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Episode 28: Listener questions and call-ins
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this particular episode is dedicated to the listeners and we already have two callers on the line the first one the last more digits is 9 2 8 1 and the second person the last four digits for you are 9 8 0 1 so I'm going to go over the first person first and then we're going to go with the second person then well if anybody else calls in we'll get some more questions we also have some questions from listeners from the reddit forums as well in some other social media forms so we've got we've got plenty of material to go over and we're going to see how much we can get to and if we needed to know their show we definitely will sound good dr. Lyle sounds good fantastic okay and our first caller is Li Li Li welcome to the program how you doing thanks hi good um so dr. laugh I have three questions the second two are related and two of them are sort of about theory and one of them is more about application so the first question you have this like two factor model for what women are looking for from men which was the attractiveness and the resources are stability and then the men as a single factor attractiveness model so and then I recognized they were also talking about additional factors that come into play in terms of like competitive compatibility with personality other things like that so my question though what is the equivalent be for a woman looking to for a man's ability to provide for her be him looking for her to be a good nurturer so she's thinking on this sort of physical and survival risk to divert her attention from her own survival and well-being to keep her child alive and I know because kids how you can't believe how much work that is until you actually do it okay and I get imagine like in the Stone Age just how much of the survival sort of risk that would be so wouldn't of so it's if a man is going to invest his resources and his energy into a para bond situation wouldn't he be si seeing somebody that he could determine in some way that whether she's likely to nurture that child and keep that child alive or does that play into your model like in another way or am I missing something there what are you yeah what yeah what happens is is that when you're speaking fast and you're not carefully you know talking to professional audience and watching every word you can sometimes say things that you wind up not getting construed exactly the way you met yeah when I talk about women being a two factor model of milk oh what I'm talking about is is mostly about is mostly about sexiness and so we're not talking about all the factors involved from it choice and so it's going to turn out that that if women come with a bunch of resources that's not going to impact the sexiness assessment that males will typically have females but females will will actually be able to more completely integrate and actually have a more complex mosaic when it comes to their overall sexiness assessment of a male as they integrate not only what he looks like but also and not only his resource acquisition capability but also his likelihood of sharing those resources with her and its reliability so that that's why because the female has has more on the line here in terms of the the the male has the female in what we're going to call a cool bind and that is that if he walks off and leaves he has much less investment in the offspring than she does so as a result he doesn't have to be as panicked about her reliability in these circumstances as she does about him and so it's going to turn out that see all psychology be more flexible aesthetically issues as well so if you are a doctor lie on your audio is a little bad your audio is getting about bad so yeah okay I why is this any better here yes better at all okay yeah the so when I when I'm saying that I'm more talking about this now we're going to be talking about paramon judgments long-term judgments are all personality factors and intelligence factors and even even beyond personality intelligence but also contextual factors anything affecting resources and the resources that could impact that will include family resources and and friendship alliances etc even the contextual situation that the person finds themselves in a particular point of history in the world in other words if we're a highly conflicted situation where we're muscles and aggression is critical for survival we might these resources then will change in terms of the equation of how attractive people wind up being included maybe you we live in a place where it's a palace and there's a tyrant king and social skills were keeping everybody alive we're really important and that would be so on both sides the equation makes when they're making long term investments are making judgments across the big five and they're making judgments of until intelligence as well they're making estimations of the total resource base that a partner would bring to bear on the equation etc so yeah I wouldn't want us to be to ascend to take my little my little comment about one and two factor models any more seriously than that I'm essentially explaining why why females are so much more willing to trade down when it comes to physical attractiveness than males are so you're essentially saying that if basically so the nurturing capability or likelihood of the woman matters but not as much as the as the equivalent sort of resource availability and potential matters for the woman so it gets sort of baked into the personality assessment or the yeah it's a yeah those variances aren't as important for the reason that the female no matter who how flaky she is she is tremendously online and stuck with the pregnancy where the male is not so