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Episode 236: Read receipts, low sex desire, weight, high school skills, silly animals
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all right dear doctors i am a 40-something male on the online swipey app dating scene i have had some rotten luck over the last few years and wondered whether i'm literally sending out the wrong signals you see i'm interested in whether turning off the red receipts on whatsapp is putting women off of course the techno savvy dr hawk will know what this is better than dr lyle i imagine which is why we left it to this show i like the freedom that turning off the red receipts gives me at the same time i worry that i am giving into my fears of rejection possibly ego trapping myself why does it feel empowering to turn off these red receipts on whatsapp and is this potentially putting off women who may think i have a hidden agenda [Music] oh man the games we play so in case anybody out there is unfamiliar with what this what he's talking about so the these apps when you're messaging somebody that you've met and you're getting to know each other and setting up a date this is the same with imessages on the phone or most apps these days have the option to let the other person know when when you've received the message and whether you've read it or not so it's a red receipt it says yes this was this this message was received and it was read by the other user at 2 31 pm um and so of course he likes the freedom that turning it off gives him because he it's it's basically a proxy for casual mating behavior so um he is he's perceiving like he's almost saying it in this question but he's not quite there um that he's putting women off by having his red receipts off because he's he's essentially displaying that he's out for more casual mating than pair bonding and so you know in principle women would be um women who are seeking a pair of bond are seeking somebody who's giving commitment cues and red receipt is a big commitment cue it's saying hey i read your message therefore i have an obligation to respond to you and if i haven't responded to you you're essentially able to track my behavior in real time where having them off means we don't know what you're up to you could be dating other women you could be talking to many different people at the same time we can't kind of control the situation and um get those commitment cues so i yeah i think the he's he's mostly if he's worried about giving in to fears of rejection i'm not quite sure what he means by that so he's you know maybe he's recognizing that entering into more of a parabon dynamic puts him in more of a position of weakness if he's if he's indicating um if he's if he's letting people be able to track his behavior and he just wants to stay more footloose and fancy free um but i think if he is seeking uh um a pair bond at any level he's better off because the assume standard is to leave them on and that's sort of like the aberrant thing to turn them off he may be leaving some potential parabon connections on the table by doing that at the same time it's it's very this is bell curve behavior like everything else is there are some women who are very very very very sensitive to something like whether red receipts are turned on or not i actually my own nervous system um i always have read receipts off on my own messages and i i don't i mean i i don't much mind if somebody has them on for me um but i keep them off because it's it does it edges towards sort of a feeling of um of a controlling dynamic that i don't appreciate so you could have a female that you find on a swipey app who's very interested in um a parabon dynamic with you who has the same sort of bizarre aversion to red receipts that i do but i think for the bulk of the bell curve most women just kind of innately want to keep tabs on you as soon as they start having a conversation with you it's just sort of the female tendency toward locking down a pair bond wow i never thought of it like that i i always curious dr hawk um dr lyles said before that women are trying to seek they're trying to split the difference between a horus which is uh the you know his is the name the the affectionate name for the pair bonded oriented male and then jimmy which is the you know casual mating oriented male and that women are always trying to split the difference do you think that men are now trying to split the difference as far as displaying whether they're horus or jimmy and therefore like what you said is being in a position of vulnerability with the red receipts yeah i i think whether they are consciously aware of it or not they um you know men who are serious about the online dating market have picked up on the the sort of female desire to split that difference to do that that dance between desire betw between the the unknown and the unattainable and the secure this is sort of what that's the those are the components of where sexual desire is coming from it's like you've got to be secure enough to be vulnerable but uncertain enough and and sort of like there's a there's enough of an edgy frontier of a distance to close between you and the object of desire um and so that's you know we can stylize that by saying yeah half horus and half jimmy and then of course it gets even more complicated because women are um desiring and attracted to different types of signals at different times in their menstrual cycle at different times in their life cycle but i think most men who are who are you know really present on the scene of course they're going to realize that that's what women want women are sort of demanding this impossible unicorn of self-presentation and signaling that is both horus and jimmy and how red receipts plays into that is going to be very specific to an individual any individual who's playing the game but could very well be going on with this guy i do think just overall that if you're seeking a parabon particularly as a female the swipey apps are not where you want to be i've talked about this ad nauseam on