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Episode 280: Lazy husband, Painful sex, Bf might wander, High T and agreeable
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so what's new with you guys uh what's uh what's been you with uh dr hawk dr lyle how are you guys good that's i'm good for small talk that's good good jeff jen jen's uh building a a uh apocalyptic fort how's that going great my compound it's good it's um yeah we've been we've had a couple of surprise late frosts which have been you know thwarting my efforts but um but yeah it's uh that's why you build all kinds of you know contingencies and redundancies into your food forest so um yeah i'm i'm all doing all kinds of permaculture nature culture kind of stuff and growing some annuals and planting lots of trees and getting getting more knowledgeable about foraging wild edibles and it's been it's been very exciting out here that's just great i spent a good part of today trying to figure out how to get rid of the um the there's there's this uh invasive edible called wild uh called garlic mustard which um is very abundant pretty much everywhere and we have a ton of it and uh it's pretty high naturally in cyanide like a lot of like a lot of plant foods are you can cook it out by steaming it or boiling it or whatever but i was trying to figure out other ways if you wanted to dehydrate it or to like make kind of kale chip style chips out of it or you know we have so much it's like what else can i do so i spent a good part of the day learning about how to you know off gas cyanide from my wild edibles you also might want to learn how to synthesize it from them well it is an apocalypse compound so you know it's this is this is called stacking functions in permaculture yeah it might be useful in in the in the guerrilla war that's to come so there you go there's a little some i'm i'm looking out the window at the farm right now there's a little bunny rabbit in there there's like the golden hour of beautiful sun and there's just a little bunny rabbit hanging out munching in the meadow yeah don't get too attached because if you eat some of that garlic plant i think they're probably pretty well adapted actually one of the things about garlic mustard is it's more abundant in places that have a surplus of white-tailed deer because the deer don't like it and they eat all the native plants so if you have a lot of garlic mustard that tells you you probably have a lot of deer which we do yeah i i think this is fascinating i'd like to spend an hour talking about it but we should move on you you probably have other topics you'd like to definitely i just want to know are you planting potatoes in this uh in your garden yeah okay yeah i planted both like legitimate seed potatoes that i ordered from a reputable company and also some supermarket potatoes uh organic potatoes that had gone crazy in the pantry and started to sprout on me and i just planted those and they're actually doing better than the seed potatoes so um but uh yeah i have everything covered for it's supposed to get very cold tonight so i'm hoping the potatoes survive they're a little frost sensitive so yeah but yes lots of potatoes lots of sweet potatoes lots of other hearty tubers doug's like okay moving on all right [Laughter] all right nathan let's find out what's first all right very good so our first question dear doctors i have been married for eight years to a man who's a federal government employee over 30 years including time in the army he's 58 i'm 50. he's very responsible and reliable and now since the pandemic he's been working from home four to five times per week i work in health care and occasionally have a day off during the week i've noticed how lazy he actually is i work out over four days per week i eat a whole food plant-based diet i do the evening cooking and all the cleaning i find myself getting so irritated when i'm with him he is significantly overweight and still growing he literally sits watching tv or reading articles on the computer and eating crap during working hours i don't understand why my habits are not more influential i no longer say anything about its diet or exercise because we've been down that road and did not make a difference my question is how can i manage my feelings of frustration and irritability i border lack of respect and even attraction to him am i being too dramatic i appreciate your feedback love you guys well jen it's a cornucopia it is there's a lot a lot in this question yeah this is like yeah sort of a master question of all things esteem dynamics yeah yeah it's really representative of i mean i have talked to so many people who um have have the pandemic dynamic of the relationship has put the the sort of established equilibrium of that relationship into chaos um and it really reveals how a lot of well you know all relationships to some degree rely on um this is a big theme in the book that we're writing the the sort of deception that's present there um you know you're presenting yourself to your partner in a certain light uh that requires um some structural support from your daily life and your work life and in in this case he was kind of keeping up uh to some degree a facade of of who he was and how conscientious he was and and what his life looked like because she's not seeing him every day she's not seeing him uh you know day in and day out without that you know intense work pressure that he had now he's at home and so his actual responsibilities have changed which have you know loosened the screws a little bit on um how how his domestic behavior has now has now changed and he's gaining weight etc but she's also just seen traits and behaviors that were there all along but he was not revealing to her in the way that he's now sort of compelled to reveal to her because they're face to