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Episode 129: Cheapskates, Hoarders, Energy vampires, Marriage trouble
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all right good evening everybody its Meiji here allowing dr. Doug Lyall with the beat your genes podcast you can listen to us live on www are a do calm dr. Lisle how you doing this evening good how you doing I'm doing fantastic alright we school months ago about 2030s maybe yeah maybe 10 shows ago we had a question come up about beauty standards for women and whether or not advertisers were influencing the standards for women whether or not women were influencing standards for men it was episode number 116 so I'd encourage listeners to check that out if they have more questions about it but recently a listener sent me a question on the same topic and I thought it would be really good for you to reiterate the issue here so dr. Lyle done female models from several decades ago the 30s 40s and 50s were often plump but by today's standards many weren't attractive and were overweight so this listener wants to know if this is a result of the standards changing or did it take advertisers a few decades to figure out what the standard was yeah good question and I and I think yeah I'm not we know that this this took place it's more it's more subtle than then is generally appreciated so if you go back and see I just if you see some hand-picked models they they may be thick quite a bit thicker than you'd ever see today and this was a plus-size model but not not typically so this but this is a very interesting question and I just read this question a few minutes ago I went online and I looked at the the biggest names that I knew in in Hollywood during that period of time and so I'll read off some numbers for you just so that we we can see that things have been actually surprisingly invariant so ann-margret was 5 for 119 Marilyn Monroe is 5 5 115 in a prime Gardner was five six one twenty Rita Hayworth was five six one seventeen Kim Novak was five six one twenty-one Raquel Welch who everybody in my generation every heterosexual male would have given at least two fingers for one night the five six one eighteen at Grace Kelly five seven one eighteen so we can see that these are very lean numbers and and this is all this is the biggest stars that they're worth so yeah so what was going on was given the fact that those were the big mega stars those were the sex symbols of those decades it's interesting that that advertisers were sometimes using much thicker models and it could have been that they that there was some disagreement and confusion as to how to go about the process of selling products so I I don't know I do know also the very simple research was done showing that Playboy centerfolds from 1970 about 1975 to 1995 went through a similar metamorphosis where they got quite a bit thinner but they but what remained invariant was the waist hips ratio and so I think I think the weights I can't remember it might have gone from about you know 125 pounds down to about 115 pounds so they dropped it dropped ten pounds but the waist hips ratio remains exactly the same so any rate I think that there was actually more to this story mmm-hmm this was a puzzle for for David buss and I I can't I remember reading some meanderings of his of his some of his thinking and some of other researchers thinking I think there was some degree of evidence that in countries where the food supply is is less where food is I II don't think of supply but relatively expensive etc relative to other goods that that that plumper females are more attractive and so it could be the case that that as our society became with with food far more plentiful and then every so many people becoming overweight the standard shifts a little bit and it becomes possibly a signal of conscientiousness to be very thin so I think that that I think that's I don't know that we have epidemiological evidence of this it would be interesting to know if somebody's got it about whether or not the incidence for example of anorexia nervosa is is considerably more now than it was say in nineteen in the 1930s in the middle of a Great Depression where everybody's struggling to get enough to eat so I have a feeling that that that some of these things may have to do with with food supply issues trick essentially trickling their way into the cultural computations of what is high status so anyway it interesting questions and I think that unfortunately I think it may not be a clear-cut answer or maybe but I don't think that the advertisers were doing any influencing of the standards I think the advertisers were following trends in the culture and and certain things that we saw were invariant and clearly built into the genetics of the organism is the two to three ways tips ratio fantastic yeah every time I discussed beauty stands with with friends of mine I always we all end up talking about the Italian Renaissance and how you know that in that period of painting there's always more plump women and that was considered right you know symbol of statins so yet that may have been because of the admit there's many there's a lot of speculation about why that may have been the case the period not not sure why and the but it but it could have been these food sensitive issues and it could be that essentially that the high class women that were being painted these are these these were probably you know wealthy people and those wealthy people were the wealth was evidence of the wealth was on the bodies says essentially and as opposed to people that