therefore the the the importance of those issues is quite asymmetrical for male and female and so that is exactly why we see the female willing to trade down for those characteristics where the males will not so the a male does not find a female who is intelligent and stable and nurturing etc sexy oh okay where it does not add to her sexiness it's so she what she either meets criteria on that sexiness or she does not as he gets to know her and learns about those characteristics he doesn't add points into that equation whereas females absolutely do okay so that's uh that's where it is that we see the two factor versus one factor when it comes to sexiness okay that make sense okay good so um so my next question is sort of my question about application of the theory but it's sort of a hybrid theory application question which is rules and just what is is there some sort of some global thing that I'm missing in terms of looking at this with respect to friendships and I did listen to the previous podcasts but basically like I'm in a happy romantic relationship I have two children I feel like there's a lot of sort of rules and guidelines out there and theories supporting all that sort of relationship but I feel like it's a lot more vague in our culture about friendship and I find friendship personally to be much sort of less satisfying especially I think because having little kids and having so many demands on my time it sort of throws into release how much certain things are high expenditures of energy for me know where I'm not getting as much back and so here's my kind of Big Five profile I'm like 5th percentile neuroticism a pile openness science percentile intelligence and everything else is like kind of in the middle okay so my friendships tend to me me playing the role of like analyze the complex situation and then advise them right um and that gives me some value I think it's like I like the puzzle but it's not related I think I could count on one hand the number of friends I feel like we consistently can have a two-way street um so I guess I guess my question sort of boils down to am i missing some bigger picture theory about this or am I just a strange person like in terms of my kind of you know personality makeup and that's why it's hard to find that kind of friendship chemistry or is there some other sort of lens I'm just missing well you have to look I think make sure I don't wander off topic here and and miss the big point but so real me back if I'd get a little bit lost the the fundamental issue is that all relationships are under competitive pressures and so you are making you are running cost-benefit analyses on every relationship and so you are you are also displaying and your own capabilities to the village and you're designed by nature to try to bring your your capabilities to the village in a display that is the most outstanding display that you can make so when you've got people around you that are needy and desperate and trying to when I say that I don't mean that in a pathetic way but they're the for example romantic questions about what you should be doing about gym and whether you should stay with them or not etc these are like really big questions and so if you've got friends that are struggling to try to understand this and your your insights are better than theirs and that they can tell that that's true that they will signal their esteem for you and they will essentially be signaling that in in ways that are saying thank you okay and what this does is it is statistically altering your your your votes altering your estimate of your likelihood of survival as if you were living in a stone-age village where them owing you would have been very important now the thing is is that if you are that there's several things about being an unusual person here that are that are notable it is just as it is not it is not easy for example for highly intelligent people to necessarily find a lot of people interesting because the truth of the matter is is that for them a lot of most people are not very interesting and by interesting that would mean that the people on the other side are displaying a value proposition to the intelligent person that it has a good cost-benefit ratio and the truth of the matter is is that that if you happen to be very bright then you are essentially not needing a lot of people's opinions or there are theoretical concepts about how it is that they think the world works it's like they're not they're not we're talking to and so you you run up against a constraint there so if you're it could be that your friends on average might be bright people but they might not be as bright as you and as a result of that they the value proposition that they bring just on that dimension alone may be always sort of lagging behind and it winds up being a 70/30 trade their direction just on that issue a lot but then we go further into the fact that you're very stable so it turns out that are in very non neurotic so you're in pretty good shape you're not very needy and the truth is is that if you're not very needy and you're in a pretty high resource situation stable pair-bond etc everybody's healthy everybody's in do in pretty good shape then essentially you're a big reason why we have friends is that they actually act as insurance policies and it may turn out that you don't need a lot more insurance that by the time you have a few people that are very confident and you've got money in the bank and you've got you're attached to careers either your own or you've got education and your husband's got education etc and you've got family money out at the periphery if needed it in emergencies etc if you start analyzing your situation from your true ecological context your your mind start saying what the hell do I need to be spending