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Episode 128: 6 Romantic Gestures That Are MAJOR Red Flags
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good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall how you doing this evening good good good hear your voice again Nate all right so you just came back from this never too late basketball camp how was it ha ha ha god yeah it was good it was very it was very good good time well III didn't mean to bring it up other than one of our listeners informed us in the Facebook group there was a Twitter congratulating you dear doctor I see I go with dear dr. Lyle because that's basically what I read on the show but it actually said Doug Lyall Sacramento stuns the never too late world by making 69 out of 80 and the famed a tee shot drill at the Oregon weekend camp congratulations to the first-time camper Doug so dr. lout I guess you can you can ball well alright I'll tell the story as long as we're here so it turns out there you have this idiot drill and Alan Goldhamer and I are there and we're both technically excellent shooters and so we do this it's the first night and we do our thing I think I hit 69 at the gallon at 64 we're both like totally disgusted with ourselves like we definitely are better than that so we anyway so we go up to report it to the head honcho and he goes well how many ice I said 69 and he looks at me and he goes you hit 69 I said yeah he goes that's the all-time high score for the history of the camp so this I have to tell you anybody out there that's a ballplayer I mean all I can say is that that the camp that's a little that's very surprising because I'm going to talk to Alan into going back to this thing and I fully intended to set the bar quite a bit higher when I go back that to anyway so it was it was definitely a fun camp and I I will say another thing that was interesting and that was that Alan I basketball camp we went went to is probably John Wooden's camp in about 1974 okay so it's been kind of a while since we went to a basketball camp and and so I actually didn't expect to learn anything from this camp our Alan's and my intention was just go there and just beat up on a bunch of old men that was our yeah that was the total intent okay and we're a little worried because we thought well there's some other old guys out there that are probably pretty good but we figured with our healthy diets and everything we're going to whomp on a bunch of old geezers so that was totally the plan so we get there and of course we're the oldest guys there's no old guys the young guys with the Kevlar yeah it's a little different every thought so then and then we didn't expect to learn anything so our attitude was yeah yeah we already know how to play this game so it turns out that of course which never really occurred to me that everything in the world folks continues to evolve and in fact if you if we were to think about it the general innovation rate for a free society is probably about 3% a year and so little did I occurred to me that basketball has evolved I mean I knew that with the three-point shot line of course they're all the young kids today can shoot from deep better than we could when I was a kid because we were never shooting that far but but that that doesn't impress me but what I didn't know was that at the high level of basketball which these coaches teach teach at there's all kinds of very subtle tricks that were never taught to me and I've never seen him before and so it was it was fascinating - it was a very kind of a very unusual camp because there's only 20 of us and the old days would be 200 kids of the camp it's only 20 of us there of these of us and uh and these coaches are very sophisticated and so I cannot wait now to practice some of my new fundamentals for some very tricky stuff and then whomp on all the young kids that I play with in my community and now they call me oh gee the old guy well now the old guy has the old dog got some new tricks and I'm really looking forward to so truly it's never too late to learn and Alan and I learned some stuff so we're going to we're going to have a good time this next year honing our new game so that's the story of our basketball that sounds pretty fun I almost want to go just never play basketball before yeah there you go well isn't it it's very cool all right let's go let's go on all right so this week the name of the show is six romantic gestures that are major red flags when dating one of them is when old guys brag about their athleticism everything haha well this is from a from a magazine called Napolitan which I'm sure a fuck 50 over listeners have listened have read and we're going to dissect it and see what we can learn from some of the lessons that they're giving us so the article starts with saying that most people want a partner who's attentive caring and if they're looking for an exclusive relationship actually committed but sometimes if you follow the advice of movies that teach you to admire grand romantic gestures your potential partners behavior could actually be covering up some serious flaws so here we go number one romantic gesture that is a serious red flag is they profess their love very early on mmm-hmm it all depends on how they say it according to dr. Mariana Bach or OVA who teaches relationship psychology at University of Toronto she says it's normal to feel infatuated very quickly if you really like someone but if a person says something as huge as I'm completely in love with you or I know you're my soul mate and I want to spend