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Episode 42: Listener questions, comments, and emails
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all right good evening everybody dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good good to hear your voice excellent you know we've had some great episodes the last few weeks I'm really glad that we kind of got them out there the one on sexual abuse was very interesting I've had a couple of emails thanking me for thanking you for for the for the great information that you that you had us that you gave us a couple weeks ago and then the procrastination one a couple of people emailed emailed me about procrastination had some comments and listener questions and then we did that for our craft station episode and I'll tell you from my perspective I've been procrastinating a little bit less you know and so you know it's been helpful in my life hopefully it's been helpful to some of our listeners so we really appreciate that excellent yeah this is this is great you know it's really great to see evolute to hear evolutionary psychology and the theory of it and it's just another another level of you know greatness to hear it in terms of practical applications so a science science is fine but if you can't you know demonstrate if you can't do it yeah it's a it remains in that in the shelves of the theory yeah so all right what do you got yeah today we've got some listener questions comments and emails and we're going to read as we got a lot of emails in the last few weeks we're going to get to as many as we can and we've we've got we've got a few that we picked out and hopefully if you have any if there's any callers that are listening and they really want their question answered callers will take priority so if you call in at six five seven three eight three zero seven five one then we'll go ahead and take your question but we're going to we're going to start with the questions that we have right now so again the number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one so see if anybody wants to write that down but we'll just go ahead and get started you ready dr. Lyle cool let's do it all right okay this questions dr. Lyle you mentioned that the magic 10% in other words a true love pairing occurs when each person in a relationship miss calibrates the other and rates them higher than they are objectively so is the implication of this that in the remaining 90% of relationships at least one person at least one person is actually not in love with their mate if so would this person be aware that they aren't in love and be faking it for the sake of appearances or would they honestly think that any happiness they feel is love not realizing that it isn't also for this 90% would females have a greater likelihood of being the person not in love since they are most likely sleeping down in the pair bonds in other words is physical beauty the sole characteristic responsible for the true love feeling uh no yeah there's a it's the good questions here there's some confusion about what I'm talking about so they they begin like they sound like they know what I'm talking about then they wander into the weeds so that's okay this is good because some of these concepts that I that I explained are very new to people and so as a result it's very easy for people to to get essentially there be a little bit mistranslation so let me explain what the magic 10% is so magic 10% is my name for the following phenomenon let's suppose that you are going to go you're looking to buy a used Honda and you're you go and you're expecting to pay fifteen thousand dollars for a three year-old Honda with 30,000 miles on it so you you go look at one and lo and behold there's one for with thirty thousand miles on it for fifteen thousand dollars it's in about the shape that you were expecting now I would I would say that you would be pretty interested and you know reasonably willing to make the deal if it's the first one that you saw you'd be interested but you it would be marginal and the reason is is that you're not sure it's the best deal you could get so then if you come upon another one and it turns out that it's it's a little bit better deal it's fourteen thousand dollars then you're more excited so the amount of excitement you have for transaction has to do with your estimation of the relative value of that opportunity relative to other opportunities that you would expect to be able to have so the same is true in the mating arena so we can all see that that people of if you're given that you're heterosexual or doesn't matter we could be talking about homosexual folks as well but given a certain calibration that you have for yourself in what it is that you could you could likely expect in a somebody to accept you as a mate you are not particularly excited about somebody who is 10 or 20% less attractive and by attractive incidentally I mean all things considered I don't just mean physical characteristics so it's going to turn out to be the case that when men look at women a greater percentage of the females biological value is observable visually that is because men do not require for their ability to reproduce they do not require resources from females above and beyond their their ability to be impregnated particularly whereas for females looking at males they actually are looking to not only get the male's DNA and reproduce the characteristics that they observe visually but they're also looking to get resources out of the male in terms of his future efforts so therefore they have to look inside the male's personality and then his intelligence and they have to see essentially does this guy have good characteristics mentally that he is going to be able to procure resources protect me and be willing to share the resources that he gets those are far more complex decisions and require more data than just looking at the male physically so we can see that by percentage as the male observes the female he can essentially estimate her mate value more more accurately from a glance then a female can estimate the mid value of a mail from implants and so but we must consider all features of the organism when it comes to their made value in total that's actually going to include even things like who they know and what their family situations like and what their financial situations like and what their debt situations like and a whole lot of other things there so there's there's a lot they can feed into an individual's mate value but mostly we can we can summarize it in three main issues and that's what we're going to call looks brains and personality and you assess those three things in that order so you you very quickly can can get a percentile judgment on how we're a person stacks up to to the people that you would you would expect to be able to mate with physically if they are better physically than most people that you would expect that you would that would be acceptable it would find you acceptable you're quiet interested from the jump then we want to see how intelligent they are if it turns out hmm they're quite attractive but it turns out they're an idiot well for the male this isn't as big