any time and energy on these people who are relatively mediocre exchanges okay and so that's going to make you very discriminating with respect to that and you can tell that that's happening by the fact that they're boring they're not that interesting and you're not that interesting and the problems now there could be a time early in a relationship with people that are for example more unstable and less competent than you where you're listening to their problems and you're doing a bunch of analysis and they are giving you feedback that you're really valuable so that's stoking that Stone Age intuition that you're gaining chips at the same time you're learning because they you are seeing that human beings have problems and have limitations to solving those problems that that you may not have and that you recognize them because you're human but you're sort of learning about humanity and humanity's variations and you're also learning about your ability to help them which is a potential value for for you in the future and so this what may seem like quote fun and quote somewhat worthwhile for a few years can start to be like okay well I've reached the limits of my ability here and I'm seeing that there's limitations and their personalities that are also causing some of the chaos etc and I'm not really seeing that the cost-benefit is is really tilting that continuing to tilt forward at the same Delta that it was before and so you know what I'm not I'm not feeling so hot about it and so I don't think that you're missing anything in principle here I think the truth of the matter is is that for someone like yourself who's an unusual specimen it's going to take unusual specimens to bring a value proposition to you that's exciting and and so as a result of that you know you're not you're going to find yourself often thinking it's not you know Judy's just not that worth it and maybe we check in a couple three times a year well then a couple three times a month and I got a feeling I might be better off does that does this make sense yeah oh that's a very very accurate I think I mean I think the other thing you know that you're saying this is you know smart people are weird on top of that right so yeah thank you know if you're funny too pressing they're also not really socially gelling necessarily this just sort of regular life well that's right that's because the truth of the matter is is that you're a lot of what goes on in regular life is a lot of regular people trying to establish relationships with other regular people in order to get insurance mates and in trade processes and so they're learning from the average Joe and you look at the whole party and you say there's not a brain in here that has anything in it that I need to harvest out and and I've already gotten better than everybody here so forget it it's not worthwhile and so that this is you know that I know this sounds very elitist but the but it's it's the equivalent of in this case it does just have to be intelligence because there's a lot of intelligent people a lot of problems that need to talk to a lot of people to try to unwind some of their methods but the but when you start to put a package together like you're talking about very emotionally stable very secure in all kinds of dimensions the most important things in your life are going to be your children and angling for their future success and your relationship with your husband who is the primary second second resource for those children's growth and development so as a result those relationships dominate everything and because you don't meet live in a situation where you where these friends are literally your insurance policies because you literally have other insurance any other market economy the value of friendships is inherently quite a bit less you will see something interesting in the world that in the low socio-economic status of our country with a bunch of little little single moms of averages or low average intelligence scrambling around trying to make ends meet from day to day you will find these friendships being a much bigger deal because they're literally the little credit and debit exchanges on the order of 20 dollars to help my kid get the little ticket to get in the movie are quite a big deal and so in order to optimize these modest amount of resources that these people have there's a much more conversation much more checking in much more sort of friendship maintenance behavior than is required for somebody like yourself and that makes lot of sense I mean just sort of understanding why I'm treated like a therapist or an encyclopedia that's because you're the best brain in the room okay so so they're trying to harvest those abilities in order to minimize their mistakes in life and they've really got nothing for you and so they're going to tell you look you know if you need if you need something Lee you break your leg you need me to drive you to doctor be there for you you know I'm saying but the truth is you're not very needy and but they they they could use that brain and they're gonna they're going to take it as long as you give it to them okay so I have one final sure um so this is about the big five generally yes um me so here's where I don't really know how to reconcile of this the claim that the big five makes that basically the fundamental aspects of human personality can be broken down into these five categories right because when I take this test online it breaks it down into the five factors and each of them have six subcategories under each factor so I can be wildly different on the subcategories but the extremes within the factor get me an average score in the middle so for example for consciousness like I'm really low on orderliness and dutifulness but high and some of the other measures like achievements