other shows it's very very very unlikely that you're going to secure and identify and cultivate a good parabond relationship from that environment because that environment is it's really geared toward male 8 and above and really really nines and above who have their just pick of the market and can send as many parabon signals as they like but still get away with uh just choosing and signaling to whatever female they may be passingly interested in and then moving on to the next one so if you're a female and you're looking for a pair bond relationship i would urge you to move toward the more highly provisioning dating sites so anywhere that men are paying money to hang out and paying money to have the opportunity to to approach you is setting the threshold at something closer to a parabon level than a free swapey app wow yeah those are those are just casual mating derbies from start to finish yeah yeah i think i think would you strap would you advise men to uh to dispense a saliva test for women to check what time of the cycle uh they're in every every date so they kind of know you know what they should they should just keep a little a little i period app on their phone to just keep tabs on their females yeah i mean i think you know men who are paying attention and are tuned can pick up the fluctuations in the female response to different signaling you know naturally so they're sort of um this is not a this is a very subtle process the sort of how responsive she is to more aggressive jimmy behavior versus more nurturing horus behavior these are not it's not a huge divergence that suddenly on the 15th of the month you know it's like oh i'm gonna just completely act different and i'm gonna be completely cold on this and hot on this it's much more of a subtle fluctuation and it's not that it's it's not that black and white even as it does fluctuate because women are um i just told someone the other day who was accusing me of changing my mind for the third or fourth time within an hour-long period i said i'm a female my moods are like the sea it's like we're very we're just very fluid we're changing all the time we're our signals are changing in accordance with that and men just don't have an intuition for that men are so um you know if if something is coming out of a male mouth he's like already committed to that idea in a way that women are not women are throwing spaghetti at the wall they're testing their market testing different things all the time they their level of commitment to anything that they say or that they like in the moment is just so much lower than it is for males and again i'm speaking as just on averages you know averages across the bell curves here obviously there's individual variation all across this but in general i i think men are uh not they because they are not wired up that way they don't have the intuition for it so they they unless they've been in the market for a long time and really responding to what it is that they've discovered that women want from them um their attunement might not be as developed as they would like it to be and is this is this a personality characteristic as far as the different bell curves for the different genders like sometimes if i if i notice someone's kind of wishy-washy uh sometimes i think that that's oh that's just lower conscientiousness or lower stability but maybe i'm way off base is it something else it could be i mean i think it's you know i'm i'm very conscientious and very stable and i can be super wishy-washy depending on the circumstances and i can certainly change my mind and in my in my experience it's like my egocentric experience of that mind changing is very much like i have totally believed that this is what i wanted and then 20 minutes later i totally totally believe that i want something else so i think that's a fairly common experience with women i think it it the personality starts to modulate the expression of it so my conscientiousness and my agreeableness probably keeps a tighter lid on how often i'm going to articulate that i've changed my mind so i've been in many many situations where i said that i wanted to go to some restaurant and then 20 minutes later i was like ah yeah you know what i really don't because actually i don't like the you know unless unless you get that one table everything else is a little cold or it's a little i'm just making stuff up like this wasn't an actual example but i've been in situations like that where i actually my preferences have changed but my conscientiousness and my agreeableness prevent me from expressing that my preferences have changed because i've made a commitment and because the other person is now planning in accordance with that commitment so i've got a lot of conscientiousness a lot of agreements a lot of stability if i had less of those things i would be more prone to just you know verbalizing in real time actually now i want to do this or no yeah actually that sucks i don't want to do that whereas those personality characteristics very much keep keep the lid on how high of a cost i want to be to my dining partner interesting all right all right our next question my dear doctors i'm a woman in my early forties in a monogamous heterosexual spouse-like relationship of over seven years i have never felt the desire to have children in fact the thought of pregnancy and childbirth is highly undesirable in addition i have found that my desire for sex has significantly declined although i'm not sure if it's related to aging in previous longer term relationships which endured through my late twenties and mid thirties my desire for sex also declined over the course of the relationship from an evo psych perspective it would seem that i am a freak of nature my desire to perpetuate the species seems to be frighteningly low however my main concern is that my lack of sexual desire has caused an issue in both relationships especially the current one it's a constant source of conflict as my current partner is very hurt when i don't want sex i'm not interested in sex outside the