face on on a more ongoing basis so this is i i have seen this happen in you know in one way or another almost every relationship and everybody that i talk to it's not always um problematic sometimes it reveals things about your partner that you didn't know but now you appreciate more but uh certainly lots and lots of people that i've talked to have discovered things about their partner that they don't um they don't love they don't uh they don't respect they don't admire um and that troubles them and that they would like to change and so i think she's she's running smack into that um and yeah it's a it's a thorny set of problems yeah the the the first thing that leads to mind for me to take a little bit of pressure off is that that you shouldn't be doing all this cleaning you should have a maid and this is a part of the process of of trying to trade as little as possible as you can with your partner trade with third parties so there there's he is basically getting you as a free maid is what's happening and so um and so this is this is grading on your nervous system because it's clearly that this part of this trade is not fair and so we we say hey listen you know let's let we we both uh need to pony up whatever that that is for twice a month to have a maid come in and so that that may relieve a lot of your irritation or some some amount of it but um i'm completely in uh in concert here with jen that that you're you've discovered more information uh and and also because the because of the essentially environmental pressures on his and his behavior have changed we now get a better look uh across a across a changing spectrum of forces in other words first he had to go to work and show up and do all that sort of thing and of course you he may be uh quite reliable and quite responsible to do that but we probably would witness him at work cutting corners and being lazy too absolutely okay we totally would yes you didn't have access to a federal government employee yeah for 30 years yeah so the um so the point of all this is that um that the admiration mechanism uh is i mean the sex and admiration are very importantly correlated uh it isn't it doesn't have to be you know it's not a hundred percent correlation and it doesn't have to be uh it's not all of the of the the marbles that are involved in that exchange but it is certainly um these are a lot of issues about about what we find appealing in a partner have to do with thresholds uh so a person needs to make thresholds across a variety of variables they have to be tall enough they have to be muscular enough or curvy enough or thin enough or young enough or old enough or whatever the heck in other words there's a your adaptive unconscious is running all kinds of qualifying probabilities uh and it's setting little little uh uh threshold requirements that you don't know what they are you you only can you can identify it when you see it in other words your the unconscious calculation then gives rise to feelings which then give rise to motivate your behavior but you couldn't tell you couldn't have said well 69th percentile on you know on conscientiousness is fine but but you know 79 is too much and 59 is not enough you could not do that but you can you can feel it and so in this case as jen's pointing out there's been some deception going on this is a late later life marriage i guess she was 42 at the time not particularly late but he was 50. so the uh she's now gotten a better look at who he is and we're finding a a very disturbing uh admiration uh reduction and that admiration reduction uh you know maybe it may be within tolerance limits if we get a maid or it may not and so the you know there's nothing in the in the cards here that ever said says that any relationship has to survive or work or be useful or be worth having you know for anything uh it's all on the table and if we were uh and all that's going to happen is more information uh and more accurate information will drive our feelings in a direction that are suspe suspectable uh but not knowable so we can't know how we're going to feel if our partner does x or y or whether our circumstances change in this or that way but but we can certainly do something about it so get them made and let's see what you know the next two months look like in terms of how it is that you feel you may be significantly enough uh less enough bitter that that you uh that you are you know it's now within tolerable limits again or it may not be so uh that's all that's the first experiment that we do but but uh yeah this this issue of what we quote really think of a person we don't really have a choice about that uh these are automated uh automated uh mechanisms of of comparison and contrast and opportunity costs and etc in other words what we think our life would look like under different circumstances i.e if they're not in it you can't stop yourself from doing that and you can't um and the only thing that will change it if it's negative is to try to change something about the situation that may make it more positive that's all we can do yeah i think admiration you know for women really is most of the story whether you know how however we want to frame that but it's admiration for who he is as a person for his personality traits for him physically everything else and so yeah i mean we have to get some of that back if we're going to rescue this if it's if it's rescuable um and a lot of this is um you know i think the maid could definitely take some of the pressure off with you feeling the building resentment that is chipping away at that admiration um but also you know you've uh you've you're building a little bit of contempt for his personal habits um and you've also lost the the uh if i can if i may get a little esoteric here the the sort of space um the the mysterious space in a relationship