driving in consciousness so what is that mean is that I'm X level of conscientiousness or do you like is it really reducible to that yeah it's really not the truth is the big five is the big five because that's what arrived out of the factor analytic studies and so the they remember what it's saying it's the big five okay so there are there are potential potentially hundreds of individual differences in people that we could synthesize down to given a given person environment you know process that is repetitive and we can see variation on that it would be stable over time within individuals and we could call that a personality variable and if we looked hard enough we would find that that personality variable would be undoubtedly genetic and origin just like we see out of the big pot so the but the big five is this is let me give you an example of of the big five at how to think of it the think of the big five very much in the same way that we would think about athleticism so we think about athleticism we could we could take five measurements of athleticism and those five measurements would comprise a tremendous amount of the predictive ability of any athletic contest so we could see for example how high can you jump we would see you know how much how much weight you could clean and press or whatever they call it just lift off the ground and press over your head we would see how fast you can run 100-yard dash we would see how why we take you to run two miles and we could see how accurately you could throw a projectile you know forty yards and so those five measurements if we were to do that we could we could take a composite score on those five things and give everybody percentile judgment on that and we would have a nice smooth bell curve and the people at the top of the bell curve would be superbly athletic and the people the bottom would be superbly non athletic and then everybody in the middle would be everybody in the middle and we could call this construct a flatus ISM but then we would say well one hour wait a second we've got five subdivisions and then somebody else could say well wait a second here's something else yeah I mean there's something else here that it doesn't quite fit any of these things and that would be for example balance okay so whether how fast you can twirl and not lose your balance sort of the capability the cerebellum that that isn't in any of those five measurements what are we going to do with that and the answer is I don't know do whatever the hell you want with it it's not one of the big things of athleticism but it's clearly belongs in here but it's not a very it's not an excellent predictor of overall athleticism where the other five measurements when we build up as a composite they essentially take up the lion's share of all the predicted power so when we added the ability to twirl fast on to the athleticism and we try to predict people's ability at football baseball basketball etc we would find that the torille variance would be very very small amount of the variance okay predicting anybody's abilities but it would be there it would be in running backs ability to spin out of a tackle or a basketball players ability to do it spin spin move a baseball player I don't know maybe spin out and then throw throw to first base it might be a third baseman's ability but it wouldn't probably have anything to do with the pitchers ability so we would see that that particular variants in athleticism would not useless but very minor and so that's that's why it is that the big five will be forever or press reading and that's why precisely why they start hacking apart the big five and looking inside the different the different things like conscientiousness and say well what do we really mean by that okay yeah we swell we got in so but you you're going to be able to split it in principle probably into a thousand pieces if you want and so it's not it's never going to be comprehensive and fully satisfying so but but it doesn't weigh like it doesn't assign different waste of different factors like let's say like your ability to you know spin and that's all over is right important to five percent of the sports out there but your ability to catch a ball or in to eighty percent of those scores out there so it doesn't assign like a varying weight for that like I base I'm just trying to sort of wrap my head around how I good I mean like for example I really like yeah Jungian theory but I understand that it had like understand its criticisms there I think it's valium I think there's value to it I also really think there's a lot of value at least personally to me to the Dubrowski theory of positive disintegration but I understand that neither of those theories are comprehensive they're not trying to sort of make that claim they're looking at like one narrow aspect and so it's just hard for me to sort of take like okay well how much of an oversimplification is this how much distortion are we talking about when we're talking about these five factors how you know what does you have in the back my mind you know what I mean yeah I think that the five factors are extremely useful they have a I think a fairly recent and useful underpinning that doesn't really exist in any other theory and and it's not strong and it's early but it's it's very promising in a way that all other theories Union Theory or anybody else's theory are completely hopeless and they have no chance and that is that and I'm happy to do yeah yeah or not yeah it's not just comprehensive they're not they're not actually theoretically elegant and they don't integrate into a wider understanding of biology and so the young young thinking about psychology is is you know it was fine for 1915 but it's very primitive and it's way way behind things don't work the way he