of a problem but for the female this is a very big problem and so the guys mate value will drop greater a greater amount then need in the same judgment that would take place on the part of a male finding out that a great looking girls an idiot that's not that's not it doesn't cost her as many points but it costs are something all right finally the personality issues as well the personality issue of the male is going to be more important than the personality issue of the female for exactly the same reasons that I've outlined because the male we have to find out if he's hardworking in generous and and that he's even tempered so if he's fair all these are characteristics that are critically important for the female to figure out whether or not she's going to get what what how many resources she can expect to get out of the situation where the male does not have to care as much about these issues because the female is stuck with a pregnancy and therefore if it looks like she's kept taking care of herself well enough and isn't a starving orphan with dirty hair then it's going to turn out that she's probably tough enough to raise a child on her own we're with a little bit of help and therefore good enough personality-wise so females will very often incidentally have this issue where if they see arrogance or selfishness on the part of a male he could be often completely ruled out immediately behind the simplest issue of how he treats a waitress or a waiter whereas males will not rule out females that quickly for exactly the same reasons that we're talking about that most of her mate value is observable through her physical characteristics so this being the case all of these characteristics looks brains and personality are all in hopper they're being they are being assessed and they are being assessed by the individual we you could essentially give people a mate value across these three dimensions on each of those three dimensions and we would do it independently the person's mate value is some weighted average of those three characteristics so let's suppose the person is a ten ten and a nine so looks brains and then the personality is just a really good personality but we've seen slightly better they lie a little bit they don't quite have the outstanding character that you've met a few times in your life so there are ten ten nine okay so there are very very high percentile mate now that that sounds fantastic that we would all want that but that wouldn't be true if you yourself for ten ten ten you would be considering that that would be trading down so what you what we do is we try to figure out we calibrate ourselves relative to how interested it other people seem to be to jump into relationships with us and also how reticent people are to enter relationships with us and we are running these essentially correlation coefficients on on our mate value from this feedback the what's going to happen with all this is this is going to establish what we're going to call our calibration and so the the magic 10% is going to be when we feel that a person that is interested in us is a little bit fancier than us maybe ten percent fancier so we actually feel like we're getting a deal this is actly the same excitement that we get when we feel like we've got a deal at Macy's on a sweater it's where we get a deal on the used Honda it's exactly the same process it's the process of the jeans working their way through assessment processes inside of our brain essentially trying to figure out whether or not this is an excellent opportunity that we ought to aggressively pursue the it just so happens in this case there's a tremendous amount of motivation and feeling and butterflies in our stomach and everything else but the truth is people can get the same kinds of feelings about some house that they're about a good to deal on and that they may hate get it at ten percent cheaper all right I've had I've asked you the same way when I go to minis I've been weak in the knees over that situation do so so at any rate what I call the magic 10% is when two parties in a romantic possibility both feel like the other one is a hell of a deal that the other one represents the upper reaches of what it is that they could expect to get the reason why I have in a quasi jaded way of describing this is to say that effectively that each of them has miscalibrated the other is is the following but there is for example let's suppose you're a guy who yourself is an eight so that means what you're you would dream of a 10 but you're probably not going to get that that's outside of your reasonable range but a nine is not outside of your reasonable range but there is some girl who thinks of herself as an eight because that is the feedback that she's gotten from the world that she's an eight but she happens to be you're nine now it's going to there's both subjectivity and objectivity in these ratings so the the objective rating for this girl is an eight but subjectively some people see her as a seven nobody Caesars six nobody sees her as a ten but some people are Sierra's a nine a minority so our guy who's an eight Caesar is a nine she our guy is an eight himself she calibrated as an eight happens to see him as a nine so as a result these two people who carry for each other is slightly distorted relative to the objective market they have a slightly distorted view of each other's value both of them now feel like they've got a hell of a deal that's what true love is that's what it nights that the it is the excitement of feeling like you are getting a great deal you do not get excited over feel like you're getting a deal that you completely deserve and have coming to you that doesn't happen okay there has to be the bargain attitude that comes with this and you will find that people that have have had the beginnings or particularly longer-lasting exceptionally good love relationships will say that quote they feel lucky okay they feel like they were very lucky that that's a that's the sign of an individual who's saying I feel like I was over rewarded okay maybe not hugely but enough not not enough to feel insecure like it was absurd and giddy just enough to feel like this is a hell of a deal and I'm taking it now so the magic 10% 10% has nothing to do with the percentage of relationships that exist here so a person was a little confused about the other 90% of relationships no no I don't think that a lot of relationships it's probably not likely that that 10% of existing for example long-term relationships have people that feel like they're living the magic 10% so maybe they're maybe they are but I don't think so that's not been my experience as a psychologist so most people will feel the magic 10% for a period of time usually early in a relationship until they find out all the baggage and dirty laundry you know it comes to light in the first year at the end of the first year that Honda that had 30,000 miles on it for $15,000 that the guy discounted down 10% to 13 five and you were all excited and you were quote love with the car when you found out that actually and you know there's a problem with the transmission sure yes the love that you feel for the car it goes