the rest of my life with you only a few weeks into dating you should take a few steps back well I would the doctor says I would tread carefully with someone making extremely grand gestures before they know you be cognizant that long-lasting and healthy love takes communication trust reliability and genuine care which takes some time to build yeah good good good thinking on the docks part yeah I don't disagree with this so let's continue on to hear what it is that she has to say and then I will I'll get my feedback from evolutionary psychology about why this is true so that we can actually look under the hood and understand the mechanics of why this is happening but let's let's hear more tell me more about what she has to say okay so she says although this is not true in all cases this sort of behavior is quite common unfortunately among controlling abusive or entire statistic partners so that was the first romantic gesture the second one is to overshare on a first date it's easy to think that someone who reveals a lot on a first date immediately feels connected to you particularly when they go into detail about their childhood and they're not afraid to open up a little bit but be cautious if the conversation turns to past relationships if they ramble about their past dating experiences or verbally rip apart people they've been with they may not be in the right place to start in your relationship the third one is they chat you up non-stop it's perfectly natural to text them talks to talk a lot it's certainly more romantic that the guy who takes and more romantic than the guy who takes four days just to text you back a one-word response but overdoing it on the videos and the means that can be a bad sign they may simply attach to romantic partners quickly and be unaware that the amount of communication is overwhelming number four is they want to spend all of their time with you theoretically the idea of just can't get enough of you sounds flattering because in fact they're recognizing that you're an awesome human being to be around but if your new date wants to come over to your place every night even when you make it clear that you're working or the friends or you just want a night to yourself you better look out requests for more quality time together can become toxic and unhealthy when you feel pressured or are actively made to feel guilty for wanting to spend time on interests or with other people other than your partner number five is they're very protective of you I love you too much to imagine you with anyone else may sound sweet at first but often it can cloak a very unhealthy form of jealousy dr. Bacher OVA says jealousy is a normal response to a real threat to a relationship and it's an evolutionary emotion humans feel when they suspect their relationship is in danger however irrational jealousy can be assigned your partner is controlling number six is they make sweeping grandiose promises it's not that saying something like I would never hurt you is inherently bad but sometimes the people who dramatically promise they'll never leave or hurt you are precisely the ones who do so it's best to pay attention to a person's actions and values first before wholeheartedly latching on to their words adding that a disconnect between words and behaviors good feeling could leave you feeling hurt and disappointed in the long run so this is these are the six she says all in all partners who make grand romantic gestures are almost our old aren't always I swear I know how to read mmm yes okay oh and all partners who make grand romantic gestures aren't always the best long-term partners regardless of how they express their devotion to you only time will tell whether they listen to you appreciate your flaws respect your independence and make you feel loved in a real way yeah so let's let's look at all this is true Doc's doing a good job there let's let's now look under the hood down into the mechanics just for our listeners so that you can see a little bit more clearly why this is happening what's happening let's let's take a very wide lens view and we're not going to talk about a romance specifically we're going to talk about motivation so what motivation is is movement and it's the it's the willingness of the organism to expend energy to move so it moves with a motive in other words it's trying to close the distance between where it is now and where it could be in order to obtain some value and whatever that value is that value has some internally recognised calculus for how that value lines up to all other values that are within the organisms ability to possibly obtain so what the what the organism has is a universal value system for that particular species so if you're if you're a chipmunk and you're looking at a little nut a little acorn you have a certain amount of motivation to close the distance between you and that acorn and that that lines up to all other values that are involved so it may be pretty valuable for you you may not have seen an acorn for a while you may not have a lot of acorns in your stack but you have a certain amount of essentially vector force that is pushing you to go get that ACORN but if it turns out there's a predator in the direction of that ACORN then that vector is pushing you further away so the what that what the brain is is a essentially it's a gambling machine that runs probabilities in order to triangulate behavior on a path to it's essentially organizing the contraction and relaxation of muscles and in order to move the organism around its environment in a