thought they did and so in the same way that the the big five has a as a potential elegance to it that's very powerful which is that each of the big five are line up very well with timeless adaptive problems for the genetic code so openness to experience is a is a cost-benefit analysis that a brain makes on a question about how much we should seek on novel sensations in the environment versus how much we should stay with familiar sensory patterns and so this is this isn't just in humans this is going to be all brains wide this goes to all animal brains so if a rabbit is trying to decide how far goes from a rabbit hole and a hundred yards is the optimum amount for that species you will find that the average rabbit has the average amount of anxiety when it hits 99 yards and that's enough to stop it under average circumstances whereas a more open rabbit will go out to 150 yards but that gene will not be as common in the gene pool because they will get selected out by foxes that will kill it more often and so you will find that rabbits that only go 50 yards are now not optimizing their their mating and food searching capabilities so it falls in a beautiful bell curve and the the discovery that the big five fallen bell curves is a legitimate major scientific advance and the notion that these are bell curves and therefore they are continua not types all of Jungian psychology is built on typology z' which are just fundamentally wrong it's just not the way it works so these are gene variations that's following bell curves and the big five when we factor analyze out the you know 20,000 or 18,000 words that human being is used to describe each other they factor out into these essentially six factors the Big Five pulse intelligence and when we realize that the human nature appears to fall beautifully in bell curves around these we start to see underneath that we have cost-benefit analysis of the genetic code looks like they're lining up to these five these variations so this this is a this is a mosaic a scientific mosaic that is it is quite satisfying it's going to have the imperfections that I talked about it's going to have limitations but it is it is I consider it to be this thinking but with behavior genetics integrated with the big five I consider these to be really the cutting edge of where we are and a major advance in human thinking as to where we were for example by 1980 okay so that so that clarifies a lot because basically you're saying it's claim to superiority is that it each of the five individual factors are like sort of a necessary and complete kind of way to categorize these fundamental evolutionary elements about the image terms okay not just humans but they are their problems of animal behavior okay okay and so yeah that that is that's bringing an elegance to to the argument that nobody has ever seen before yeah thank you you bet very good fantastic Lee thank you very much for the call we really appreciate it our second caller I believe they are just they they hung up so hopefully hopefully those a prank caller who decided that he didn't want to wait but let's go over to the next question so this is a user from a user from the from reddit forums that I posted on regarding these questions and the comment is I don't have something concrete dr. lab but I want to talk about to talk about social isolation in my opinion is the biggest problem in our time next to lack of purpose humans evolved to be very social creatures so it's obvious that by fixing the ongoing and increasing problem of social isolation that we will find happiness but isn't it actually in our genes what causes people to choose going home over getting to know more people is this some stupid tried behavior or some people are welcoming while others are not it's not just a state but rather a general attitude to strangers yeah the person's got a lot of comments in there and so well I'll try to I'll try to just sort of answer some maybe more generally and hopefully hit on what they're asking the modern society certainly has major structural changes in it that are not consistent with human nature and so the person comments about two things such social isolation and they also comment about quote lack of purpose or meaning that people feel and those are those are two things that you wouldn't have seen in a Stone Age environment you wouldn't have seen social isolation because people essentially can't survive they sort of hell can't reproduce without being hooked up with villages so that that that would have been different than it's possible for people today people can be much more isolated today than they've been they would have been annexed own instituition the and also the purpose issue is that that people can be doing things where the village is not seeing what they're doing and the village there is no thank you process or esteem process where they are contributing to the the absolutely all-important issue of the group survival and so the so people can be sort of cut off and and not hooked up in in that way their work may leave them feeling like they are not they're not necessary or they're not thanked and they're not important whereas people contributing in the village all up and down the line from the most valuable person in the village the least valuable the least valuable would certainly feel anxiety and some some some angst about wanting to make sure that they've contributed enough to still be able to access the villagers insurance if they needed it but they but they would have been you know watching that process and doing what they could in order to become more secure and reduce that anxiety whereas today you know people can be can be useful to the society economically but not really hooked into a village tribal system where they are observing the esteem that they get