relationship i'm just not interested in sex at all thus far attempting to negotiate frequency of sex has not proven successful so my question is am i a freak of nature or is something else potentially going on that could be corrected um yeah you're not a freak of nature at all um you're you're close to the middle of the bell curve for female sexual behavior um into your 40s and 50s so it's you know it's very in and into a long-term relationship both of those things uh it's very normal for sexual desire to wane over time uh by no means universally so you know you're no more of a freaking nature than the female who remains very high libido into her 60s or 70s and there are plenty plenty of people like that but for the bulk of the bell curve um i i would say it sounds like you're actually right kind of squarely within one standard deviation of average this is this is very very normal behavior so without knowing what's going on in the dynamics of your relationship or sort of when you're sexual desire started to wane in that relationship there are a variety of things that could be going on um but the fact that you're not interested in sex outside of the relationship either means that this is probably just a natural hormonal progression related to aging um and uh you know not that big a deal your previous relationships i you know there is if you're if you're not interested in kids and you're just sort of a low sex drive human in general you're just watching the general decay function on that over time over the course of a long-term relationship again very normal in the sense that that's going to be the most common experience of females in a in a long-term relationship you i mean it's worth looking into seeing if there's if there's anything awry hormonally or um you know if there's if there's any kind of easy path to reigniting the relationship but it sounds like this is just a really organic progression but we would want to know more about the dynamics and what things were like at the very beginning and what it is that you found exciting sexually about your partner in the beginning and whether those things are still there and all of those all of those things are very relevant but you're definitely not a freak wonderful uh dear doctors i have been a plant-based vegan for over four years i've lost a little over 50 pounds i'm 5 foot 4 126 pounds i work out every day i lift weights i look pretty good and fit for being 40 years old but for some reason i've been fixated on losing 7 to 10 more pounds for the last two years i've introduced several twists to my diet mainly to reduce the caloric density of my food but the weight just does not come off i've maintained my weight for about three years but my brain just keeps pushing on the goal of losing those extra 10 pounds i've tried but i cannot make myself eat less starch i just end up binging and feel awful about myself afterwards is there something i could do to actually lose this weight or how can i convince my mind that this is it and just be happy about it yeah well this is a really very common situation that we we hear from people who are in some version of this all the time like there's there's just these last vanity pounds that you're trying to get off and so the first thing that i always think of when i hear this is you know it's a this is a number that you're fixating on and your stone age self would not have had access to a scale you would not have known the difference in the stone age between being 126 pounds and 119 pounds those seven like it just wouldn't you it would not register to you as something worth expending any time and energy to achieve the feedback that you would have been getting in the village would have been the same you you wouldn't have had the opportunity to obsess over these numbers so the modern tool of the scale creates an inherent distortion in the obsessiveness that we get around this kind of thing it sounds like you were at a very stable equilibrium for eating a very healthy diet and that you are just a person who you've essentially found the trade-off between how uncomfortable you're willing to be versus the versus where your weight wants to rest and so we know that we could get those lost last 10 pounds off of you if we essentially had you eating under the hunger drive um and which you would have been doing in the stone age so you probably would have been 115 pounds in the stone age because you wouldn't have had access to enough food you would have been scrounging around for roots and twigs and leaves and berries uh really happy to find a potato when you could um and you would have nommed the hell out of that potato when you found it as you would of any animal food or anything else rich that came into your environment but you would have been hungry all the time um and that's just what it is and so that is that is for your sort of genotype and and who you are and and the food environment that is available to you in order to get those last 10 pounds off of you you have to eat at a level of caloric density that is going to you either have to eat at abundantly at a really low calorie density level so you're just completely filling up on on kale and broccoli and brussels sprouts and and all of the low calorie dense foods which in your case it sounds like is is just not registering the full satiety that you're getting from the starches which is the case with a lot of people a lot of people have uh receptors and satiety mechanisms that are are you can't outsmart with a low-calorie dense diet at some point at some point your body's like hey you just put three pounds of 100 calorie per pound food into me and we've only had 300 calories and this is this in in dr lyle's words this isn't going to fly like we need we need more calorie dense food please and so you're being driven back to the starch on the stone age you wouldn't have been able to go get a potato if you really wanted one you would have had to have just dealt with feeling hungry and being under the hunger drive and enjoying your 115 pound body um but again you wouldn't