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Episode 138: Older vs younger generations, applying Evo Psych, genes vs environment
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this week we've got a couple of questions the first one is about older generations versus younger generations so okay dr. Lyle it seems to me that there's a pattern with the older generation complaining about the younger generation screwing everything up and then talking about the good old days and how things used to be is this contempt built into us as we age particularly the disagreeable and conscientious people or is this behavior necessary for the adaptation of the species as the younger generation throws out the less advantageous ideas of the past and then hones the more advantageous ones no that's that second part is a kind of bunch of cockamamie theorize thing that doesn't have anything to do with evolution alright that looks more like cultural speculation but let's look at this it's kind of an interesting thing so we have older people potentially you know obviously I think I think the pattern is is discernible and they will they will you know these days you can hear them and I have my whole life here at hearing the older generation occasionally you'll hear negative comments about the younger generation now we can I can think of multiple reasons off the top of my head why we might hear this from time to time one reason would be that there's an inherently there's a weaning conflict in nature that between parents and children the children want to suck up as many resources as they can and the parents want to move away from the child and move to invest their resources in in other reproductive activities for themselves so this is this is a throughout the animal kingdom this where children are being provisioned by parents this is an inherent conflict built-in to nature that the children are only 50% related to the parent but but they're 100% related to themselves and so as a result there's a conflict of interest the child would just as soon grab every resource possible so it's you can you can imagine that a a 40 year old man facing the 16 or 18 year old children is frustrated with their lack of effort lack of work not working hard enough you know eating up twice as much as they you know eating quote me out of house and home is irresponsibly not turning the light bulbs off and essentially consuming more resources than would be necessary from the standpoint of the 40 year old father and you can imagine the just constant grinding irritation at that conflict of interest and the criticism that would be directed from the 40 year old man to his young children is teenage children and you could consider that this would move on as he becomes 45 and the children become 23 and then he becomes 50 and they're 28 and they're still got their hands out now so at that point you can sort of hear why you might have the commentary it sound like you're going to hear it all the time but there might be a ringing commentary of essentially the lack of work ethic the lack of diligence the irresponsibility of today's youth etc and it could be ringing down these lines now it's also possible that there's truth in it particularly in the last several generations in the sense that that a hundred years ago people in the United States were an awful lot poorer than they are now and so 20 years later the next generation was inevitably in considerably better shape and therefore the the adults at 40 at any stage of the game had lived a life that was much rougher chemically quite a bit rougher the typical different change in in economic circumstances in the US has has doubled doubled in in net worth and efficiency about every 24 to 25 years or so and so that doesn't matter if we're even talking across the Great Depression it still happened anyway and so as a result of this if you think of a generation as being 25 years which is probably probably was there really probably close to that now but it was more like 20 years before but just think of that every generation in one generation the the youngsters are walking into a world that is twice as wealthy twice as efficient and therefore things are easier they're a hell of a lot easier than they were for the generation twenty or twenty-five years before and so that parent looking at the situation and not just the parent like I have I have I have the same thing that goes on in my head even through my very sophisticated glasses I look at 20 year old children today driving around in very nice shiny cars and not working very hard compared to how it is that I worked you know when I was 18 or 19 years old you know 40 years ago and the reason and the reason is is everybody's a lot wealthier and so the extraordinary change in wealth can cause a and the ease of it in comparative to where we were when we were their age it's a little ridiculous and it just seems you can seem to us for me now you're talking almost to doublings so yeah my my 59 year old eyes looking down the barrel of a 19 year old today the 19 year old is looking at a world that is probably three times wealthier than when I was just 19 years old so life a hell of a lot easy you know we didn't go out out to eat just go in and get its sandwich of the Togo's or McDonald's and when we were 19 years old we didn't do that okay that was way too expensive without that that was not typical behavior that was a big time treat and so so things have changed things have changed you know massively for the better today's you doesn't have to work nearly as hard in nearly as hard of circumstances as the youth of my day the youth of my dated had way better than in my dad's generation they had to work quite a bit harder so some of this criticism that you're hearing I think has to do with some real changes that have taken place and you know obviously for the better there's no great thing about having to work diligently hard in the salt mine for pennies so of course it's fine that things are better