where desire exists so this is language that you know comes from people like astaire perel and lots of people talk this way but you know familiarity breeds contempt you're not there's not enough of him that you're discovering and seeing in a new light on an ongoing basis to drive a kind of consistent repeat exposure effect to drive admiration um and so instead you're seeing this sort of um laziness and this he'd rather spend time um you know watching tv or reading reading his articles and spending time with you and so this is similar to a question that we had um you know i think on the on our living wisdom q a that we do with our members on our on our website um where uh a woman's partner is spending all of her time all of his time playing video games and it's like okay well let's run an experiment where we do a date night um because if you if you introduce something like a date night you are getting him out of this rut you're seeing him in that light where he is back in you know really kind of a deception mode back in the in the courtship mode of of trying to show himself off and in the best possible light that he can to to engender your attraction to him um and you're you're building back in that little that mysterious space and and driving that desire effect so um and if he doesn't want to do a date night that tells you that gives you a lot of information in itself about how he values you and and where he is in this relationship so that's another in addition to the maid experiment i would say you know going at this in a very open way and saying i feel like in the pandemic we've kind of slipped into a rut and um you know it's we we should uh you know try to take each other out once a week or a couple times a month and and just get out of here and go enjoy each other and um you know go experience new things together i think that's important for our the the health of our relationship um and see how he responds to that and see how that affects your nervous system because that alone might help drive some of his own um innate motivation to improve himself uh and might help you feel a little bit of that lost admiration for him wonderful excellent right so dr dr hawk um i i'm just wanna you know make sure so you're you're essentially saying that um that the pandemic uh more revealed certain personality characteristics rather than created a situation where people are just you know locked in their house they're eating a bunch of stuff that they would normally eat but that's just all they can do so that doesn't necessarily cause the pandemic didn't cause this this was just revealed it that did i understand that right right yeah it pulled it out of their personality repertoire so it was in there um and this is why we talk so often about personality being a an expression of genes in in the context of environmental incentives and constraints so the you know the personality that you're expressing at any given time your level of conscientiousness is very different if you've got a micromanaging boss breathing down your neck demanding a report on time versus um you know you're working at a subway uh in a mall and nobody nobody ever comes in and you can kind of do whatever you want and and oh well when somebody or when the boss comes in or when the district manager comes in suddenly you're conscientious again so your the those levels of conscientiousness are in that organism waiting to be made salient by the environmental pressures um and so yeah it's not it's not like the pandemic has transformed anybody into a different person it has just elicited different uh personality expressions because it's a different environmental context yeah and they're why you got a better look at it so it's effectively you're actually getting to know him more fully right yeah it's like you're you're essentially what you're doing is you're it's running an experiment on him we're putting him in a situation a then we're putting him in situation b and so um and that's exactly what transpired here and and what she's finding out is things that she he's slipping below thresholds uh on her estimation of what this personality really is and this thing's in trouble so yeah we take uh everything jen is saying to heart and we hope for the best that's what we can do thank you so much really all right all right our next question dear doctors i appreciate your work and knowledge and i'm in a bit of a dilemma i'm in a relationship for about four years now i'm an agreeable introvert she is a disagreeable introvert sorry we both like spending time together and doing things together but our sex life is not great she has some medical reasons and penetration is painful and this is something that comes up every now and then she confessed that previous relationships ended because of this i can feel that most times she's not enjoying having sex but she puts up with it my question is is such a dynamic possible can a relationship survive long term my sex drive is quite high i'm 30 years old she's 28. i feel like we should make it work but don't know what are the odds of this and i find myself reaching out to different outlets to express my needs well jen where do you want to start yeah yeah i think this is a more common issue than um than people think you know and i yeah i think you and i have both known people who have had success with this um therapeutically uh sort of sort of talking it through even even in kind of a psychodynamic context like oh you know you're you're holding on to past bad experiences and we need to let them go um and uh and you know all kinds of different approaches and so there it you know he's hinting at this case in this case there are some medical reasons but i would suspect that it's at least in part um there's there's also some uh psychology around here to be unwound with a competent um therapist