way that will optimize genes survival so that's that's what the brain is is it's a it's essentially a behavior handicapper and it handicaps like a horse handicapper and horse race tries to figure out you know which horse is likely to be win and by what the odds are etc etc this is exactly what the brain is doing for behavior as it scans the environment calculates all known options for behavior by analyzing all major values and threats in the environment and then arrives at a certain amount of motivation for different particular measure options and then select the option that it believes is in fact the option of highest highest genetic efficiency so that's what it is now you can so the genetic efficiency is going to drive different feelings so your feelings are essentially an analog feedback system think of for example let's suppose that if there was if you were doing a dance routine in front of 10,000 people on the internet and and as you're doing your moves that in in real-time every every five seconds there's a there's an integrated set of feedback that they play a little tone that tells you you know what the 10,000 people think and so let's suppose that you you're doing a lousy then the tone is low and it goes boom like that means lousy and then if you do a little better or they think your moves are better the next five seconds it goes boom and then it's like thick blue like ah really high okay so we add an analog feedback system that moves up and down a scale to give you feedback about whether or not your your dance routine is being pumped as popular or not that's that's what emotions are emotions are an analog feedback system that is giving you giving you a feedback sense of how valuable various alternative courses of action are so what's going to happen is that if you go to sale sale at Macy's and you look at the thing like that it's the same damn sale I saw a month ago in fact I think I remember these these things were 35% off a month ago and now they're 25% off what kind of joke is that people raised the price by 10% in the last month I'm not interested okay so however if you go today and it turns out uh we've got an end-of-season clearance sale 65% off you're like whoa these things were 35% off a month ago now they're 60 by basically the price has been cut in half oh my god I want to stock up so let's look inside your nervous system and see what we're seeing we're seeing a motivation to contract the muscles in order to tan those values and we have excitement in the system so the system is excited it's basically saying this is really worth doing so there's a lot of energy expenditure in order to aggressively pursue this opportunity okay the reason why we're doing this is that it's a high efficiency feedback with respect with respect to genes survival as it compared to all other behaviors that we could be doing right now okay so we could be shining our shoes we could be having lunch we could be on the cell phone talking to our friend we could call our little old mother in Ireland and see how she is or what could we could do we could buy these sweaters at Macy's that are 65% off and pick through them and get our size and our colors before anybody else gets them okay if we believe that this is the best use of our time and energy right now that's what we're going to be focused on if we feel like the opportunity is particularly excellent in other words it's a very good opportunity relative to any opportunities we've seen in our habitat in the last three weeks then what's going to happen is the analog feeling system is going to generate a lot of heat high excitement okay and the reason why is the cost-benefit the the amount of cost for the behavior to acquire the value versus the amount of benefit is an exceptionally good ratio but what that means is it means that we can bet that the opportunity is going to be time limited because competitors are going to observe this and somebody is making a shitty trade okay somebody is making a mistake and while they're making a mistake we're going to cash in as fast as we possibly can because other people are asleep at the switch okay that's what drives excitement what drives excitement is rare opportunity a house that you're you know you're a house speculator and and you like to flip houses and so you come across a house and you're like oh my god the market doesn't know about it yet it's some little old lady she's dumping it and she doesn't care and it's not even listed and somebody told me about it and I went and talked to her and she she wants you know $65,000 for because that's ten thousand more than she paid ten years ago and our little town in Arkansas and the truth is is that I know it's worth ninety five okay but she's embarrassed about it because it has bad paint like fantastic are we excited yes we're excited okay somebody might think dr. Lyle how unethical to steal thirty thousand dollars from a little old lady okay that's somebody else's problem okay now kinda like way up on that younger older man at the basketball camp so anyway the point is is that excitement excitement is about the the high energy that the system will act activate in order to seize a short-term opportunity that is likely to close okay along with that excitement there is also paranoia okay so there's a feeling that oh my god somebody else is going to get it okay so we feel we feel nervous that that opportunity is going to be the person on the other end of this opportunity is they are going to wake up okay so this is how this is going to work so if I'm a gold miner you know