were were poor so it you could have a situation where you could get a funny-looking process taking place where under certain dynamics or certain social dynamics you could wind up with something that is going fairly fairly hard against the genetic code to some degree status is pushing against it for a short period of time that we is not typical of what we see worldwide and in and and certainly when we go back to the statues of Venus you know two thousand years ago and we we see that they are five four one hundred twenty pounds it has been the translation of what what those statues would translate into real-life people today which is remarkably similar to our Hollywood sirens so yeah there there may have been wobbles and interesting periods of time where things looked a little different for a short period of time but essentially we continue to see some of these invariants and we see things returning back to these pretty similar ratios yeah I always wonder just how disagreeable that you telling women of the Renaissance period actually are all right moving right along yeah Buddha okay okay our next question is about cheapskates dr. Lyle what dynamics are in play with the cheapskate father-in-law of the listener here is fantastically cheap won't pay for hotel wants to go to Taco Bell if he says let's go out to Mexican food his frugality goes way beyond just using an papers that flex login you've got a lot of money in the bank and he lives very frugally to the extreme I'm confused well he's been successful his entire life and the family was well-off during his childhood he was so successful that he retired in his mid-50s and now at 70 his retirement is still secure and more than comfortable so what forces at play here when he's washing out ziplock bags or requiring rides when an uber would be far more convenient I start to get a little resentful his regular judgment and his general disagreeable nature makes this particular quirk pretty hard to stomach can you show some light no I cannot show you light on this the this is a clearly you know OCD ish behavior this is uh there's a lot of conscientiousness in there there's some but yeah I mean I've seen it actually this is not far from my father and if you would ask my father what's going on inside of his head he would I actually did at one point I cross-examined him on his thinking about a about sort of sweating over a minimal purchase around food and he he stepped me through the logic and he basically said well if it turns out that you know when when I'm older and I can't make any money and I'm living off my savings and I'm actually and I literally go through it all then I'll wish that I had saved the two bucks on this pizza okay so that's what was in that particular head so you're like my dad could articulate you know you didn't just have a vague anxiety my dad actually could articulate right down through the chain of logic as he was essentially walking walking me through what was going on in his computations which was the worst case scenario and so so it's just what it looks like like you've got a worst case scenario so this person is looking at this guy and saying listen listen he's got more money than then he's very comfortable so yeah well how comfortable what if he needs to you know go to the third world and buy himself a kidney and it cost five hundred thousand dollars and he's got a private bunch of people and all goes wrong he has to fly back and then he has to admit the terrible sin that he has he has to get a defense attorney but he's got to get to John Hopkins anyway and he has to donate a million dollars for a wing so that they picks them it's like what if what F okay the truth of the matter is in principle there's never too much money and in theory there might not ever there might not be enough for something that you might want so what we're looking at I think is very high conscientiousness which which drives the worst case scenario and it drives it in a variety of perspectives so some people it will drive it into you know having their house super clean and free of germs other people it's going to be making sure that they are half an hour early for any business meeting and in other people it's going to make sure that they don't waste a nickel I have a relative I have a relative that has a a comfortable eight figure net worth so people can like do their little do their little math and that's what it is and so it turns out that this individual if you go to their house and he pours you wine at the end of the night he will pour your wine back into the wine bottle which is one of it yet another reason why I don't drink what is any event so this this sort of thing I think that that's what you're looking at is you're looking at and in this case and actually interestingly enough in this individual also quite disagreeable so when you start realizing that there would be others or and somebody's wealth and that they would be essentially wanting to have reasonable access and share processes and joint decision-making in around the wealth and it turns out that we've got a disagreeable human that has this these uh this highly frugal you know hyper conscientiousness chip that they can get it can get rough like you can't push them around you're like no and so they're and so this is the disagreeableness I think probably helps the process probably if we looked at all misers we would find that one of the characteristics would that they would be disagreeable and not just not just have this specific kind of anxiety so great question and it got me to relive that that moment of discovery