm-hmm but what I think I think that she didn't believe I was going to fire him so what she did was from my point of view she orchestrated a series of confrontations that ended up in him sort of firing us as client Wow and so and then after that even after that it got worse and worse with you know she's sort of making bad reviews online for him and forth business and then he's coming back and you know even using my name and saying thinking it's me that that's writing these which for me it seems it makes me feel sort of like Howard Lee like you know because I applied tend to say to him I would just say it write to him I wouldn't do it online but so anyway she's pretty unapologetic about about all this from my point of view you know business relationships they end and you know I'm not really worried about that but the I feel manipulated by the whole thing I think that yeah there are other ways to handle it I had actually offered to fire the guy but she said to me later she didn't believe that that I would so um I guess my question is I think given the same set of circumstances she would do it again and in fact she said that so when I say to her she's admitted to me she said well you know actually wanted him to fire us and then I say well you know you manipulated the situation and she said well don't say that about me I said but that's what happened so that's what the fight was about so from my point of view I feel like you know she meant it manipulated the situation so that she would end up with a certain you know certain situation and and that's what happened but from her point of view she's she feels like she's she feels bad because she feels like she burned a bridge for me like I'm sort of introverted and I don't uh kind of hang out with a lot of people but I was hanging out with you guy and you know I just feel like I so not only lost of this association associate but I lost a friend and in a way that I've never I've never done that before I've never sort of things have never really ended ugly like that terribly ugly yeah the terrible situation well that's a heck of a situation and the so it if I if I'm hearing this correctly that what you're saying is that this friend of yours in in what transpired as this unfolded there was nothing that he did that was until we get right down into an incredibly last nasty dynamic that was orchestrated by your wife that there was nothing that he did that was in any way dishonorable in other words there was he made some mistakes he you know not every not every deal worked out he may have had declining abilities but there wasn't anything about how oh I said I guess the one thing he he made ethnic comments okay so this just disturbed her okay now let me ask you is your wife Chinese yes Oh Chinese not from China but from another country right but you know there are Chinese that live in other countries of course there are all over the world so the point is is that this is an incredible statement for him to make I'm going to ask it with he himself Chinese no but he's not from the United States he's from the Middle Eastern country yes so this was this was an extraordinary faux pas okay so despite the fact that he that he may be a very decent human being this is a this is something that you know people will make stereotypical general generalizations of other groups of people all the time okay myself included it's a it's a to think that human beings don't think in terms of groups is literally laughable from for any cognitive psychologist on earth we know that this is how people this is how people work okay and they have a tendency to work in group out group and the out group is always like mostly inferior to us particularly morally okay right so this is this is how it works okay it gets right down to the level of the simplest delineations possible which was discovered by Henry TOEFL in the early 1970s and what he called minimal groups so even the slightest delineation between two groups and suddenly we have in-group out-group dynamics so this is this is a deep genetical algorithm inside of people so and it's going to also be true that in America were a melting pot of different cultures and so those different cultures will they will give rise to different standards of how it is that people negotiate and so among to native-born Americans it's unusual to find much back and forth go back between two people buying and selling a used car between each other privately it is it gets disagreeable if you're going to go more than two or three transactions back and forth whereas if you are in other places of the world you might go back thirty times back and forth and so as a result of this when when different cultures clash and and people behave differently you're going to wind up with some pretty flaming surprises and inferences about quote characters of people and so in this case this guy may have interacted in a number of interactions where the Chinese that he interacted with may have been very very fastidious negotiators and it turns out that that might have been inconsistent with his culture and as a result this is what he comes up with okay right and I don't know if this is true but this wouldn't surprise me a bit okay so this is yeah these are common inferences and generalizations that you'll find so he does this but the incredible thing is that the last person you say this to is you know it's dangerous to say it to anybody you know you have to be on extremely strong ground to make generalizations you better feel like you're a pretty tight in-group before you criticize any out-group okay right so the however if the last thing you do is ever criticize an out-group that's staring across the table from you I have to tell you and that and that is a that is a faux pas of that that no two-year-old should be able to make okay but he did right all right and in how much in my wife's defense you have mentioned earlier said that you know he had done nothing dishonorable or right you know where are you firing she in her eyes the mistakes he had made even besides that you know would warrant a firing and right and also right some way she sees them in some way in some ways