it's Setters fort I'm paranoid as hell that if I've got a claim that's making money I'm like I don't want anybody else to know where my claim is I don't want to know how that they don't want them to know how much money I'm making out of the claim I'm paranoid as hell okay the first day I'm gonna buy a shotgun and a big dog okay and I'm going to try to keep people off my claim now the underneath that in a romantic situation or in in any situation but it particularly a romance it this is all about being generated by a cost-benefit analysis that says this is one hell of an opportunity essentially I am being over rewarded it's the concept of being over awarded so everything that you see in this woman's writings you are seeing the fact that the person like she's sort of trying to blame this on the personality of the individual on the other side of the fence that's actually a mistake okay so she's saying okay these people tend to be narcissistic or they tend to be this potato it's a pattern that she has seen and the literature may have seen in other words it is true that that will happen with such individuals but she's missing the broader principle that is in fact driving the boat that some of those individuals often happen to be in which is that those individuals feel over awarded when they meet somebody kind of interesting because they know they are carrying around substantial liabilities because they're haywire and they know it okay so the but not everybody is carrying around major liabilities so some people that are not norsu cystic freaks will also act excited paranoid over rewarded and have a hell of a lot of energy to try to seize the opportunity and that that is happening not because they were controlling that case or anything else is just that they're very excited and they feel over awarded okay this is the concept of high energy expenditure in the machine when it feels like it is it has the potential to seize a giant profit of some kind of any kind whether it's real estate or whether it's sweaters at Macy's or whether it's acorns that happen to be all their clothes tied together or whether or not it's a romantic opportunity the very same process is going on the motivational mechanisms are calculating a high benefit relative to the cost ratio they understand intuitively that this opportunity is going to be very time limited and therefore under heavy genetic selection pressure and as a result they they are a what was I going to say they they're feeling pressure to try to get the deal closed so they're trying to get the person to to essentially you know be with them team up with them etc now some of the characteristics she talks about are a little different so that this is sort of a smattering of different problems and that's okay so that she's describing things people that are very open and talking about their ex and complaining about it you know we're looking at some signs of disagreeable humans that that feel entitled etc etc so there's a smattering of problems that are being discussed in this list but the most overriding issue that that they're talking about is actually the high selling energy of the individual that is that is feeling panicked and paranoid and essentially is wanting to do a full-court press to try to drive this relationship towards exclusivity as fast as they can they will also make a lot of grandiose promises because they feel over warded and panicked so what they're going to do is they're going to try to sell future benefits that they cannot currently you know distribute and they're going to be trying to minimize their costs like oh no I don't need anything for myself I'm just one of those people that just give Gibbs Gibbs Gibbs Gibbs okay so this is the story now so that obviously most of the time in a true-blue romantic situation most of the time the male feels some of this so from the jump because remember he doesn't have the in the Cosmo article Cosmo in general sold the women so the article was written from the perspective of a woman being pursued by a Mel the and so this this dynamic going to be most commonly with males directing high-energy towards females because the male feels like he's getting pretty good feedback from a female and he feels over rewarded by about females looks and as a result you can't see anything particularly objectionable about her personality or her brains and so as a result he's kind of falling all over himself very quickly because he because essentially she seems to pass all all criteria needed for him to be wanting to drive this thing towards exclusivity very quickly so he's selling very high benefit and hiding costs he is he is essentially leaking his anxiety he feels paranoid he peels over potentially over rewarded he's very excited and the gambling machine is generating a buy signal very very hard and just like a buyer on Wall Street that he's panicked you know in half panicked to try to try to grab as much of the stock as he can now so some of this is reasonable to some degree if you don't have this dynamic when we don't have that good of dynamic so we need to see some of it if you're a female the male needs to be chomping at the bit a little bit to some to some significant extent if he's not then he's not that hot on you okay that's what's taking place the unless he's an unbelievably stable human but the most stable person I ever knew when he went out with his what his would-be wife for the first time he was closing pretty hard even on date one okay because he he was pretty damn sure this was the one and it turned out it was so