have known the difference be really between those 10 pounds other than maybe your menstrual cycle going away um and and you know other kinds of cues that you're you're edging toward being a very very low weight for your your genes and your height um so i i think it's it's it's just kind of confronting that you're going to be the equilibrium that you're at by eating if you wanted to lose those last 10 pounds you have to continue to be willing to eat the way that you need to eat to lose those 10 pounds forever and you're not you know you're not you're you're you do not feel satisfied and it's not a stable place for you to be that hungry and feeling that deprived of satiation from your foods so given that it really is just okay so it's 126 that's what it is it's you're perfectly healthy it's a perfectly reasonable weight for your frame um you're you're healthy you're fit you're you're in a much better position than any of your ancestors ever were nutritionally because you're getting much more of an abundance of food you're not living in the kind of scarcity that they were you just the price that you pay for that is an extra five or ten pounds wonderful now um yeah i was going to say if this question was somebody who was not able to eat whole natural foods because they didn't taste very good then i'd say come over to fasting escape because then that can reset the taste buds and help them help them get back on track but yeah toe this is great i mean a lot of there's a lot of patients here that come to fasting escape and that's what they're trying to do is last if lose a few pounds here and there and sometimes the fast can help uh just kind of lose those last pounds and then they get back on the healthy food and they're just fine but i appreciate you saying that doctor because a lot of times people are doing fine they're just a few pounds heavier than they want and all it takes is just time for that to settle down yeah i i think it's a lot of it is just the arbitrary fixation on a specific number um that would not have been it's it's a it's a strange it's hijacking your conscientiousness in a way that it wouldn't have even had the opportunity to do before scales were invented so um to the degree that your struggle is oriented around that and the feedback that you're getting from the scale then maybe it's best for your sanity to especially if your weight's been stable for a couple of years eating the way that you're eating you know that you're not going to gain weight and so getting rid of the scale as an experiment and just seeing how that affects your overall level of well-being and sanity and comfort in your body would be worth looking into and experimenting with wonderful all right dear doctors i remember in high school being taught the concept of critical thinking skills the more i enhance my knowledge of evolutionary psychology and see certain personality types on social media promote conspiracy theories i believe teaching these concepts are limited it appears that critical thinking skills and questioning authenticity can be finessed for those with that personality type but i no longer think it's a skill set that can be universally thought universally taught am i viewing this incorrectly as i come up to speed on evo psych what other american school systems skill sets cannot be universally taught due to our differences in personality i i yeah this is a really interesting a really thoughtful question i think it's personality's part of the story personality is part of where you're gonna run into limitations in what people can be taught and what they can learn in any kind of institutional system but even more important than personality of course is iq and this is the third rail of american politics and any discussion about the you know what our educational system should look like and how it should be institutionally designed it's still firmly rooted in blank slatism and this idea that if we can just get the curriculum right and and you know teach critical thinking skills across the board that everybody is equally able to integrate that those those skills and you know live their best life and and bring all of those skills to bear on their adult lives and it's just not the case i mean you've got the full bell curve of iq in every american high school just like you have it in the entire population so the lack of awareness around that fundamental truth continues to contribute to ill-advised policy the one-size-fits-all educational model and then of course personality is a huge feature as well where particular you know conscientiousness is almost a proxy for iq in certain ways where if you've got very low conscientious people um in try and you're trying to sit them down and teach them certain skill sets in in a school system it's you're going to have variable results behind that conscientiousness just like you're going to have variable results behind the iq so the overall lack of understanding of behavioral genetics and individual difference is something that just it's it's not something that has seeped into uh the educational system in the united states really anywhere at all and i don't think that's likely to change anytime soon i think it's actually likely to we're likely to double down on blank slate thinking if the current politics are any indication of where things are heading um and so something like a conspiracy theory people who are promoting conspiracy theories on social media that is a mix of personality it's you know it's openness um it's disagreeableness uh it's you know to some degree um low conscientiousness depending on you know maybe they they haven't done their research but it's also it's just iq it's um you know that there are smart conspiracy theories and there are crazy conspiracy theories and even people who are friendly toward conspiracy theories are dismissive of some of them for being too stupid so this is this is all personality it's all iq um it has you're not going to con you're not going to change the the presence and the proliferation of conspiracy theories and social media