but we can the youth can seem sloppy effectively wealthy not that diligent etc and the truth of the matter is is that it's all the same personalities and in general levels of abilities but they're being played out in much more relaxed circumstances and so so that's I think part of what it is that you're saying and of course finally I think that there's a an issue more broadly of as young people challenge older people for positions of authority in legitimate dominance hierarchy conflicts that's also a threat and so if I may let's suppose that I'm in an aging Hollywood actor won an Oscar ten years ago when I was 42 or 15 years ago and now I'm 57 ok and now nobody's too interested hiring me as a leading man anymore I can I can feel sour about some 32 year old that they're going to hire for the leading role who I feel like isn't you know can't can't shine my shoes as a factor but he's younger handsomer and it's all frickin cool and he's good enough and he's going to put put you know he's going to sell tickets so there's going to be reasons why you know the challenge to hierarchies that have been ascended that that could be an issue the issue of the generational differences in legitimate wealth it can be really substantial and therefore caused differences in the levels of effective conscientiousness that you see in people and then and then finally the the actual weaning conflict that would go on you know within a family or within a guy's mind about or within any parents mind about their own children all of these are reasons why it is that we might hear this kind of tone from time to time fantastic I've also heard like when I was when I was working at true north we had one of the patients there was several medical doctors that would come in as patients because I saw the value of nesting but I'm making friends with one of the surgeons who he was just there as a patient and we were talking about this and how there's some hazing of medical students going on in the form of sleep deprivation and working them to the bone you know and he said that attitude was that that hazing or that that sleep deprivation and that hard work was what surgeons believed made them good doctors and so they are that if they do this it'll make the other person a good doctor or in essence we doubt the ones who aren't that great anyway interesting boy that's some really terrible you know logic but you could see how they could they could arrive at such a thing that essentially a fitness indicator test but yeah ridiculous I mean in that the fact that that goes on today I don't know I know that it goes on you know to some considerable extent and that's a that's a what do you call it that's a sort of an embedded mistake in in that system that it's going to be it's going to be very hard to pull you know pull those weeds out of that garden it's going to be a long time like bit by bit it's happening but yeah that's absurd and the I don't I don't think that there's economic rationale that really supports it perhaps there is but I don't think so I don't think that makes any sense no I think that there is a essentially a completely outmoded way of looking at how to manage the situation of training of doctors and yeah that that's going to have that's going to have to die it's painful death here over the next couple three decades yeah that's absurd interesting yeah yeah well speaking of clinical applications family nice nicely into the next question from one of our listeners who has a master master's in all dairy and psychology dr. Lila read evolutionary yeah I'd Larry I'm sorry what did I say that's a good i'll deer am i watching Star Wars alright go ahead sorry alright dr. Lyle I've read evolutionary psychology 101 by Glenn gear and in reading The Selfish Gene and while evolutionary psychology seems to have a good take on lives and behaviors I'm not seeing how it's used in therapy and treating entrenched mental illness or behavioral problems can you talk about how evolutionary psychology is used in such treatment and how cognitive psychology relates huh good question so this is student were actually look sounds like they they completed a master's degree in Adlerian psychology the Adler in psychology that's uh followers of it was Alfred Adler he was one of Troy's sort of early disciples in the early 20th century and then sort of broke away and did his own thing and you know it's a psycho dynamically oriented thinking so I guess I I didn't know there was a master's degree that you could get in larry'd psychology but may you know what there's there all kinds of things that you can get so anyway good take yeah evolutionary psychology has a good take all right that's one of the greatest addressed emissions in history evolutionary psychology is absolutely incredible I forget what john tooby had a phrase for it that he used recently and i somebody's going to have to write to us and tell us what it was it's I think he's called it magic or super super yes or something our yeah superpower later we went over that a couple shows ago is the article yeah pollution is ecology a superpower yeah right you bet it's a superpower good pity so this our person here is read The Selfish Gene which is great and read a little bit but yeah there's a lot more to read and a lot more to understand the spectacular scope of what what these early investigators have uncovered here in the last 25 or 30 years so you have to read the moral animal then you have to read you know the evolution of desire by buffs that will completely revolutionize a person's understanding of man-woman relationships then the mating mind will by Miller will fir the further revolutionize your understanding of motivations of all kinds the blank slate by Pinker is an absolute brilliant magnum opus of the field and then we have spent by Miller that will come along and explain you know consumer behavior there's more there's there's Nick Nicholas Wade who's published when it's it it's called a troublesome inheritance which is an