the so anyway I forget where I'm wandering with this so what would I say I would say don't be turned off by the excitement don't be turned off by a little paranoia don't be turned off by little little possible hints of stress around jealousy issues early in the deal those are all normal but if they're very high in intensity any of them then we've got a problem and this is precisely why by the way we have strategy of 10 paid dates and the reason is is we're slowing down in sexual action to a crawl and the reason we're doing this gives you time to vet the underlying personality characteristics to see what's under there and that's why we do it because the the guy who is merely excited and feels like he's somewhat over rewarded which is exactly what you want him to feel and he's feeling like he's over awarded on a superficial level but he does not feel outclassed ultimately and what he wants to do is he wants to say listen if this is a pair bond deal trust me I am going to do everything I can and make this thing at least even for you I want to make you an offer you can't refuse I want to show you who it is that I am and what I'm willing to do for you and that guy is going to be patient and he's going to be selling essentially a long-term steady flow protection and provision that's what he's attempting to do okay the a guy that is actually not really in that situation and has a lot of dirty laundry that he's hiding and has some has some flaky circuits is trying to close more quickly with far greater move towards deep psychological intimacy and vulnerability and physical NMC in other words that guy's trouble okay that's precisely why we cool everybody's jets slowed everything down and when it turns out that he's a fundamentally a flake with a lot of problems believe me we're going to know that by date five if we don't know it a lot sooner alright fantastic dr. Lai we on we have three colors on hold so we're just going to take them one by one Wow she asked me to call her chippy from San Diego chippy from San Diego let me show oh she's a chippy on the side yes hi there dr. Leigh oh my oh man great with that chippy are we talking about yeah wait so you're the chippy on the side yes well I'm not happy with that I've been a happy non-monogamous pair-bond I'm extremely open to experience and agreeable enough to be called a unicorn okay all right all right so my question is I'm doing a one-hour talk for a group of about 50 to a hundred people and I would love your input on what an evolutionary psychology perspective would be on my topic okay what's your solution to the me to movement me to movement okay the me to movement you're going to help me with this because I'm barely paying attention so the me to movement I guess is the notion that that I as a female and protect specifically it's generally what it is was sexually molested and is that is that essentially what it is or is there more to it tell me more yes so it's about supporting survivors and to end sexual violence against women okay all right and so when you say a solution to the me to movement like I don't I don't have any problem with what the person that has been molested or worse you know speaking up naming perpetrators and and basically saying hey you know in some ways what this can do for people that have been harboring some shame or embarrassment about having this happen to them to see millions of other people say hey it happened to me and I'm a star basketball player in the WNBA or this happened to me and I am now CEO of you know I don't know Tabasco sauce corporated like whatever it is I don't see anything wrong with that so when you say a problem of the media movement tell me what it is what problem it is that you're referring to so how to help support men and approaching women sexuality how to have a healthy sexual expression how to help sexual you know victims or survivors mudball what in their you know sexual ization hmm well I don't think there's a single scrap of evidence that indicates that anybody was molested has any arrests in their sexual you know evolution so right away we have an incorrect premise on the part of this movement so the movement it was an unpleasant situation that took place in the past and it's an unpleasant memory to reconsider but it did not derail anybody's sexual evolution as a human so there is no process by which we need to help anybody in this regard because they weren't damaged okay so obviously there could be rare exceptions to this but by and large the implication that these people have been damaged in any way in this arena is a mistake okay so we have a we can't have sort of an incorrect premise on which this is floating so I there's no need to help men try to figure out how to be nicer to women in these arenas because women are damaged okay so that again incorrect incorrect premise after incorrect premise and so we don't really have I don't see this is a problem I see this as a I've known many people who were molested and the molestation is an unpleasant memory they they wish that they they wish you hadn't happened and so every now and then their their nervous system they pick up cues from the environment and it will rattle them for a little bit in the same way that it might rattle somebody that that watch their dog get hit by a car okay it's not a pleasant memory to have so we have our memory system will we'll keep in mind or keep in file drawers incidences that we're unpleasant and when certain cues come up from the environment it will it will activate those memories that is different than looking