by somehow changing the way that you teach critical thinking and critical critical communication skills in schools because it's emerging from a whole different set of circumstances that seek to display to the village and um that are that are based on this huge perceived in huge perceived advantage of having information that other people don't have and getting all the credit for bringing that to the village and all of the grandstanding that is now possible to engage in on social media so those things are all intersecting in ways that any amount of critical thinking skills taught in any high school cannot cannot stand in the way of that [Music] so uh yeah any predictions dr hawk uh with uh he said it's not likely to change very soon but uh no i mean i think we're heading very much in this direction of um this this collision course between identity politics and blank slate thinking which is actually a very bizarre um paradox when you sort of really think about it uh but the the i we are really doubling down on the idea that any disparity in outcome is environmentally rooted it's it's some environmental there's environmental origin um even even going to the degree of you know it's it's epigenetic and ancestral and everything is systemic and everything is blank slate blank slate blank slate um so if we can just if we can just restore the um equity of circumstances and in the environment that we're going to have equity of outcome and it's i think we need to go quite a ways down that path before we discover how erroneous it really is because it is really taken hold of the public imagination and come to direct our politics in a way that i i don't see that changing anytime soon i remember reading a tweet by jeffrey miller and he's he said something to the effect of academia doesn't like the concept of iq because it makes it makes it that they can't redistribute it yeah jeffrey miller is very wise and uh very particularly incisive and insightful on twitter i recommend that everybody on twitter follow him if your personality type can handle twitter which i'm starting to question whether mine can it's probably best for my personal utopia to stay off of twitter but if you're going to be on twitter be sure that you follow jeffrey miller all right um okay so dear doctors why is it funny to us when we see animals doing silly things are they actually are they losing actual status by our perception or is it that we're personifying them and if a human were doing such a thing it would be a big status hit yeah i don't think it has anything to do with status i think it has to do with the ways in which cute animals tap into our um our our maternal and paternal instincts so we very much see our animals as children the the sort of they have little child-like characteristics the neony of their little the little stubby paws mimic the little chubby baby hands their little round faces i mean this is this is why domesticated dogs in particular so the well adapted well suited for being protected and provisioned by humans is because they are mimicking childlike characteristics so i think we enjoy watching animals cute animals do funny things just like we like watching children do funny things it's sort of just it's it's like a it's not a status game as much as you're you're watching someone mimic adult status displays um and it's this little outlet for watching the ways that you might screw it up you kind of get to see this child do it in this imperfect way and there's there's some sort of projection and uh process going on there but i think mostly it's it's just inherently um entertaining just because you you feel like you're watching your jeans come into their own just like you do when you're watching your children take their first steps um so yeah cute animals are cute all right dear doctors why do people love to solo dance so much and this listener actually sent us a youtube link of a guy solo dancing what are they getting out of it is a is it a mock display as if their moves are making up for their lack of beauty or is it a last gasp for status as they admit to themselves that they have nothing more to lose at this point i know in their mind they're literally just enjoying dancing to the beat but what are their evo psych reasons behind these counter-intuitive seemingly self-displaying self-defeating displays people really let loose maybe it's a display of high extroversion as a mating call to other extroverts this person is really it's it's really funny that like the to apply the evolutionary psychology filter to these things because there's like a lot of theories here about the deep status games that are going on and um mating displays so i would you know if you want to get if you want to get dr lyle really upset um you give him the phrase dance like nobody's looking because he really gets agitated about it he's like that's the whole point is nobody you never dance like nobody's looking you totally dance like somebody's watching you all the time even if you're by yourself so i if this person who asked this question attached a video we know that somebody was looking so this guy was not um you know he wasn't solo dancing just for himself he was making a display um and he was uh he was rehearsing how he could be successful in uh in a mating environment and in the village you know as he as he has been watched so i don't know if he was like secretly recorded or if he recorded himself um just to really advertise like those are those are two very different impulses so did you watch the video nate do you know no i didn't i i have i have blocked on my computer yeah that's good good productivity yeah yeah well so yeah i mean if he so if he was solo if he was secretly dancing and he really didn't think anybody was watching him and you know he got secretly recorded and that's what this is then he was engaging in a rehearsal to refine and finesse his moves before displaying them to the village where they would be evaluated by other people who would allocate esteem accordingly so that's one process the other is if he recorded