that I found is enough no I never yeah that's right all right Alec um I I was curious to about people who have hoarding who who are hoarders yeah that hyper constant interests as well no I not exactly I think that I think it's in there and remember it's not like what we have is like a a set of five or six ingredients or a jukebox in here what we're talking about is we use words like consciousness is to describe a pattern a behavior that seems to be associated and clearly is associated with gene variances and has a that plays out in in behaviors that are that are somewhat similar from individual to individual so the we have to keep in mind we're looking at impressions of sort of broad characteristics now hoarding to me it does have some of those characteristics so hoarders feel the anxiety that they made use something someday and they don't want to give it up and a lot of times it has to saving these Ziploc bags that this person was talking about the so in other words is starting to cross over and look a lot like that orders have a fear that they're going to need something and if you if you think about animals human beings were able to start to produce things of value that they would carry with them you know probably in the last one to two million years maybe longer but probably not it's probably around a couple of million years ago is when they started carrying little tools around and then in the last five hundred thousand years when they were effectively truly human they were probably carrying around quite a bit of things clothing you know moccasins little tools there's we've seen evidence of a lot of little things that they carried around in the last hundred thousand years so you can you can start to imagine that you would have anxiety about about losing things that you had acquired and probably acquired a quite substantial cost and so as a result you could start to get the feeling of not wanting to lose anything and to keep it and so this is sort of protecting the wealth and so hoarding you know looks like this and it's uh I could be wrong about about the derivatives of this it could be something a little bit different in the kind of sort of behavior that you'll see in animals that will collect things particularly collecting food it's not the only thing animals collect but I have a feeling that instead of being an instinct they came down all the way from a chipmunk for storing for winter I don't think so I don't think it has to do with that it would you would be moderately interesting to see if equatorial peoples are as likely to be hoarders as people from northern latitudes if there's a difference there that would be that would be notable and it you know it might be it might be a derivative of food storage and anxiety about food storage that that crept in and became a bigger issue in the 150,000 years I I think it's more likely to be a variant personality about you know the conscientiousness of something that could be could be useful and that we're giving it away so I think it's I think it's similar to this but you know it's it's not clear to me exactly what it is okay fantastic so all right we've got two callers on hold we're going to take one question and then then we'll get to the callers so okay dr. lout so last show and a couple of shows before that and in chef AJ's webinar we heard you talk about the concept of keeping your time valuable and the the examples you gave of having you know thousand hours or hundred thousand hours or a hundred thousand dollars well every time you give that away you can't take it back so this listener asks a question blocked a while or the concept of an energy vampire or drama queen meaning that these people somehow feed on our energies our need upheaval and in a spotlight okay so they see if I understand the question concepts are bit is that is that they feed on our energies well what let's talk about what I really mean by this that what we're talking about is that there are people that will use various strategies in order to get basically take some of your energy so you're you're designed by nature your entire motivational system is designed around the products of principle of energy conservation so everything about you is is being filtered through an evolutionary history to build behavioral strategies that will optimize the use of energy in order to reproduce genes so that that's how you're built and that's how all animals are built is they're built with energy expenditure being front and center in terms of in terms of evading the organism to do whatever it's doing so it's going to turn out that one thing that we will see happen is that there are and people will do a great deal of trading they'll do more trading with each other than any other species trades with each other other ways this is the most social of all animals so you could say well B is very social but they're not trading with each app they're a little isolated job that they do you're not watching exchanges between thousands or groups you know groups of individuals and you're not seeing all kinds of different trades for all different kinds of purposes there is nothing like a human so human and not only do they trade part of that process of trading is also insurance so this is what friends are about and and families wind up being insurance policies some degree that that the fiber of that is benefited through Hamiltonian math because we have shared genes but the bottom line is is that energy utilization energy conservation these are core concepts if you're going to understand anything about why any creature is doing