from what they're doing so now the question is why it is that we here in this way the the truth is is that a there's probably many reasons for it the but we can we can do things we would just assume not be responsible and at the beck and call of the villages demands of forty other people right now we're where we are the doctor the the the hunter of last resort etc etc so it's going to turn out that the modern environment as these coalition's got larger and larger and we got trade economies it turns out that we don't have to rely on villages we don't have to be hooked into the villages in the same way and this makes social isolation possible and it actually makes it perfectly safe in a way that it was never safe before we can also work in situations where we are not getting where we are just a little cog in a machine and we are not and we're quite socially isolated even at our workplace at which point where we're not connected to a feeling necessarily of feeling like we're producing anything of value or we're not getting any feedback for it so we can actually in a modern environment as definitely has some potential liabilities associated with how it works it also has absolutely incredible assets that blow those are those liabilities away you know in almost every respect but not every respect and so now the question is social isolation in general is that people differ and happen in two ways that are important and then there's a third way that's situational the first way that they differ is that they differ in how socially attracted they are so there are people that are inherently more valuable to other people and when they display those value resources it's very unlikely that they're going to be socially isolated because other people are going to search them out and they're going to essentially proposition them with value propositions in order to engage them in relationships so you know good-looking Pleasant funny smart emotionally stable people you know are usually not lonely and socially isolated so that's one thing so now it's going to turn out that in principle you could be if you are extremely introverted and so social isolation can be is probably largely it's significantly a derivative of people's essentially probably to a combination of two major factors number one is going to be not very socially valuable human which of course people will freak out over this kind of talk you know that's the ultimate political incorrectness to actually talk that there's individual differences between human beings and and how valuable other people find them but there are such things and I wouldn't fight I wouldn't necessarily find a thief very valuable or a murderer so you have a point to right and notice that we find one athlete worth 30 million a year and the other athlete on the same team worth a million year you know I'm saying so people people are people are dramatically different in how valuable other people find them and and so if you are not particularly valuable to the general more okay then you are going to have less social opportunities and you're going to get less social encouragement etc now the other thing is is that you may be very introverted and introversion is going to be one of the big five and that's it looks to be solving the problem of how how much exposure that you believe your immune system can handle from being exposed to a lot of potentially communica communicable diseases and so extroverted people look to be more robust with respect to their immune function and introverted people appear to be potentially less robust with respect to that and those people are somewhere in the middle so if you're someone who has some kind of magical internal device which it looks like we may have which can essentially assess our immune you know function then and you essentially have some self analysis that is tripping that says that you had better stay away from other people you better keep yourself introverted and you also are not very socially attractive and you do not live in a situation that is conducive to group oriented work and interaction you may find yourself socially isolated and actually living a and overall you're less satisfying wife and had you been back 10,000 years ago living in $100.00 society so there those are those are how that plays out and and we are seeing the in the in the social media revolution we're seeing how important it is for people to get a steam from groups and how how essentially almost unquenchable thirst is for that kind of feedback and so we're it's tapping into a pretty serious and important need opinion human psychology and this is very interesting because the next question from the same user is from the same listener is following up on this and it looks like you answered most of these most of this question but the following is a sense of meaningfulness and purpose seems to help many people any idea why and aside from the obvious ideas he wants some evolutionary psychology explanations like the drive to be useful I think you touched on that ah yeah yeah yeah the your your you are competing with other people in the village in order to gain esteem from being the Millar running for the most valuable player the most valuable player is in principle the player that the most value would be given up in order to save them so the most valuable player in the village is the safest player in the village or to be more complete and accurate the genes of the person who is the most valuable player are the safest genes in other words if big kikuna you know the mean is the most viable guy in the village and his kid falls in the river and it's dangerous in the river I just might jump in the river to save his kid but I'm not going to jump in the river to save the kid of the guy who's in the bottom 10% of the village and so