himself doing some sort of exaggerated which is what it sort of sounds like this is that is sort of a exaggerated embarrassing letting loose kind of display he he's signaling his openness he's signaling his extroversion he's he's really putting himself out there um trying to indicate the kind of human that he is and and therefore that he is worthy of befriending and mating with so um in some sense it is a display of high extroversion as a mating call but not necessarily to other extroverts just to people who would want to mate with those extroverted genes which might be extroverts or might not be but he's he is just kind of casting his net and seeing who who is going to be interested in who's susceptible to it um by exaggerating his own innate characteristics very very uh good for him youtube is the best thing that happened to this guy it sounds like [Laughter] well yeah he probably got hundreds maybe thousands of views that he wouldn't have gotten if nobody had sure sure and he's much more likely to you know within whatever little town he lives in or wherever the chances of him running into somebody that would just be really like that particular crazy dance is really their cup of tea there's a certain probability assigned to that but that probability increases the more people he can get that mating display in front of so um this is this is what drives social media in general and from what i understand is when people are dancing they're essentially advertising their gene mutations uh of how coordinated they are etc um so my thinking is if he's practicing how much better can he get without practicing and i guess where i'm going with this is if he got recorded in the middle of a rehearsal if someone actually meets him he's going to be way better at dancing because he's had all this time to rehearse from the point of video video um will that matter that much i mean if the person sees him practicing and then they like see him a month later and he's like way better are they going to be more impressed or can they kind of detect those gene mutations right away it's interesting yeah i mean the whole reason that we rehearse is it's like this in internal focus group so nobody nobody watches us struggle we really want to just kind of come out on stage and announce i woke up like this you know i came i i was born with these jeans that are able to play this instrument and to dance this beautifully and to perform at this advanced level without ever having to struggle or try or practice or anything um so whether it makes a difference for a potential mate to watch you through that process is a really interesting question um there there that's that's almost certainly a personality dependent thing where you know there's some people are going to hold your your past struggles against you as you went through the rehearsal process and others are going to give you credit for improving over time that's going to have a lot to do with agreeableness and just other specific personality characteristics but i don't know if that's been systematically looked at uh our next question dear doctors why in the world would someone literally only want to be listened to there's got to be more to it than that they either want to increase your sympathy for them and make it feel like they deserve more resources or tolerance or favor of some kind right or at the very least make the village keep that person on their mind and more valued is this incorrect could there be a legitimate desire to only literally only be heard for no other reason i personality personality personality so the we all know people who are just blowhards who just want to be listened to who just want to go on and they don't even they're not even paying attention to whether you're paying attention or not it's really immaterial to them um and so that's just sheer disagreeable narcissism they they really are um they are displaying their their sense of the the disagreeableness is driving the these uh sort of exaggerated sense of self-worth to the point where they are they're like here let me show you how valuable i am to the village that's part of the display um just like it's the corollary with agreeable people the best way to think about being super agreeable is that you're systematically undervaluing what you have to contribute to the village somebody who's very disagreeable is systematically overvaluing what they have to contribute to the village or to any given conversation so for them the the cost-benefit analysis on somebody who's just yammering about something um is really that they are adding they are they're displaying all of this added value and therefore that makes them more attractive as a mate friend and training partner so there is there's a cost benefit in it they're not doing it for no reason they're they're doing it um perhaps to try to manipulate your behavior into mating with them or being their friend or hiring them um but they may also just be engaged in a general display that's just letting you know it's it's you know akin to um you know why we either we're out there mowing our lawn to display hey look i'm the kind of person who has a really nicely maintained lawn and that says something about the kind of person i am this the the guy who won't shut up at the party um is is doing exactly the same thing like hey i have so much to contribute i'm so intelligent i have such strong opinions on so many important matters of the day um that i am worth keeping around just because i add so much value to anything that you could possibly need me for so that's what i that's generally what's going on this is going to be personality driven all the way yeah wonderful i just manslained mansplaining i think yeah i mean i think i think yeah i mean i've definitely interacted with people men and women who just want to talk you know forever i'm also curious dr hawk um this question also sounds like it could be written about a guy who might you know the the woman in his relationship might be saying i just want you to listen to me i just want you to listen to me hear what