extraordinary book outlining the last few thousand years of evolution and changes in in in personalities essentially around the world and how this has given rise to differences in political systems and so forth I mean so the the as David buss has said evolutionary psychology has a precision and elegance that rivals modern physics now if you're just getting introduced to it you haven't seen all this so you've just seen the very very beginning and the outline and it doesn't necessarily necessarily seem that much fancier than anything else you've read in psychology but it is it's completely different now there I would say that there's so much to say that I'm just going to have to sort of just talk for a while man shut up when it makes sense the relationship to cognitive psychology that's sort of an interesting part of this question I have a feeling that the person who wrote this question may be a little bit confused I'm not sure about the term cognitive psychology so they're probably thinking cognitive therapy cognitive therapy and cognitive psychology are two different things so just for everybody's general edification just to understand that psychology as a academic discipline is is currently organized and has been organized for you know several decades around sub-disciplines so it's just it is if you're studying the human body you've got people to study the kidneys the liver the lungs the circulatory system etc so you hack up the seven major systems of the human body and you study those systems between sort of knowing that they're integrated but you know to each other in some fashion at another level but understanding that from one viewpoint they're an independent system now the in the same way that psychology has sub-disciplines within the field of psychology because in those sub disciplines are social psychology study of you know dynamic interaction between people cognitive psychology is the study of numerous factors in the computations and calculations and perceptual processes that are involved of how the mind works the then there's going to be clinical psychology which is actually how honor key would sit down and try to help anybody there's physiological psychology that would be studying you know nerve mechanisms and how they're hooked up to the brain and how for example of satiety mechanism might work etc the developmental psychology would be studying the process of you know taking an embryo up to an adult up to your old age in other words the entire process of maturation most developmental psychologists are infinitely interested in the first two or three years of life because historically we've been so fascinated thinking that huge changes in choice points and and variances and outcomes might be being laid you know in in place in the early years we now know that that's not true but that still remains a fascinating thing to watch the human mind come onboard and watch the emergence of behaviors as people age so these are the sub disciplines so cognitive psychology is one of those sub disciplines so for example using cognitive psychologists were the people that figured out that all these objects that you see in the world could be broken down and are broken down into the into the perceptual system and vision into a few simple components and the brain use few simple components to to put things everything together in your mind that you see the the fact that you can take a cup and you can or a bottle of water for example and rotate it in your hand or look at it and without moving you would in principle not know that it's a three-dimensional object but as soon as you rotate it even a tiny bit you know not only are certain that it's a three-dimensional object but you are also aware that it can't be anything else than what it is that you think it is because that object is in its shape are uniquely specified by the changing pattern of light that's that's hitting your retina as that object is under rotation so that's why you will move your head from side to side to try to see make sure that you're not looking at a our board cutout of Ronald Reagan you know I mean or whether you're looking at the real guy because as soon as you move your head even a tiny bit the object that you're seeing is under rotation and now you can see that Reagan himself would not have looked like that under a little tiny bit of rotation that must be a cardboard cutout so now it's way too long of an explanation to try to get to the what they're asking the probably they so evolutionary psychology is no more or less related to cognitive psychology then it's related to developmental psychology physiological psychology social psychology clinical psychology or anything else in other words it's just simply an overarching theory of psychology as we we understand now that the mind is the result of evolutionary processes of natural and sexual selection that have given rise to the characteristics that we call a human now I think that what they were saying was they were really asking about how does it relate to cognitive therapy now cognitive therapy has nothing to do with cognitive psychology and cognitive therapy was just the the name or the brainchild of Aaron Beck who had come up with this different you know a sort of a rudimentary different new way of trying to help people that he called cognitive okay so every pourer PhD in cognitive psychology in the world has to put up with their aunt saying oh so you do cognitive therapy it's like no on a cognitive psychologist that studies motion perception for godsakes have nothing to do with cognitive therapist so this is the so I think that our person was actually asking what does cognitive therapy have to do with any of this and the answer would be nothing in principle now however if we're going to talk about cognitive therapy and how what it might have to do with evolutionary psychology and the utility of evolutionary psychology the answer would be really all therapies of all kinds from behavior therapy to cognitive therapy