anything that it's doing and so it's no surprise that there are individuals among among us that are going to be people are designed by nature to use manipulative strategies in order to get essentially to have a net energy plus for whatever's that they did so and that's fine so some guide that's I don't know he's selling tacos he's trying to make a profit and thereby be energy efficient so that he has more more money in his pocket so he can go trade for more things and he's trying to be as efficient as he can about that and he's also trying to sell you those tacos for as much as he can get okay so so to blame what I call energy vampires or drama queens as if they are independently different from other people in principle would be a mistake at one level there was everybody's out to get as much energy efficiency as they can get including these people the difference is is that these people are using emergency mechanisms and there there are threats there's anger there's tears in other words they're manipulative as hell and they're they're essentially raising raising potentially activating paternalist things paternalistic or paternalistic instincts s by their crises that they have they're also threatening us with anger if we don't do what it is that they want and so as a result what happens is these people are a lousy cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the expenditure of your energy so they wind up taking more from your life than their giving and that's what it is so when we say Darr the feeding on our energies I mean not like a vampire but they are attempting to manipulate us into doing doing things for them that that ultimately don't make a lot of sense when we see it from a variety of perspectives and alternative choices that we had so we can get hooked in by their draw and I you same thing with the drama queens at least they can start to start to make us feel like they are they are in trouble during an emergency and and one unit of our effort now is going to be the difference between them experiencing a huge loss and not experiencing huge loss so our natural calculus says oh boy this is really worth it because they're really in trouble and they really need this help so it activates altruistic mechanisms inside of us you know this is this is where compassion you know arises in the system and it signals to us that we want to do this good thing because it turns out is biologically profitable for the two of us for me to expend this energy and for them to consume it and then they're going to owe me because they got 20 units 22 one pay off because they were in such an emergency that I mitigated the emergency with some of my effort so it turns out that these are the these are the boys and girls the cry wolf and so they're they're always in a crisis so always a you know etc and so this kind of manipulative tactics I mean they aren't consciously and deliberately doing this they just are they've got emotional instability disagree ability low conscientiousness they've got a constellation of characteristics that make them very expensive to deal with and so that's why I you know that's why it's important for us to analyze and get a real feel for who you know what these personalities are and how to spot them and really understand that these are stable characteristics within the organism that are going to have repetitive repetitive emergencies that are going to be expensive and so so yeah they aren't quote feeding on our energies like a vampire and they don't quote me to be in the spotlight in exactly but they are trying to steal our energy and they are willing to go into the spotlight and show how vulnerable and pathetic they are and how upset they are and how angry and how unfairly they've been treated those are just they're willing to raise hell and social turbulence in order to have mitigating concessions from the village so that's that's what I mean by this and that's hopefully that it helps us understand what we're dealing with fantastic all right dr. Lai we're going to take a couple of callers cool caller caller this is an anonymous caller from Los Angeles welcome to the show yes hi dr. Lyle hi there how you doing I'm okay a little nervous I wrote down my notes I practice like you always say when you get nervous so I don't have to just speak off the cuff very good okay so all right well tell us tell us a story go ahead okay I'd like to know how to handle my husband's drinking and anger he drinks almost every single night about three to six beers he and he doesn't have his priorities he'll buy like fun toys exercise equipment vitamins electronics and then he won't consult me about it then he leaves the important things like his car registration he neglects those things and then I have to pay past penalties when I confront him about it he angry and starts yelling while not letting me get a word in edgewise so I've tried flooding the circuits by pointing out his strong points what I love about him and when I express my concerns he gets upset and says you just gave me a compliment and now you're saying this which is it so I'm at a loss and in the past he's told me he wants to work on these things but I don't see him making any effort I think he's just telling me what I want to hear and I'm extremely frustrated when we got married he quit drinking because I told him it was a make or break for me but soon after he started again and it never really stopped got it okay and so how long have you been married about five years five years okay yeah the got it and and you did do you add the two you have any children no okay so no