at unpleasant memories as termites that are eating away at your soul and somehow undermining the found day your self-esteem your self-confidence or your capacity for happiness joyful sexuality or anything else that is a mistake okay and that mistake has its roots in Freudian in you know psychodynamic psychology that is based on false premise after false premise about the nature of health psychology works so the so the bigger answer your question is there there's nothing wrong with the me to movement and as far as as far as I'm concerned people normalizing the fact that this is a fairly widespread phenomenon and that they go on to have perfectly normal excellent lives it's fine for people to say isn't as shitty that this happen to me etc to sort of sensitize the culture in this regard it's perfectly fine when we go past this and think that it is a bigger monster that needs I don't know government action criminal justice stuff and all kinds of witch hunting the answer is no we need to to recognize it for the for for what it is and identify what it is not it is not something these experiences are not going to linger in the nervous system and cause the kind of trouble but that so many psychologists and laypeople believe that they cause okay chippie from san diego thank you very much for the phone call on that excellent question all right our next caller is Andrew from Seattle Andrew welcome to the show good evening gentlemen yeah Andrew good good thank you I'm attempting a three deduct a treat to five water fast on my own here in my home yeah and I went for tea I once go one two days just fine and towards another two days I had a big conflict on my head there oh my gosh they feature I not face it don't know I'm gonna grab my teeth I'm going to do this mhm my instincts are going no and I'll go get some food what are you nuts we don't look at them fooling no no I can do this I can do it and then my daughter made some watermelons and rice and couple potatoes and I wanted eating a little bit else I felt bad afterwards for caving and felt good at first I felt bad afterwards so that I want another 24 hours about any food at all yeah and now I'm sort of lost I'm not sure how much longer I can continue how do i grid to this third day have I started all over again I'm kind of like confused alright well we're not going to have a long discussion about this you know free country free world water fasting is a great idea done under the right circumstances a lot of people can can do a short water fast on their own they're young and healthy enough and and it's sensible it's not sensible to go very long on your own I wouldn't I would start to caution people if they're going to go more than 72 hours the not that many people haven't done this and gone more but the problem is is you start to get weak started to get tired and if there's a bunch of food around the house you didn't get temptation and then you may not wind up doing doing a very good job of it no all is fine the so it's not you're not going to wind up damaged or hurt as a result of this provided that you don't have something really unpleasant that you're trying to deal with so let's suppose you've got I don't know Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis or some such thing and you try to water fast on your own that's a mistake okay if you've got some other medical conditions that you're trying to address that you're fasting on your own they could be a mistake you're trying to fast on medications that's a mistake so in other words this is a this is a vastly useful tool it's the biggest thing that modern medicine doesn't know it is absolutely the biggest thing there are I don't know some small number of doctors in the world that know how to do it and your hosts on this show Nathan Gersh fell doctrine and Roosevelt is one of those people okay he went through many years of outstanding first class training at the premier research for water fasting in the world which is true north health center in Santa Rosa and so the this is you know you're playing around with this thing you're you're kind of screwing around with it it's not hurting you to screw around with it sounds like you're healthy you're bouncing around all this but for you want to get serious you do three days that's no big deal you want to go longer and you want to try to address other big things might be a good idea to go to a place where they got docs around that know what they're doing so anyway good luck all good I've got I got another little friend of mine that's going to do three days here in the next started tonight on on her water fast young healthy athletic no medical problems make sense there's a reason why she wants to do this and so this is not something I discourage people from generally but you know be prudent and know what your own situation is and in general the the old the old school said don't water cows without supervision the new school says long as you're healthy and we don't have anything we're particularly worried about becoming destabilized and if you're on no medications perfectly reasonable to go three days any more than that we suggest that you have somebody looking over your shoulder that knows what they're doing all right good call good question what else we got after andrew from seattle thank you very much for the phone call okay our next caller caller what's your name where you calling from caller with the last three numbers are four three nine caller going once caller going twice caller going three times well I guess they are not there all right well