dishonorable to die and another thing to about this guy and I won't say the name of his company but ironically he named his company a certain way to attract Indian I mean to attract Chinese investors so it's it's kind of ironic so as it turns out where you know afterwards we saw a side of him we had never seen before rise out he is something that we haven't he is something different than than I had you know previously thought yeah you know what my point of view from something like this my what I like to do is just walk away from a situation and then never think about it but it again but just it just keeps hounding us because of these online battles and stuff right right this is right so we're we got two different situations here we have the conflict between you and your wife over what this means for future for future situations and then we have the existing situation with this man okay right so the the more important issue is the underlying conflict between you and your wife and you know as as we we take the microscope out and we look at what it generated her irritation and rejection of him is that as you look at it you can see some you can see that she was being sensitive to some characteristics that you were you were number one you weren't as personally insulted and you by being more agreeable you are not as touchy okay a disagreeable person is effectively a more sensitive smoke detector for disagreeable other okay yes because they can sniff the conflicts of interest and they can see it and they can feel it more rapidly so well ideally in myself I blame myself to a certain extent that I should have been a little bit more you know sensitive to that you know you just saw who you are so you you were you were not seeing the you know any reason to be you know particularly upset about his behavior and his performance and it wasn't rising to the level of a a really a fairly substantial cost of not just a business relationship but also this friend okay right so for you the CV on severing this thing was pretty high and the reason to sever it didn't really make a lot of sense so from from your wife's standpoint she's far far more in the line of fire about being insulted she's sniffing a disagreeable and essentially a potentially dishonorable characteristic here that in other words an insensitivity that really shouldn't be there and that is a signal of potential problems okay yeah and so even though those problems haven't existed in the past she's sniffing that under conflicts of interest within the future anybody that would be there would be that insensitive who is is not safe okay so she's sounding the alarm and in fact she she can see that you're not going to bite very easily so she doesn't trust that you're going to do it she can sniff that you're probably going to try to smooth things over and have things continue to work out be okay and she says no you know she's too disagreeable and too upset too offended and so she engineers a bunch of conflicts that wind up fulminating in what happens to be a dissolution of the relationship okay it's an unfortunate way to have this happen and I'm going to suggest for the two of you a different strategy for things in the future the most important thing however is going to be that that I'm not particularly concerned even though the fire that we see right now is they is the very negative esteem dynamic that's taking place between your household and him okay we can figure that one out we'll talk about that in a minute but that that's chump change compared to the the more disturbing issue that you and your wife couldn't get on the same page in this process we thought you know it's going to disturb you because you're going to feel like you don't see things the same way that she sees them and she will go cowboy on you and she will orchestrate alterations in your life space that she considers that have to be done and these could be very expensive to you okay in terms of your life not not money-wise but personal lives and so you're looking at this and you're saying wait a minute we've got a problem here okay and you do have a problem so it's the central problem here is that that that that this kind of situation if if there's conflicts in the interest in the future we should have an agreement now that you basically say look if we start going down this road with anything else that's substantial in our lives okay then what we need to do is we need to bring in a third party mediator that helps us talk out and communicate very clearly what all of our concerns are and line it all out because we couldn't do it before okay we did not work as a team and work our way through our conflicts of interest here we just you you went off went rogue is what happened and you know what that scares the hell out of me because the truth of the matter is I can't sleep at night comfortably knowing that that strategy could be a strategy that you go in the future now as we go back and do a post-mortem on this situation I can understand it and we can give you latitude on that but I can't give you can't give us both latitude but that's the way we're going to handle things in the future because that's just we don't want to have to incur you know huge losses when you don't even know what you're signing up for right so that's that's a problem so that's that I would I would have that type of discussion with your wife because that discussion you we need to go to the mat on that and we need to have an agreement on that okay that yeah she she may have it's kind of like you know you're in a foxhole together and something moved and she turned and shot and it turned out he was the enemy but it could have been your best friend coming back from mess and it's like wow you didn't look carefully enough at the consequences to me you know yes you thought you saw that it was the enemy but I don't think you check carefully enough you didn't check with me okay so that right that's how I that's the core issue that we have now the issue with your what this dis man is is is a little bit different and there would be many different ways to approach this the I think that the best way to do things would be