children and and are you are you your childbearing age or is this a later million relationship later life I'm not a child caring knee okay so your later life relationship you've been together for five years and you're you're real frustrated with these with these behaviors how yeah how would you yeah how would you describe say how happy you are with the relationship in general it's it's up and down these are really huge points for me that aren't changing at all and then there's a part of him that so loving and so caring and then sometimes I almost feel guilty like why can't I just accept him the way he is because he accepts me the way I am but then I think well I'm not doing those careless things so I sometimes I have these guilt feelings that you know I don't know how else to say it but right I just when I talk to my sister she says you know you guys are always up and down I know you love each other but it's always the same I hear you know one day you're in love one day you know you're frustrated so I think the trend is like an up-and-down thing yeah yeah so my guess is if this is a later life relationship bar are the two of you fairly well had you kind of taken care of yourselves up to then with careers and so forth or was one person supporting the other at this point or how's that working out in terms of the financial dynamics actually when we got together I kind of was saving him from you know he was homeless and whatever and I helped him out as a friend but of course when I took him in things changed when he expressed his feelings for me because I have known him for a very long time we dated when we were young so we had always kept in touch then he you know his work picked up and he's he has a very good career and a stable one and so did I until just recently I left work on his urgings to go back to school to pursue another career the third one in my life so far so now I'm in school and he's the breadwinner yeah okay and and so as terms of your own your own sort of personal finances and so on and so forth are you so at this point in the game are you effectively dependent on him for a while yeah or have you yeah okay god it's okay yeah so this is a this is the kind of situation where it would be impossible for him to not understand that you are dependent that that would that would not be possible for him to to fail to be able to compute this no essentially he you are in a position where it would be probably pretty you know inconvenient or I'm not sure what your career was and how easily you could resume it but it might be inconvenient or even impossible or difficult for you to then sort of turn the corner and become financially independent again is that true or where could you easily resume what you were doing and be self-supporting I could possibly do that however I don't want to do that I mean like I really am looking forward to a new career and it's a very promising career and in two years my life will change dramatically right if I stick with digit program right that's that's good sounds like there's a new and sort of a new chapter in your life coming that you're you're planning and in investing you know this process in and one of those investments is to be in the relationship that you're in and one of the prices of being in that relationship is that you know he who pays the piper calls the ten and who has been paying all the bills and he wants to drink three to six beers a night and he wants to have poor judgment and it when when you say that it pauses you'd have to pay penalties you're not paying those penalties he's banned penalties because he's the one that's making all the money okay so essentially he you're you have placed yourself willingly and reasonably in a in a position of financial vulnerability and knee okay and as a result he he has he has no fear that the biggest the biggest card in your deck when someone is you know when you're very frustrated with their behavior essentially you signal to them that the cost benefit of the relationship is putting you in a position where you're it's starting to weigh on you that you may be better off without it that's called anger and frustration okay and we signal that in a myriad of ways and you have signaled it the however the person on the other side is is generally quite competent at seeing through your cost-benefit analysis and understanding your situation and so this is why this is why you know sometimes you'll get abusive situations where we're essentially the man will know that the female has options and he will essentially threaten her life or her well-being physically because he knows that if he does not put that threat in there then she would leave okay you're not dealing with the situation anything close to that draconian you're just dealing with a guy that's you know God got an alcohol issue mm-hmm and you know he's not he's not falling down drunk Betty's this is kind of how we live and in this how he wants to live and he told you five years ago he wasn't going to live like that but then once once he sort of ingratiated himself in your heart and you guys got married then he decided no actually that is how I want to live and that's how I'm going to do it and so so now so kind of what has happened here is when I see the situation what I see I mean we might say okay well what magic words which you tried you tried to you try to flood his circuits and essentially what we call stroke kicking so we tried to drop him and kick him to try to get his attention and to try to try to you get him to you know take some psychological pressure off you with things that