doctor last so we had some really good insight about romantic gestures that are major red flags and seems like what you're saying is that the girls can usually spot whether or not the guy feels over rewarded if they're if they can see the anxiety they can see the nervousness but if they delay this delay the sexual chemistry the delay the the sexual contact and they kind of keep spotting the guy then he'll actually reveal himself all of his personality characteristics that may be dangerous will actually end red flags may actually reveal himself in due time right we just need a little bit of time a little bit of background and that's all that's all we really need just to slow down the likelihood of making a mistake you don't want to make that's the idea I interrupted you yours you did and I have one more thing I want to talk about a good friend of mine called me or texted me and asked me about there's a new movie out I can't remember the name of it it's like I don't know identical strangers or something like that something of this nature it's the story of these triplets who were separated at Birth and then found each other in New York you know in late 1970s and it's a documentary and it's a fascinating story and unfortunately of course the the filmmakers do a remarkable job of not finding the gold sitting right in the middle it I did it's actually entertaining for me to watch like a bunch of blind people stumbling into the elephant and not seeing it for what it is the the it turns out that this was the these children were these three young boys were separated at Birth and it was done the way that it was done through an adoption agency in New York and it happened to be run by members of the Jewish faith and not surprisingly what was connected with that with the psychodynamic psychologist or psychiatrist ability was skya trous let's blame what we're going to say skaia trips because I think he was besides I'm a psychologist so I just said it was okay so this was apparently a very big shot psychiatrist big big mahai muckety-muck in the new york psychoanalytic circles now what this guy did i use like some austrian which makes him almost a german and what he did was really shitty okay so what this guy did was that he he selected three hand selected three different types of parents and separated these three boys out so that he could observe their development under three different types of parents for whom he had therefore they were fitting a psychodynamic profile that he expected then to be able to you know blow away the world and show that when we put these three identical kids in these three different psycho dynamically charged environments we get three very different outcomes okay this is clearly what this guy was up to and he was trying to do legitimate research but it is really shitty and unethical as hell okay this is not what you should have done tell the guy be imprisoned if he pulled a stunt like this today so what turns out you know the famous last words we're going to do this study well what happens is these kids run into each other and it becomes this incredible story all over the pages of the New York Times and so they become rock stars and they're on all kinds of TV shows you know I don't know Phil Donahue and Dave Cabot or whatever the hell okay these guys become like nationally famous I didn't remember anything about it this was you know I just went right past me because I don't I don't have any friends I don't watch TV so I never know what's going on in broad culture but apparently these guys were a big deal in the late 70s and very extroverted nice-looking kids and so what what do we see we see that they're incredibly similar and they said it's like looking at themselves there and they become fast friends they're all you know entertaining funny smart verbal extroverted it's extraordinary to watch it and then it turns out life goes on one gets depressed kills himself you know so some shit happens and these guys are like bitter they find out that they had been separated at Birth by this you know evil genius that did this to them and that they that they that the evil genius won't release the records about what the findings were of all the psychological observations that they did to them it's like - dum dum they didn't find anything okay the study blew up in the psychiatrist face when you guys met and the whole world finds out that you're basically the same it didn't make a damn bit of difference who your parents were so this is what was obviously found out now what happens next is interesting the kids get bitter because they feel like who I was subject to you know investigation how terrible how harmful it hurtful this was a bullshit okay the second of all oh the terrible trauma being separated at birth now it's not terribly traumatic there's no you didn't know you were separated at birth and so you wouldn't have any an idea that anything happened the idea that something that happens early in your first few weeks of life imprints on your brain and impacts your emotional life it's totally ridiculous and completely contradicted by all scientific evidence it's ridiculous now the you know so but I mean it's psycho dynamically makes sense but it does make any sense in biology and doesn't make any sense at all to the common sense in general if you have a bad six weeks in your life no big deal okay you don't even remember yet about six weeks so here's what what goes on next what goes on next is that the these these guys want to seal the records so the records of these of these guys and some