the so as a result people are running for or they are displaying for and making efforts for to make displays that that indicate that they are of higher value than their competitors within the village and so these you know these these competitions can be friendly it can be dancing and singing and guitar playing and and so forth and carving and etc but they can also be more directly practical for survival they're all about beauty enhancing us the so people are that's why people are going to fix their hair and you know comb it and braid it and they're going to do all kinds of stuff they're going to have fashion to try to make their bodies look better and more attractive and make their minds look more mattresses if their clothing looks elegant and creative so human beings are are driven to try to make displays that indicate that they have more value than their competitors and so this is the I think he was saying a drive for meaning that the Stone Age village is just fully meaning that that you've got your you know if your little jeans are running around you know you know you've got meaning the meaning is how we going to make sure that these little things survive and that we maintain enough status in the village that we can call on villages insurance when we need it and we need to look out for the village in general because if we all if a bunch of us go down we may all go down in other words Stone Age man know more things about quote the pursuit of meaning then does an aardvark or giraffe it's all about trying to live as an you know smart as you can and make all the moves so that you can you can make it it's only in the modern environment where suddenly we are living artificial circumstances where the food is a steady flow we've got more than you need and your temperature controlled environments etc and nobody needs you you're not that important as Charles de Gaulle said the graveyards are full of indispensable men the in a modern environment everybody is replaceable the greatest surgeon is easily replaceable any president is replaceable I mean there is any great players replaceable like there is nothing that is not replaceable and so as a result we live in a world where people can feel quite as steam deficient and and feel like their lives are quote devoid of meaning and anyway so that that this is what drives people to try to pursue things that are valuable to other people yeah and I'm curious to hear you expand on that is that this is why people are esteemed efficient that's that's a that makes complete sense with with if you're easily replaceable that that would get people to be less stable less more anxiety etc etc I'll tell you what you talk about replaceable you know one of my one of my heroes in life of course because I you know grew up in California was Joe Montana and you know a guy only won three Super Bowls for the San Francisco 49ers but he got hurt and then suddenly is replaceable can you can imagine you know your your status or esteem in this world is very perishable and and so as a result you we have a drive to continue to get feedback and to try to figure out what we can bring to the village to continue to to maintain a flow of steam signals which support our security and our well-being now you're talking about replaceable in terms of trading partners or business does this translate to friendships and mating and mates the potential mates absolutely in other words we you are you are all entirely replaceable in case you don't know this mate you know there's a little there's a fancy little technique that one day if you ever settle down and get married and then it turns out that that if you die then you get to there's this little porthole that you get to look through and you get to see that your wife is shacked up with your best friend so yeah we are all visible and certainly there are there are times when I mean there's people that are enormous ly valuable but that feeling replaceable and in other words we can never have those experiences again and their losses if we lose them would be you know just huge for our well-being that that is true but when it comes to most trading situations that the defined human nature we are very reversible even if we have a number one pick the number two pick is not very far behind us well what I meant was was nowadays in the modern world we are much more replaceable when it comes to business and trading partners ah versus in the Stone Age today are we as replaceable with our friends and mates as we were in the Stone Age Oh probably not I mean we're probably very replaceable today where we were not as replaceable in the Stone Age so the Stone Age you didn't have that many people and so these relationships were you know very long-standing and so think about your best friend from high school and then think about that the last 15 years that you've been living the two of you went on you know 700 hunts almost died seven times you know I'm saying and and went through tremendous hardships and saved each other's lives three or four times now how do you feel about the guy okay yeah my guess is you're massively more connected to him in that situation than you are connected to your best friend from high school now and so and so this is the the hardship and challenge and a scheme earned in one would be more profound in an environment of greater challenge and this is what guys find what happens to them when they are pursuing these very intense group actions whether they're in military or in sport where there's very high levels of achievement and a lot of pain and personal sacrifice involved they form these these bonds that they form during those times are much deeper than they form in a business deal so it's like an insurance policy where they're not only going to save each other's financially they're going