are frustrating you and he's not buying it okay is his anger when he yells at you is his signal to you that he feels like you're being unfair okay yeah basic so uh yeah go ahead I said yeah when he yells it's like he's really trying to shut me up he'll try to yell really loud until you know I shut up and until then he just starts yelling and cussing you know all around the house right and these are these are threats that he's basically he's basically saying he's signaling to you I'm not renegotiating okay you're out of line you're unfair I'm gonna do it my way and that's that that's what he's telling him and so and you know what I believe him so I think that he's going to continue to behave just like he's behaving right now okay so essentially until you are earning a paycheck again um this is this is how this goes down in all probability and I don't think there's anything that we could probably do to change it the your if so it's used sort of looking at this thing staring at this two-year price in the mirror yeah if there's any other way for you to get this schooling other than being with him if there's a mother or an aunt that you can live in the basement if there's some more time work you could do to to feed yourself as a student loan that you could take out and move out etc if there's any other way to finance this new adventure then I would look into it planet get out your pencil and see whether or not you can execute it and then if you can then we can threaten him okay then we can say listen you know what I want these things for your own good I want these changes and if you don't do these changes that's fine you could live your own life but it won't be with me well interestingly yeah I did do that a few days ago because I was thinking I'll live with my dad or you know mm um she of course freaked out I don't think he expected it and yeah and sudden I got a call from when he was at work saying you know you know you pushed me that night and I just said things I didn't mean of course I want to really sing and I don't know but I said their job I said none of your actions show this your actions actually show me what you did tell me which was you have no intentions of changing so how do I believe that and he got upset with me and immediately he's like you exaggerate things and I said well wait a minute what happened I thought you just said you were wanting to change and now you're saying I exaggerated things which is it let's talk later you know I I'm at work right now and you know so that's how it was left so that that red is a table and if he called if he called my bluff I would leave I'd rather not I'd rather try to make it work but I will so what is my next thing to do when we do have this talk and he's trying to kill me he really does want to work on everything well that's fine in other words I think that essentially you played out the first move and exactly what I was talking about yeah and the truth is is he did get anxiety so he did call up to you know apologize and be conciliatory didn't go so well because you weren't in a you weren't in too much of a mood to have it go too warmly because you don't you don't basically trust the words I don't keep talk and as you've seen you've seen you saw the chief talked before before the marriage and then you saw what happened afterwards so you know this is this is one of these deals where usually when we're confused about about what direction to take our lives in principle what we want to do the reason why we have confusion is the the brain is running all different alternative scenarios and it's attempting to grasp hold of the master cost-benefit analysis that that is happening as of analyzing two or more alternatives courses of action and so sometimes you just can't do it it's too difficult it's too difficult to do so people procrastinate on decisions indefinitely waiting for circumstances to change in order to tip the balance now we can usually do better than than than waiting so very often people just wait and procrastinated spin but we can do better than that and one of the ways we could do better is we can sort of take the fight to the problem and we do that as best we can by running experiments so we want to run benign we want to run benign experiments where people are not hurt and costs are not incurred where as little as possible where we actually see an alternative universe and what it is that we're doing so in this case if you could quote go live with your dad if your dad would let you go over there and park over there for a couple of weeks then you could just go park over there a couple weeks we don't change the dynamics nobody files divorce papers you just decide you're going to take a little break okay well now you get to see what it feels like to not be watching the three Disick Spears go down and whatever behavior you don't like every day and you can see what that feels like and he also gets to see that you weren't bluffing okay that you are actually willing to take these actions so now suddenly your threats have a tremendous greater potency and so now everybody gets a little bit better look at the situation you may go to your dad's and feel like god I'd rather live in a Russian gulag than with my father so my husband's not so bad after all saying we're not sure what you're going to feel or you may feel like you know what this is a hell of a lot better than living with my husband the hell with negotiating I'm out okay so we're not sure and since because we're not sure that's why we run experiments so in general the the art of intelligent decision making is to try