other twins that they had studied wind up being sealed and they'll be unveiled at Yale University in like two thousand and sixty-six like all what's in the record fans nothing's in the record the young psychologist they had one that was involved in the observations that collected the data and they interviewed him he's like yeah I was watching these kids and I watched them all I'm taking data on him it's like kind of weird because I was just watching your brother last week and God he's a hell of a lot like you guy was really open about it he wasn't doing anything unethical from his standpoint and his followers he knew he was just there to document these different twin behaviors and these twins were separated at birth and a is just taking data well I know what data he took is Bailey scales or Wexler scales and different kinds of little you know I know the Rorschach test like that's a big deal okay bottom line is is that what they got was these kids are really held similar they're all having these similar pretty decent happy lives because that's who they are and then they grow up and they're incredibly similar when they meet each other at 18 19 20 years old unbelievably similar and then what happens what happens is is that they want to seal the records what deep down thing did they find in the records they found that guess what they're similar so the reason why this idiot does not want that released he died recently anyway the old psychiatrist that engineered this Fiasco was that there was a vastly better way to do this research and by 1985 it had been done and had been done by Abe telogen and people like you know Robert Plomin and all these guys at the University of Minnesota that they showed that monozygotic twins raised apart you know wind-up unbelievably similar and that when you have people adopt it in you know when they're adopted in two families they do not take on characteristics of the adults or children that are in those families okay that's what's been done drop-dead evidence no contradiction to that evidence this guy ran his own rogue study he actually did it beyond what the Minnesota twin studies did in other words he actually intervened with his psychodynamic vision to try to prove that the type of parent that you adopt a kid into is going to have this profound impact on the child's development he knew that it did not and when those kids became rockstars on the front of Time magazine in 1979 it's like oh my god my grand theory just went up in smoke because look at them they're all the same they're unbelievably similar okay so the reason why this guy turned like a gofer and headed for the dirt is and took the data with him it was because he ran a really shitty unethical study and he got quietly humiliated that his grand psychodynamic theory was obviously disproven and if that wasn't enough the great research that would settle the question forever would be published four years later in the mid-1980s to set to set the record straight forever so if anybody at the end of the end incredible that those filmmakers couldn't manage to choke that out because it doesn't make it doesn't make a good story okay so they wind up with a hokey little you know story at the end and they're all acting like it's all a great mystery and it's all unfair that it's going to be sealed and what's in the record friends there's nothing in the record the nothing at all interesting in that record and if you want to know what the truth is about about how this works you just read Abe telogen and you read the Minnesota twin studies you read the adoption studies and it's very clear how it all works so unfortunately for these kids they wind up feeling a different kind of a feeling like they were I don't know Lab Rats of some kind it's not a good feeling to feel but it doesn't do you any damage and in fact I think unfortunately a bitterness that comes out of them and a bitterness that that may have rocked one of them into and just you know this suicide that he did with the because they became so novel in such rock stars very early in life that the novelty and interest behind them was bound to wane and so this is the equivalent of you know young youthful you do some stupid sitcom when you're 19 years and suddenly you're an international you know phenomenon and it turns out you're not even very talented and now pretty soon what do we got we got problems you're a mess okay and I think life was actually hard on these kids because of the extraordinary adulation and excitement that came around them and the attention and essentially they wound up over awarded because as individuals there's nothing that particularly special or interesting thing about these kids they had no particularly great achievements at all and yet they were massively warded into celebrityhood and then when you do that and then it doesn't back up because you really can't sing and you really can't dance and you really can't rock and roll and what are you going to do you're a celebrity with no reason for you to be the celebrity and so I think that that is responsible for the suicide probably more than anything else and anybody that's looking for anything deeper in the terrible aspects of this thing is looking in the wrong place so that's my analysis of the identical strangers movie I think for anybody that's interested in behavior genetics it is a fascinating movie to watch because you're you're not looking at actors you're looking at the real thing and when you see it it's it's it's it's an amazing sight
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