who can kind of work with her and talk her through these things and and do um uh obviously not a not not the kind of exposure therapy that we usually talk about when we talk about exposure therapy but but sort of getting her more comfortable with the idea yeah um we don't we don't know um what what these medical issues are and what the nature of it is that she's running into and so um let's i mean we we have to start at different points of our assumption about what this what is actually going on do we have a situation where there's there's a pi sexual attraction on both parties and that she would be very interested but but she has a vaginismus type thing or whatever you call this that that that this is uh very difficult for her uh is that what's going on or is it that she's not that into it generally or is she not that into it generally because it's so often painful these are these are like super interesting questions that go to the heart of whether or not this relationship um is something that is that is worth investing in or whether or not what we really have is a dead relationship and a relatively unmotivated female in the sex department because she's not that into it so we're hard to know and i don't know what the answer is but i guess i'm i'm assuming i'm assuming that it's not a question of not being into it because it sounds like this has been consistent since the beginning um but uh but maybe i'm just making that assumption from the question but it's that that would be a really important thing to know like if it used to be great and you know there was no issue and now we have this issue and this avoidance um then it totally could be a cover story um and you know a deeply deeply believed subjectively believed cover story on her part um that is just an avoidance mechanism who knows but i'm more likely to think that that um it could be the causality could look like this that she could have some essentially uh you know conditioned or or appropriately not conditioned uh muscular you know reflexes in that area and the um it turns out there's there's you know hippy-dippy people uh in this arena that that know how to help that problem if the if that's her if that is her problem and so uh so there are i know of one in sonoma county who is outstanding at doing exactly this kind of thing she's a lpc or some some kind of a therapist but this is really what she is and so this is not the same thing as a sex therapist who gets a couple together to talk about how to focus and look in each other's eyes and all this jazz no we're talking about um you know a a series of penetrating you know devices that you use and then get knowledgeable about use of lubrications and that you essentially get get the woman more uh more increasingly comfortable with uh that penetration to the point where she's not getting these essentially reflex uh spasms okay so that that could be doable and if that if that winds up uh so that that individual complete probably with nose ring or you know tattoos needs to be found um the uh and there's probably if you're in any big city such an individual exists and uh so that that that's that's who i'm talking about with the the the and there's this often comes bundled with psychodynamic stuff right right i wouldn't have thought of that yeah yeah so it's it's sort of like well let's talk through your whole like why why are you having this issue and now let's like guide you through this you know very very gradual process um at the same time we're unwinding all of your emotions associated with it so so there may be that kind of it's unless you live in a really big city where you can really have your your choice of practitioners you're probably not going to find somebody who's evolutionarily minded on this question so you're just going to have to roll with the psycho dynamic approach i wasn't actually understanding where you're coming from jen now now i understand we can't get what we need without taking a bunch of stuff we don't want exactly yeah like yeah you can take my car but you got to take all the crap that's in it yeah then so that that's got it and but but knowing that that that's what th that that's what we're trying to get accomplished we're trying to get to the knowledge base and the exercise process you it's probably online but but it might be better off uh face-to-face uh with with someone who knows a lot of detail and can ask all the detailed questions this is basically an engineering problem and we need somebody that that is wise enough to to help to help the person through this now the uh so uh and then we're gonna run into hey if she's not motivated that's an interesting little mark on the on the score sheet okay so if a relationship uh and people differ also dramatically and how important sexuality is to their existence and so you know there are people for whom it is a very low priority and so and that may be true for this person and that this um that this uh this difficulty just simply has accentuated it and made it more so so we don't know there's too many unknowns but one thing i know is that if we have an identifiable problem and we have a possible or significantly possible solution we have to go for that first because we don't know what else we have until we have made that effort so i i think it's unlikely that efforts in this direction wouldn't be rewarded with some degree of improvement um it's slightly puzzling uh and actually very promising that it's not quote always a problem it's intermittent uh that's important these are important you know little data points so uh these are young people and no matter how matter how cool and slick they are there may be an awful lot about human sexuality that they that they that because of these issues they need some some uh very knowledgeable guidance about this so uh we we go that direction and