to to get a small experiment going that will shed a little bit of light on the macro cost-benefit problem and in doing so we make a little decision and therefore the big decisions don't be they are not big and daunting because we're not feeling the world you know hanging in the balance of our lever we instead we get hints of what is that we really want and then if two weeks goes well we do a third week Samsung this is how we do we we basically creep our way to decisions rather than make them dramatic and may and while the threats are heard loud and clear and they're they're not empty threats and so that's how that's how I think I would go about this this problem I would I would analyze the daylights out of an alternative strategy staying there I would begin to execute superficial details of that plan like going to your dad's for a week or two and and and they're thereby essentially amplify the legitimacy of so that his map of his brain sees that you've got this alternative scheme that you very male white might use and therefore that starts altering potentially will wealth or his cost-benefit analysis on his own behavior it may not be enough to change it and so these are that that's how I would go about suggesting that you manage this okay okay um if since we were supposedly talking this weekend do I wait to see what he has to say or just Rumsey oh yeah you yeah you could know you could talk to him this weekend let's hear what he has to say okay and then come you know come afternoon or evening or Monday evening or whatever and we're down another six beers and we're we got some other things that we didn't like then it's no problem okay okay then that then we don't threaten we just do all the background work so what is that we're gonna do and then we execute on it okay but then we let him know hey you know what I'm gonna take a week off I'm just going to go to my dad's yeah just just get a feel for it and nope bacon that way you can do what you want to do and I'm gonna yeah we don't have to be in the middle of this conflict and just take a little time off boom okay okay my sense I love yeah it does it makes a lot all right all right very good we'll listen thank you for calling thank you doctor I'll you bet my butt all right caller thank you very much for the call and very great question I look forward to yes seeing how this plays out doctor well that's great just you know close a few loops in my head as well that's that's really interesting how I really like this concept of running little small experiments and making a small decisions before you make a big one you got it yeah - uh yeah I don't think we're gonna have time for the second caller but they hung up any good that's good yeah yeah just in to to sort of understand just from a big wide global perspective just to sort of recap this that all a brain is is a cost-benefit analytic engine that's what it that's what it's doing and so that means it's running alternative scenarios and the human mind being the most the most extraordinary you know machine that there is in the universe that we know of it's running multiple alternative scenarios on how to handle things and it gets complicated and so it so in this case case there's a lot of values on either side of the equation there's a relationship of great significance and on the other hand there's a great deal of frustration and so it's the person is basically saying if if the cost benefit the person reacted differently I'd be happy to be here but they're not acting differently and I'm not happy to be here but they could act differently and therefore I might want to be here but I'm not sure what the odds are of them acting differently so I'm not sure I want to stick around how long find out it's like it's complicated and so and when we look at all quote tough decisions all tough decisions are complicated values are always in conflict that's the nature of values is that they are inherently conflicted and so the so there's always going to be you know you may what love that beautiful new car but the price is a little more than you wanted and there's another car that is quite fancy but it's cheaper and therefore we'd be more comfortable financially it's like there's no end to it your whole life is nothing other than a series of decisions on on this very problem so it's good to have a decision-making strategy or actually a set of strategies and the concept of running experiments by isolating what we think are is the core variables involved in this case the core variable was I either am in the marriage or out of the marriage okay that's the core variable and in it one reason that we keep us in it is if we had enough threat or enough traction in order to change the behavior or the person on the other side in a way that is not unreasonable okay it's just uncomfortable and they don't want to do it and so the so as a result the the question is what is going to be what is the alternative look like what will it look like if we choose the alternative course of action and the answer is we're not sure what it looks like we got to go find out so that that's how we we step through trying to get an assessment of these parameters and so little bits of data sometimes are all we need to clarify what looked like a big decision and then then it starts tipping in a is this doesn't we do it because we're not sure what we're going to feel like and we're not sure how other people are going to react etc but by making small decisions that are inexpensive we can sometimes clarify a great deal of stress
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