to do no purpose is served by mutual mudslinging there's just none and what you are in is what's known is a Hobbesian trap so you're you're you know you're doing action against Sam he's doing action against you and there's this essentially really nasty self reinforcing negative esteem dynamic this is a in other words the best move that you can make because he's about to criticize you the best you movie you can make is to undermine his credibility as ruthlessly as possible okay so you're both caught in exactly the same with the same decision making because you're anticipating that that's going to be the next move now what we want to do is we want to stop that esteem dynamic and so you want to you know I'd be happy to talk with you and your wife about this but you could just explain it to her that what you want to do is this dynamic can in principle go on forever okay because your your it literally continues to spin so what we can do is we could stop it and all you have to do is stop and you can do better than stopping okay you can actually communicate with this man and say listen this is a very unfortunate mess sort of brought out the negative side of human nature and the truth of the matter is that it's a mess that I don't think you want and we don't want and so I want you to know that we are ceasing and desisting on any of these negative comments as of today okay now if you continue you're going to continue but I just want you to know that we know that this is not actually a road we want to go down any further so we we would like to stop this now and then you stop it okay yeah my situation with him is is not even it's non-existent really I don't I I just walk away from it but hmm I just keep saying I just say to her stop doing things you know so teenys get the yeah she doesn't she doesn't she actually doesn't understand the loop she's in and so the problem is is that you can explain if you want this is an exacerbation cycle then when the when the business relationship ended I just said to him okay look hey let's just let's just part his friends that's what I said to him in an email but then he come back with his most vicious attack right that was his response so then I said okay well then I withdraw my offer to remain friends and then that was the last communication I had with him but then it was followed up by a bunch of things but as far as he goes that he's not like you said you know my situation with him pales in comparison to my wife who ran over were partners and we're in the foxhole together and that's what's important to me I don't really care about him right what the hell the hell with them man yeah we're not going to worry about that okay we're going to worry about that we we need to have at some point you know in a place the relationship is feels pretty good and it's pretty bueno where we going to have to you don't have to do this but I would raise the issue of what's really disturbing you and what's disturbing you is you feel like that that she essentially took a risk for you that you weren't you weren't ready to have taken okay and so that what you want is you want a collaborative much more collaborative approach to any kinds of decision-making of that magnitude and what you want if you guys can't work it out together you want to have an agreement that we're going to bring in a third party and is interested wise third party to help us sort it out okay and that that if you get that agreement from her in advance so her honors on the line that that's what's going to happen then the next time if ever which it may never happen but if the next time ever happens were there's enough chips on the line that you're being quite disturbed by her take on a situation and that she's going off on a tangent that makes you very uncomfortable and it feels like it's you know not the direction that you would want to go then you have the right to pull the card out of the pocket that says we agreed to get mediation on this we agreed to get counsel so let's go get counsel and if you do what you're going to do then at least we've done it after we did where we could try to process our different perspectives okay yeah she's willing to do that she's mentioned oh yeah well that's a lot of safety then and so the but I think that what you're going to experience for a while is the fact that she might agree to it is different than the fact that she'll do it and so you you live you know to some degree with a you know a bit of disquiet in the corner of your mind of realizing that that you you can't buy your own brute force and and status in the relationship necessarily control behavior of hers that you would consider quite disturbing and so that's a that's a little disturbing thing it's prob going to be fine it's probably a once-in-a-lifetime mess so we're probably you know there's probably more concern about this than needs to be there but the profit but what really is going on is in principle you found out that when when there's a significant difference between you and your wife that disagree ability that she has in her personality you know carries inherent dangers for you and that's true and you know women sweet women that are in relationships with big strong brutish aggressive disagreeable males are also were aware of the same problem in other words those men can drag you know can drag the family into a feud into a fight into a war etc or you know into litigation that they would have had no interest in being a part of and that's that's part of what comes with the disagreeable side of the personality spectrum there are there are costs and benefits to those characteristics and one of them is is that you know you may have gotten early warning against something that could have been a financial problem that that is true but the but what you've mostly found out was that that disagreeable streak you know you need to have a strategy for checking the potential risk exposure for you in future situations that look like they could be of significance all right that makes sense yeah that's great all good all right thank you for your call very good call Dave
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