to Adlerian therapy and Freudian therapy and they're kind of therapy edit at their root what they're attempting to do whether explicitly or implicitly is the removal of distortions and so the in essence the the notion is that cognitive therapy it's them probably the most explicit that they're basically saying you have what's called cognitive distortions and we're going to try to take you through various exercises or arguments in order to try to reduce the distortions with distortions being the cause of your depression and anxiety and misery or whatever else it is now the the same thing is true with the application of evolutionary psychology to clinical psychology which is what it is that effectively I'm doing the reason the person has to see anything written about this pain is because there hasn't been anything done to speak of and so what it is that that I have done in the last 30 years is I have been applying what has been learned in evolutionary psychology to the problems of clinical psychology in a way in other words using an overarching frame of understanding the motivation so that the nature of humans and trying to understand how it is that we're going to go about and help them from a more precise less naive version of understanding motivation in general thinking so distortions can have multiple sources so one of those sources for example is your genes so you are you inherit you know your personality and your own personality the more unusual that personality is the more likely it is that it's going to have a distorted understanding of the way other people think and possibly in optimal behavior so for example if you are born with very low conscientiousness you might be an agreeable nice person and pretty smart but if you're real low and conscientiousness you're just not going to quite get it together get your bills paid and you may not go to the dentist and your teeth are going to rot out you're going to do a lot of stupid stuff in other words you will under invest in some conscientious behavior and you will wind up with some bad outcomes as a result of that and so that's genetic in other words your your genes have essentially built your mind with a with a variant that that is not very successful which is why it is that there aren't very many of them in the gene pool because they've been selected out alternatively your genes could have built you you could have genes that are hyper conscientious at which point you don't have very many Kin Kin either you're hyper conscientious you are you know checking and checking and checking things and trying to make sure everything's right and can't turn in your term paper and you know until you've you've had it reviewed 17 times by 17 different people and then you can't even turn it in at all you just feel like it's not properly done and god knows what other problems that you might have so the once again gene variation causing gene gene variation causing distortions in a person's understanding of appropriate cost benefit analysis looking for behavior leading to suboptimal outcomes etc so that's one look at distortions I actually don't know of another theory of psychology that would integrate anything like that that evolutionary psychology and principle are actually most of the commentators in evolutionary psychology aren't talking too much about personality but that's just because they haven't kind of gotten to it yet but the the notion that personality variation which is driven by gene variation is causing distortions in people's thinking and behavior they're then leading to clinical outcomes that are problematic that that is a direct derived set set of inferences leading right out of evolutionary theory the now the notion that a person's learning history that they have been through things they've been I don't know slapped by their uncle they they got turned down for a date by Suzi and that that really hurt their feelings that they lost three jobs in a row lost their confidence etc whatever happened in other words the notion that you're learning history has caused you to have a distorted view of reality and thereby make decisions in the present that are not optimal and so this is the concept that the environment that you have lived in is not representative of the environment that you're living in now and therefore the inferences that you have made as a result of living in the previous environment are not are not valid they are misrepresentations so for example if you had had three jobs and they all had paid you $11 an hour and and you've been sitting on this $11 dollar job for the last 14 years and you're completely isolated socially and nobody told you that in fact given your skill level you could make twenty two dollars an hour somewhere else then your understanding of your environment would be distorted and learning that and your your learning history would not be representative of the environment as it actually is now you can see that in principle everybody's learning history is distorted which it is in everybody's genes are distorted which they are so it isn't as if there's such a thing as living free from distortion the only question is is whether or not your distortions are problematic enough that they're causing you to behave in ways that are suboptimal for what would be you know ultimately in your best interest and as a result of that you're doing some suffering that is unnecessary and the only thing that is required to correct that suffering would be more you know essentially better information or a removal of distortion so psychotherapy isn't going to change your genes but it could absolutely change your learning history so if someone comes into me and asked me a question about how they think the world works and I asked them and then they I find out that they're wrong okay that they heard from listening to Andrew while that the way that they should get healthier is to eat more lard from a grass-fed hog okay and I'm going to tell them no actually that isn't a good thing