we we see what we can get and if it's if the person's a dead all the way around throw them back you're only 30. i i wasn't gonna say that jen i was gonna say it and then it just came out oh man yeah it's a little different situation that if you're 48 and you've got four kids you know what i mean let's let's be smart about this so do the very best you can and and if sexuality is very important to this young man for god's sakes if this thing cannot be resolved uh with some significant effort then take a take a long hard look at this because life is long you know you don't we don't want to be in a in a fresh we don't want to be frustrated and miserable in that area of your life that's or you know really or any area that that uh unless unless we're under a you know leftist regime somewhere then we then and your choices are limited all right let's move on i think we got to replace dr hawk's toxic masculinity alarm with the communist alarm oh a very good point that would be yeah all right well yes we'll just play the soviet anthem [Laughter] all right our next question yeah all right dear doctors how can i tell if my boyfriend is in love with or is really interested in his female friend for some context he's not confident around women and wouldn't really make an overt first move but this friend asked him to help her get an internship or job and he said he'd ask his sister who's high up at a tech company there have been other signs that they're too convoluted and long to explain for this particular question but the question is how often would you say intuition is right in these situations ah well there's not a ton of information here but it but it is it's ominous let me put it that way it's ominous yeah it's go ahead what are some things you're seeing jen i mean i would say female intuition is just a correlation machine and you you have a feeling even if you can't quite articulate it of how um how much of an outlier this behavior is relative to his other behavior around other women um and so yeah we need to know a lot of things we need to know like you know have you been have you been really had this reaction before how long have you been together how much data are you working with and in terms of you know have you seen him interact with other attractive female friends and not behave this way um but i suspect if alarms are going off um you know there's something about this that is it's it's striking your nervous system as sufficiently unusual to warrant more investigation um and uh you know these are what he's doing here i mean telling her that he'll talk to his sister in itself is not a huge issue um but it's it's context dependent you know if normally he would not raise a finger to help even a very attractive female um and you've watched that happen dozens of times but this time it's happening then you're it's gonna ping your radar you're going to be you're going to say what's going on here that i i need to know more um and you're you're mentioning other signs and it's convoluted that sounds to me like an accumulation of information over time that is starting to map up on on a regression line um and and basically telling you i'm i'm seeing something here i can't prove it um but it just doesn't feel right um and so female intuition is is you know pretty good in if we if we look at it through that lens although with caveat that uh you know it's subject to personality distortion like everything else is and so if you're a highly jealous possessive person in general um and you know anybody that he you know you get jealous of the way that he talks to the waitress at the restaurant which you know happens i've seen this happen um and you know really any attention to any other female apart from yourself is is going to raise this kind of alarm then you need to kind of control for that distortion but if if you're not and this is this is genuinely unusual relative to how he interacts with other women then um you know it's worrisome i remember dr lyle or dr hawk one um you know a couple years ago on one of the podcasts you mentioned maybe it was david buss or he had some data that said that when a partner suspects their their partner of you know stepping out or you know maybe thinking of stuff now their intuition is almost always right yeah is that can you talk about that a little bit yeah well i mean jen just i had to stop and write down what you said jen female intuition is a correlation machine beautiful that's what yeah that's what all intuition yeah that's what the adaptive unconscious is actually is a correlation mission and so um yeah so david buss uh he he reported he may have done the research i can't remember he may just be reporting on the research somewhere in one of his books and um i think it is in in um i think it's in the new science of the mind but it might have been in in something else but um might have been in in evolutionary desire or why women have sex or something but um but anyway the the results were striking and that is that in in in every case that one partner was suspecting the other partner actually this wasn't being in love with somebody was of having an affair and so the the the answer the truth was behind closed doors it was admitted that they were either the other party was either having an affair or was very seriously considering it so there was not an exception where somebody was just flat out wrong so that is super interesting and that is that means that that uh that as this person is leaking that there's a lot of little cues uh that is going that are going on here as jen is saying the the the dots are formulating around the line and you know the that doesn't mean that your relationship is totally doomed it means that there may be some attractive hussy who is who is essentially uh finding a way to use her charms to get your boyfriend to do stuff