to save each other's lives yeah much bigger deal yeah it's bigger good yeah okay and so you know one thing I was reading on these reddit forums I mean some of the stuff is a little bit out there in terms of in terms of you know practical application but one thing that was saying was that men bond by insincerely insulting each other whereas women women worldwide by in sincerely complimenting each other what do you think of it that's fascinating you know I have to say I never even thought of it but that's a that's a very interesting observation and I mean I've certainly recognized the male issue and and the male issue is very is a very you know warm process when we insulting it's a it's essentially a test that is telling you I mean we could talk another day about humor and how humor works humor works through the mechanism of somebody losing status on the other end of it and I believe that is why humor even exists it's a pleasant experience because someone lost status and in a in a village situation if someone loses status it's good for you because because the status is effectively or the esteem in the village is effectively a zero-sum game there's only so much status to be had everybody has their rank ordering how important they find other people and you have a certain net average in that village about how much status you've got and if someone else loses a little bit of status it's it can tickle your nervous system in other word to say oh that's a good thing and it's funny okay but what's interesting about it is that that it if you actually really lose status and a competitor competitor could find that very funny and be laughing but it could really hurt you you're embarrassed okay and so that's bad for view but good for him and that's why he's laughing the but what we find is that in elegantly done humor there what people do is they they create situations where the status loss is not real that it's actually going to be what I call those status and we tickle the mechanism of status loss so we find delight in it but actually we recognize that it's not real between friends friends can needle each other and insult each other but the insults are not real and you know the moment in a situation where possibly it's always going to be in situations where there's going to be other parties around so two pretty good friends and they're joking and needling each other and people are laughing because they're are enjoying getting tickled by this issue of people losing status and so then it turns out that you know maybe it's four or five guys and one of his girlfriends is there and then somebody is really kind of interested in this guy's girlfriend and so he cracks a joke about her a guy with the girlfriend and it it's not those status laws it's not false it's actually real and he's actually cunning after the guys status by pointing out a liability of embarrassing deficiency and he may laugh and some other people may laugh but our guy is not laughing okay this is what's called hey that's not funny okay so you're yeah okay so you're going to so if you track status gains and losses in this we can see how humor works and we can see how that that when it's those status it's actually a way of signaling to somebody the best humor is signaling to them maybe a foible where it's out of Syria status loss but in it in my ability to risk making fun of you I'm taking a risk that you are going to interpret it the right way and that I'm not actually costing you any real status and some upside down way what it tells you is that I I feel bonded to you and affectionately towards you okay and so really I'm signaling esteem why we play this game and you can enjoy it you know that's when you can laugh at somebody making fun of you because you see a little bit of truth in it and you you appreciate the creativity but you also appreciate that they have not really cost you status and they have in fact signaled their affection for you and so this is this is how you know males will play that game with each other whereas it's interesting that I don't think females do it as much you know I think it's a fascinating insight and I never thought of it and that the fact that females is sincerely flattered each other is uh just fascinating we will have to think on it a little bit more yeah but think about that yeah I don't know anybody needed to do a little research yeah I don't know the truth about about every girl that I've told that to was like oh my god that's totally true we do you never mean what we say when we're complimenting each other about our hairs and our outfits and our boyfriends and whatever so yes that is that is at a fascinating insight and I'm glad somebody said yeah there you go huh all right fantastic we got one more question and we got a couple more but one general one about the political differences Podcast yeah okay so the user writes that he disagrees with the caricature caricature of liberal views on the social safety net a lot of left-wing charity goes to supporting the arts so culture matters whereas raw capitalism leans towards playing it safe and speaking of arts he was disappointed there was not a single word about the importance of empathy in the creative arts and how that might play into the Liberals views how many creative people weren't celebrities for instance I actually quite frankly I can't even quite he's got he's got some point he's trying to make there but I'm not even sure what they are sorry about that I can't fucker okay yeah yeah I was trying to clarify as well and I I didn't I didn't succeed either yeah but trying to say something important but I just can't quite I can't quite map out what he's getting at but well why do we if he if he clarifies that for us glad to talk about that next week
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