to do and here's why and let's chart out let's look at some evidence so that you can now learn that you shouldn't be eating lard from a grass-fed hog and that's not going to be in your best interest so in other words by educating people as to the nature of the actual contingencies in the environment we should be able to improve people's functioning so the notion is can't can we do this and cognitive therapy had a nice little concept which is the concept of experiments in order to try to test ideas in a way to try to get to the heart of whether or not someone's underlying hypothesis was more likely to be correct or less likely to be correct good ideas now also you could have distortions in your brain because there's been an assault on the brain's integrity through drugs injury psych meds fatigue etc things like that not that important theoretically except for the psych meds part and the drugs part I suppose a big theoretical issue in evolutionary psychology so application to clinical problems is the mismatch between stone edge algorithms that were built salts to solve survival and reproductive problems in that environment versus the modern circumstances so some high school kid whose got dumped by Susie and is suicidal which by the way it's a major cause of teenage suicide the that that is a distortion because in the Stone Age when you lose a mate that could be a big deal you might not get another one it's only 2000 people on the planet eighty-three thousand years ago so now you have a situation where losses that would have been potentially catastrophic in the Stone Age are actually trivial in the modern environment but they don't feel trivial particularly for young people who haven't found out that guess what you get to lose Susy 10 more times just but between now and the time you're 25 you got a lot of heartache coming kid but the good news there's always another way now the so there's several there's there's threats to human psychology or their their good functioning as a result of the mismatch between Stone Age and modern algorithms things like the pleasure drop by e supernormal stimuli the widespread pretty major problems resulting from that the problem of the ego trap being bar the bar set to high by social cues and then haven't been perpetual so that unlike the Stone Age where if you were given too much credit for something you got to dance in the Sun for a couple of weeks but pretty soon you got to give it back in the modern environment they give you the you know Emily Dickinson award in the eighth grade for your poetry and then you're terrified the rest of your life and you're in an ego trap the whole ride it's a mess so the potential perpetual ego trap with the modern environment where you can hide and escape and not reach your potential you know through competitive competitive necessity the way you did in the Stone Age that's a problem the notion of pseudo esteem the fact that there are two normal Stone Age mechanisms of esteem in which our self-esteem which is generated from your internal audience observing your efforts and then there is esteem the actual feedback from real live people in terms of rating and analyzing what it is that you have to trade relative to others in the major domains of life those being mating friendship and trade and it's going to turn out that as villages got bigger and we got more people than we could know their names what we're going to have is a phenomenon known as reputation and that's going to be pseudo esteem and so in the last 10,000 years we we've witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of people looking for cues of how much esteem you've earned rather than actually the actual esteem process itself and it gets all the way to ridiculous so it gets ridiculous to the to the point of people taking pictures that look cool and posting them on Facebook rather than actually enjoying their existence and actually enjoying real live esteem process with anybody they're an awful lot more interested in in the pseudo esteem that they might get from looking cool to people that they don't even know or barely know so this is a threat in the modern environment that essentially what pseudo esteem is I mean it's an inevitable byproduct of a world that has trading potentials that go beyond first first degree knowledge of individuals so there's no stopping it and there's nothing wrong with it in principle but it's incredibly seductive when it comes to of the theoretical leverage that can come from it that your reputation can be more important than what is that you can actually accomplish or would and so you can see how this could draw this is effectively supernormal stimuli it is effectively the pleasure trap of the the esteem processes in the modern age and that's a fiasco and so what we what was beginning to be evident in I don't know the 1950s called keeping up with the Joneses now comes full circle to you know potentially grabbing ahold of the human mind and not letting it go is happening in the cases of some people where where the the concern over gains and losses of pseudo esteem is dominating their motivation as opposed to the gains and losses of self esteem in the steam so that's another threat another threat this is sort of directly these things are you know most penetratingly and clearly understood through the lens of evolutionary psychology now the notion of hill climbing climbing dominance hierarchies etc this is incidentally described well by Adler 100 years ago and others spent Adler made a big fuss out of this and in essentially the notion just for people's edification Adler saw status or striving for superiority and the concerns about being inferior as being central to human motivation he was certainly right in terms of he was operating in the right territory he had a lot of psychodynamic baggage that he brought along with it but you know throughout the the centuries very good minds were good had good descriptions you know they were good observers that's what Hollywood is