for her that that are that are you know is good good for this is sort of like watching uh what do you what was that scarlet o'hara you know maneuver people around and go out and get killed okay so the uh that doesn't mean that your relationship is doomed uh but it is certainly insulting uh to to watch what it is that you're saying and and it certainly uh you know it it doesn't bode well for the esteem signals that that you are receiving from him so you know doesn't doesn't look good and uh the one thing about these things is that uh time time always tells the tale that i always tell people when they're in an early relationship and they're bouncing off the walls i'll tell them you're gonna know a lot more in 30 days and 30 days is like an eternity because they really have a great deal of anxiety and angst about whether this great possible thing is actually going to hell or whether or not it's going to survive and what about this is this a pathomonic sign that means we're doomed or what you know what do you think he said this or she said that or did this or did that it's like i tell them hey listen we can't figure it out we'll know an awful lot more in 30 days and if you're past a 30-day deal and you have more established relationship but you're still there's it's hazy and confused and you're not sure where you are and you're four or five months in and and you know we're six months in and it's like well guess what you'll know a lot a lot more in 90 days so you may not know a lot more in 30 days but you'll know an awful lot more in 90 days so this is just as jen says these are putting dots on a graph and sooner or later the truth will be evident and there's nothing we can do to change that we're all you can do is keep your eyes open and uh and your intuition will be on and it will lead you uh down to where you know it'll let you know as soon as the evidence is is sufficiently you know compelling but even yeah i suppose that's if if the question is is he interested in her yeah your intuition may get very clear on that question but as you're saying that doesn't mean he's ever gonna do anything about it right i mean if he's if he is you know not a first mover um yeah it depends if we're dealing with scarlett o'hara or not yeah and even even then it depends on you know his all all kinds of his personality characteristics and the nature of his parabondedness and um you know et cetera et cetera et cetera i i think sometimes women in in relationships with guys like this who are the sort of more more of the uh the beta males who are not not giving the not the pursuers not the um not the aggressors um they're not always great about sending um uh good relationship signals once they're in the relationship because as the female you you probably you know moved in in similar ways that this female is is ensnaring him with her her wiles if that is what's going on um so you might see some of of that in you know of yourself in that and that's causing you some angst um and and these are you know sometimes these are not guys that are great once they're in a pair bond at making you feel really secure in the pair bond because you were the aggressor um and the the signals are just kind of all scrambled in that way so that can be a little bit of a a tough thing when you're seeing him give what look like positive signals to another female and you're not getting them and you're feeling insecure in the pair bond and um so that that you know it makes sense that it's going to be sending little alarm bells off all over the place um but as doug says there's really not much to do here except wait it out and you're certainly not gonna advantage the situation by interrogating him or you know making it making a huge issue of it um i would say just waiting for more data and and seeing what happens but just because he's got a flirtation and some interest in someone else's is not cause for it's not a it's not a catastrophe in itself fantastic i keep thinking i keep thinking it's like well dr lau we've been together for a year what should we do and you say well we'll know a lot more in 90 days yeah it just keeps recurring and well the truth is is that the if you're under a lot of uncertainty over a substantial amount of time we know that there's a dicey cost benefit that's being that in other words the cost benefit analysis is not clear which by the way is not good okay your the cost benefit analysis if it's strongly good it will cont it will send you very strong signals very consistently and only rarely give you pause to you know basically some occasional indigestion under under periodic periodic conflicts that that will come up but we shouldn't be in that state often and if we're in that state a lot a year in quite frankly almost always you're in the wrong place um that doesn't mean that an awful lot of people don't get married and have kids and tough out you know basically a so-so uh married life you know with with a decent human uh at the end of that but the uh and this is this is not a tragedy this just tell this is a this is just simply the the the the score the emotional scorecard that your life had as a result of that relationship that you you know that it calculated it all out and for whatever reason it made the decision that that's that that's it was done you know it didn't want to risk the the cold blue ocean and so as a result it it went ahead along with this thing whatever it was that was that had all kinds of evidence that it was so so okay and then then they come into marriage therapy eight years later like gee you know we really want to fix our relationship blah blah blah it's like whatever this relationship is is emerging precisely as all the dots were already on the graph you know they did this isn't always true but this is a very common pattern and so as as jen said it's a correlation