i have to say oh sure uh yeah okay so that's interesting that's a different situation so that's often you run into this clash with male female dynamics where all things equal again speaking very generally to bell curves men are fixers and women are sort of processors uh so there can be this is just a cliche that you'll run into all the time i i don't know if um listeners have watched the they should they should google on youtube or maybe we could we could post it somewhere um the it's not about the nail that which yeah we've played here on the show before yeah have we played it on the show yeah so if people are not familiar the gist of it is that there's a there's a woman who's complaining about a headache and it's just like the searing pain that won't go away and and she just really needs to to process her feelings about it and the camera pans around and there's a giant nail driven into her forehead and this poor guy that she is complaining to keeps trying to be like yeah well maybe maybe you could do something about the nail maybe you could take the nail out i.e trying to solve the problem and she's like that's it stop trying to fix it stop like but that's not that's not the point i just want to i just want you to listen to me so there is this is a stereotype and a cliche for a reason because men are fixers they want a discrete problem that they can solve and that they can add they can add their value to solving the problem um and women like i was talking about before all things equal are not that way they are they're more um they're they're trying to take lots of different pieces of information they're trying to discover what it is that they feel about a particular situation in the speaking about it in a way that most men do not so most men the words leave the mouth and it's like they've already kind of thought about it they already know what they feel and what they think um and in general women do not quite as much they they need to they need to roam around the idea verbally before they really land on what their true feelings are about something and so when they're saying i just want you to listen to me they they need they're really asking if he can just like not try to interrupt and fix the problem and and hold that container for them to explore what their actual feelings are about the situation which they need his help to do because they need they need a foil they need to speak to another person they can't they can't do it on their own so that's usually what's going on there so in that case she is trying to cheat she has a strong cost benefit analysis she is trying to resolve her own situation and she's asking for your help to do so so it's not not that she's just talking for no reason there is a reason you just may not have access or understand what that reason is um would you agree with the following statement that men may be looking at their their own position the village as far as uh tenths you know like oh i'm i got ten percent worse standing or ten percent more standing whereas women might be like point one you know every point one that deviates they're like nervous about it did i lose point one of my status and now they're like super nervous about having to talk about it and just make sure that they're in that same position or am i kind of off base there um i don't uh yeah i don't think women are as status sensitive in that way so they're not um they're obviously they are very status sensitive with other women about certain specific matters you know there's there's certain things um that women are very very attuned to the pecking order around but they're not i think i think it's a different um i know that doug has talked on previous shows about how there's this process that that men um i'm just astounded when he talks about this because i like as a female i have no intuition for this but the the when you enter a new environment you're sort of sizing up the other men to see who's going to win in a fight basically and i i hear that and i'm like are you serious like i've never in my life done that that has never even been a a passing nanosecond of my psychology so we're women are not um we're not attuned to status in that same way it's not the same kind of crude hierarchy like who's the biggest strongest going to win but there are little um yeah there probably is more fluctuation in how your stock is rising or falling um among the women of the village at any given time but i don't know if we could break that down into tenths or percentage points or what what that would look like um but it is i think it's just generally a more fluid situation for women but i think both genders are very susceptible to what we what we've called before stone age stickiness which is this idea that was very relevant when we lived in a tiny village of a couple hundred people who knew everything about us from birth until death and we're completely involved in all of our business where if you if you lost status in that environment for any reason it stuck to you forever and you could it was much more difficult to regain it and and to get past it uh so you were you really were um in the psychodynamic language the the sort of the sum total of your experiences the you never got away from your past in the way that we very naturally do in the modern environment because we're part of such a bigger community we have so much mobility we can pick up and start fresh again at any time and because people are just so much more distracted and they don't they're not as involved in our status-driven vicissitudes as we think that they are but we're beholden to this ancestral stickiness and so we we often think oh i said something stupid in a conversation with that person five years ago and i lost status with them and they must think about that every time they think about me and hold it against me when really it's probably not part of that person's radar at all um and so that's that's just kind of a tangent that uh we're we're both status sensitive in that way mm-hmm you
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