when they hit a movie right you know they don't understand evolutionary psychology but they've got an intuition about the nature of psychology and you know they get a lot of pieces right so Adler wouldn't have understood and he couldn't possibly have understood what the motivations were behind the striving for superiority he would not have known that these were these were algorithms designed to compete for advantages that would ultimately result an increased likelihood of genes survival so that however you can go back and connect some of these observations of people that had come before us and recognized that they were recognizing truths they are another problem in the modern age is the loss of deep connection that we talked about before and also the marriage is some major potential threat to human happiness as a result of essentially having the social and financial and and therefore cultural and religious expectations of a 50 year relationship when you have a five-year chip that was evolved to help you make intermediate level mating decisions and and now we are we're trying to force that chip to make decisions it wasn't designed for so at the same time although we have these considerable threats moving from the modern environment and the mismatch between stone edge algorithms we also have opportunities we have birth control we have a village that we can choose and put together rather than the one that we're stuck with we can have temporary status losses loss of job loss of mate loss of loss of esteem because the mistakes that we made which can be corrected and actually completely mitigated in our futures in a way that you might not have been able to mitigate those in the Stone Age you can as I said change partners and we're not we're not under the the can change partners and actually have a wider range of ability to to find people that are far more appropriate for who it is that we are and what it is that we enjoy in people than we ever had before we can essentially afford to make more mistakes than you could have made in the Stone Age among a variety of dimensions you can and with respect to finances and other issues you can operate from a position of power where you can actually afford to how things go wrong and still be okay in the Stone Age many times you couldn't so the modern environment has vast opportunities for increasing human happiness it also has traps that are potentially threats and reviewing both the threats and opportunities of the current circumstances for people this is the this is the sort of foundation for the application of evolutionary psychology to clinical problems alright I think that's a good place to stop now that's fantastic doctor wow that's uh yeah I think no one's ever disappointed when you go into more detail but leave nothing there's nothing there's but speaking up alright yeah come on Mel yeah well the next question is a clinical issues it's actually we're going into a specification particularly it says dr. Lisle I'm a 22 year old male and since childhood I've been having trouble maintaining long-term relationships romantic or friendships my big five stupidness high conscientiousness low extraversion agreeableness behind eroticism I wanted to ask if you have any advice for people with this personality type when it comes to maintaining relationships or if not meant to be where do you think a person like this should look find happiness how important is it in also another question is how important is in romantic relationships that both parties share is similar IQ Wow what a tremendous question uh first of all I would say 22 year old male having trouble with romance join the party alright so I my heart doesn't quite bleed for the kid the because you got you got a lot of time to just to sort some of these things out and for all we know some of the troubles that this person is having our troubles of young people growing up making mistakes learning how to do things a little bit differently learning through learning through some difficult experiences etc okay now in terms of what it is that he might do to do things differently as we would look at if we're looking at his profile we can see some reasons why that he might be having some difficulty so high conscientiousness low agreeableness high neuroticism this is a this is a formula for someone who's pretty uptight and kind of difficult you know ken ken could be difficult if other people aren't doing things that are that are perfect and it looks like it's a little bit irresponsible and now he's upset and he's and he's going to voice that so now that you know that looks like Alan Goldhamer personality except he's very stable so Alan would just look at people be disgusted that they're doing things improperly and feel irritable about wanting to tell them but at the same time he'd be so stable that he just wouldn't say anything just plan I let him suffer so he's having a similar relationship to reality but not quite now the I would say that one thing if you are recognized that you got some disappear disagree ability chips there's a decent formula to keep in your head that that I read you know many years ago by the basketball coach John Wooden and that is in the fine art of friendship go be willing to go more than halfway now the average person is is a slightly self-interested traitor more than a little slightly but not terrible they're pretty reasonable which is why most people can do pretty well in the friendship arena why we've got a got a cooperative species that makes use of the cooperation and the cooperation benefits outweigh the costs or we wouldn't be as friendly as we are the dis grilled disagreeable jeans are no doubt have been or are in the population because they still work in terms of exploiting people that are more agreeable and so if you're if you are disagreeable one of the things that you need to understand in principle is that we're going to we're going to call you a 70/30 trader okay so that means that you're going to be irritable