machine and uh so you know a year in you've got a hell of a lot of dots on a graph tremendous amount of dots on a graph so there will be an emotional tone that will emerge quite consistently and there'll be a mean emotional tone that if we were to compile all those dots and then run a run a mean analysis on it we can tell how good is it is it is it very good is it pretty good is it so so or is it mediocre or is it terrible if it's terrible we're going to get out of there okay if it's mediocre depends on our risk tolerance depends upon you know how open we are depends on our perceived probability of success elsewhere et cetera et cetera the uh but but one thing that we're not going to do is we're probably not going to do anything to change it okay you are the the relationships uh for for almost all intents and purposes that not that there aren't occasional structural change or short things that need to be negotiated and can be that will actually improve relationships in some ways there there it is sometimes possible to improve relationship uh by working through some conflicts that is true but um it is not particularly typically true so what's typically true is you know what what you have at the end of a year is is a is a graph and that thing either looks like you know there's a slope on that graph and that slope is foretelling your future that's a fortune teller and so uh pay attention wow thank you dr lyle dr hawk uh you wanna do one more question uh what do we got we got the one about the yeah we got one more go ahead one more roll okay yeah all right our last question dear doctors is it possible to be an agreeable highly testosteronized male what would such a male look like this confuses me because i often think of a highly testosteronized male as a dominance climbing aggressive and and overly competitive so i'm wondering how these traits could co-exist yeah um yeah it's it's it's not so simple that one little chemical is the story of um those testosterone levels are correlated with how disagreeable you are but they are not the only thing okay so it the the system is not that simple so you will occasionally find highly testosteronized individuals that are that are very pleasant okay so the um so there's there's so the answer the question is it is not a simple one-to-one relationship at all and therefore all kinds of combinations are on the table so you could have a low testosteronized person that would be very disagreeable okay so the um so that's so just the fact that you can easily imagine that character is that's that's the thought experiment you need because it's a little harder to imagine the high testosterone maybe they're upset because they have low testosterone you know yeah [Laughter] uh but yeah there's lots of low testosterone disagreeable so you can clearly envision that that that is not somebody you'd want to be assigned to on a group project at school yeah a great example i mean there would be many examples that i could pull out of the sports world the yeah i was thinking in the sports world and then i was like no there's got to be something that's not in the sports world sorry about that trying to think of to get this yeah yeah it's just searching my data searching my database okay and so i just watched for probably the fifth time the uh the fabulous uh docu-series uh the last dance the and so if you have any if you have a single sports neuron enyo i would recommend to anybody that they watch this it's the it's the story of michael jordan and the bulls and they're it's a it's a incredible series and uh one of the things that you find out in there is that michael jordan is disagreeable as hell [Laughter] okay and he doesn't he's he's very funny and can be extremely personable but he is he is ultimately very disagreeable and the uh you also find out that a teammate named scottie burrell who just as big as michael just as strong as michael you know obviously very competitive guys professional athlete is world champion and he's unbelievably nice and it it irritates jordan the whole time he's just picking on and pushing him trying to get him to be ready for when the fight breaks out between them and the knicks that you know scotty's going to be ready for it and burrell just won't bite it's just not in him and that's how it is and so scotty varel has all kinds of testosterone but it's an unbelievably sweet person and you can see it in the film it's just just how it is so you're you know you don't have to look too far to find examples like this and um so yeah it's it's uh but it's a great question because you know obviously we are aware that testosterone levels are highly correlated here there's no doubt about that the uh but they are they're definitely not the only you know the end-all be-all of the story i think that you explaining that just made it clear to me why it's hard to find examples in other domains it's because sports is probably the main domain where you can where where talent uh outranks the the agreeableness factor where disagreeableness is going to be important for success in almost every other domain particularly between men um so the dominance climbing requires a fair amount of disagreeableness just to get to the top and so those are the examples we know so when we're trying to think of you know captions of industry across domains yeah they're pretty much all high testosterone disagreeable right um and and it's it's difficult to kind of think of what that that sort of stereotypical archetype would look like but we can easily imagine it in the sports world the easy the easy going but very talented right um basketball player yes yeah yep and there's been a lot of those guys you know they're they're and uh but yeah that's a that's a great example where you can find this semi-anomaly you
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