and you're going to think you're right and you're going to think that you're fair and the truth is is you're you are going to be distorted fairly often and so this is an example of us attempting to try to help this person patch a characteristic that that they have and we're probably not going to be very successful but we may be a little bit as successful when it counts so when you are with someone that you care about and you're starting a romantic relationship and you actually like the girl then the right thing to do is remember go more than halfway okay this is this is just a good strategy for long-term relationships in general to admit and women the go more than halfway so now the thing is is that you can test you can test this and see whether or not it seems to be helpful whether you get over a lot of bumps just you know choke it down go more than halfway now you don't have to go 80% but if you make a conscious habit of going where you think it's 6040 the other person's direction then you get to test whether or not the relationship works more smoothly and better with that kind of strategy and whether or not it's worth it okay so but in general I will say my tagline at the at the bottom of this thing is that what this person really needs is to find the saint yeah and such people exist okay so turns out that one of my best friends is is high openness high conscientiousness and haida scramble and it turns out that he found the saint and he married that Saint and they are married today 30 years later or 28 years ago about 30 years later and you know great people both of them so even if you are somewhat of a difficult match in theory there's a cover for every pot you know what you're looking for you're looking for somebody that is high enough conscientiousness that is that that's not going to grate on you and a pretty high degree of agreeableness that that's our individual that could fit this person well now when it comes to how important it is in romantic relationships the both parties are similar iq the what counts you know all these kinds of issues we we don't solve these issues from the left brain analytically you must solve them only through the right brain ie through your intuition I use left brain and right brain metaphorically because that's how that's been talked about the last 50 years the it's your intuition versus a reasoning process and the reason I say this is is that you there you are I you know on all of the personality dimensions being in general the only two we're opposites attract is in agreeable disagreeable and agreeable people are not attracted to disagreeable people but they're just so easygoing that they're willing to put up with them whereas disagreeable people are absolutely attracted to agreeable people because effectively they get their way more often the only people that they've ever met that are halfway reasonable but in there along the rest of the dimensions people actually have a bandwidth of acceptability that the people have to be reasonably similar to them because these dimensions will ultimately be a problem problem and the person is sufficiently different than you you will probably find that you will have to rule them out you don't have any choice so if you're very conscientious and the person is is beautiful and open and funny and and agreeable but what they're a flake it's going to eventually drive you crazy okay so the point is that people have to be reasonably well matched and well matching on any dimension including intelligence it needs to be enough that the people you know do not feel that irritation or disgust with where the other person's at that's that's deaf to romantic love and and the thing is is that it takes you don't have to worry about it because it takes care of itself you can you can meet somebody and think that they were smart enough and then after you interact with them for a little while you've been with him for a couple three weeks it's like well actually they're not okay and it took a while for you to figure that out well you know alternatively you could think that they're not smart enough but it turns out as you hang out with them longer and you're physically attracted to them and other things are going well it turns out that they're within a latitude of acceptance and you're fine with it so these things are not things that you essentially have to think about they're kind of interesting since we know we're going to top down now we can look at these major characteristics and we can actually observe these dynamics and you can you can get very facile about this as you size people up but what you can't do is you can't know your own latitude of acceptance by a score on a sheet on anything you you discover your latitude of acceptance by your interacting with the individual all right fantastic dr. lasso yeah the guy's 22 so he's got a long yeah way ahead of himself too long yeah yeah don't go back to any luck or any success for the next 10 years it's a yeah I mean I guess we'll ask this next next next week but there was a question you know buried in some of the questions that that can this caused a great deal of frustration with with young men that they're essentially being competed by the older men who you know thirty forty eight 50-plus men who have already been established and they're essentially getting the younger women more attractive women no yeah whatever everybody's got a bitch everybody's complaining about their competitive position and everybody's unhappy about it the older guys are like gee the younger guys are handsomer and then the 35 year olds are interested in the 28 year old so you know I'm 40 and I'm getting screwed they're like yeah nobody's happy never I've I've never met anybody that was really happy with their competitive situation and if I did I'd be irritated with them okay I think that's enough for one night date all right doctor my pleasure speaking with you we'll talk to you all next next week
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