through them somewhat of a transformation and turn out that an awful lot of existing relationships that people are in begin with the euphoria of the magic 10% and then settle down into a quote trade that feels reasonable but does not feel like it's a great trade so this is so in it so I would I have no idea what percentage of relationships where people feel like they are really fortunate and are in love with their partners it's it's some you know ironically it probably is 10% the research evidence would say that it's probably in that range ten or fifteen percent or so of long-term relationships look to be very happy and then a whole lot of them are real so so kind of what you would expect after you find out that the magic 10% really wasn't there so that's uh that's a long answer to a question that had a lot of little nuances to it but I hope that covers it fantastic yeah all right next question all right go to another here we go yeah okay dr. Lyle is there a scientific explanation for men with characteristics typically observed in women like the speech patterns emotional sensitivity interest in color and aesthetics music preferences body language etc yes of course there is yeah about the Marlboro Man that you knew by the way oh you remember that story yeah years ago god we won't talk about how long ago this was but it was a long time ago it was before it might have been before the three points shot in basketball so anyway this is a long time ago but I would say an intern at a Counseling Center at the University of Virginia and there was a guy that had been one of the models for the Marlboro Man he was uh he had made good money as a young man you know he was a had these screaming great you know square jaw etc patna that his name was Larry by the way and it turns out that Larry it turns out he wasn't gay but I mean we all thought he was he was very effeminate very arty etc and so the ironic thing was he looked like the Marlboro Man but he looked like he blonde in the movie birdcage that daddy's house that's how he acts my behave so yes it's going to turn out that these characteristics are definitely you know biological it looks to be obviously largely genetic it could be that there's other factors in utero that are taking place this these characteristics are being set up very early in early brain development and and so that's what you're looking at it's it's overwhelmingly dictated by genetic variances the and you're just talking about hormones causing causing the neuro tissue to be more androgen eyes door more estrogen eyes and so the way this works is that men have an awful lot more androgens than women probably ten to one I think are more or less in that lab wiping circulating differences between an adult man and a woman in testosterone is I think about seven to one maybe more than that and then with women obviously the test Rajan is going to be the main sex hormone so essentially all women have more estrogen than any man and essentially all men have more testosterone than any woman now this isn't to say I haven't met some women who could beat me at arm wrestling well I I have okay so and they didn't tend to have real pretty feminine faces all right so the you can see evidence of the amount of testosterone and estrogens in people just by looking so in my case of my my friend Larry they're back at University of Virginia it was sort of the striking contest where the body the body the genes that built the body said one thing and the genes have built the mind got a very completely different set of genes with respect to their sex hormones so yes men are feminine men because they were born that way and this has to do with genetic variances that they that their mothers or their fathers put potentially essentially had genes for high estrogen and that's what you got hmm so their mom didn't raise them and like teach them how to be more feminine ha ha where I go I love it just one place where I could just relax and tell the truth without worrying that I'm offending some of the audience because if I am offending some some social workers psychologists out there at least I don't have to see it and see that they're upset and exasperated listening to me and ready to object know your personality is genetic and it undergoes essentially zero systematic alteration from environmental events so for people that are upset and they've gone to the University and they heard that it was 50/50 my friends it's not even remotely close to 50/50 the there is of all the environmental events that they have tracked and trying to see if there's an environmental pattern ie dominating mother permissive father 3 I grew up you know the fourth the fourth boy after three sisters or the third sister after four boys or I broke grew up with five brothers that's why I'm more testosterone eyes as female this is all nonsense it's got absolutely nothing to do with it your personality is almost entirely dictated by the genetic code or what happens the reason why two identical twins aren't literally identical is because of essentially random events that are taking place mostly in utero causing a lot of slight differentiation of neural tissue and then also of course your entire life life history alters you and completely unpredictable ways not in ways that can be predicted by any theory with any kind of psychodynamic concept so if your mother is is more permissive it doesn't make you a flake neither does it make you more organized because you were so upset because your mother was such a pretty permissive like herself that you had to like get it together in bjorgen that is not how you arrive at your personality you arrive at your personality through the same way that you arrive at your facial structure and the color of your eyes and the color of your hair you arrive at that by your the genetic variance that was handed to you so that's why that works now a little side question and the equivalent in personality look first let me set this up a little bit yeah let's say like physically someone lets themselves go they don't exercise they don't eat whole natural foods really rich foods and they basically they physically they look very unappealing after a certain amount of time what is the equivalent in personality is just someone who just like stays up holds themselves up into the video games and never learns how to conquer social skills or the I would say that you've got a point there in in the the sense that in the same and for the same reasons the reasons why people I'd get in trouble physically is because we have removed themselves from the natural environment so in the natural environment people had to eat whole natural foods they had to exercise visit vigorously they had to get bet on time and they didn't do any drugs and so as a result they were you know aside from the the the hookworms that they sometimes had to deal with and the diseases that they might wind up getting the truth is is that they were otherwise in screaming shape the at a friend of mine that went to Machu Picchu which is you know one of the the mecca's of the of the educated people of the world with you have to go there some day so in theory I have to go there some day but I'm really not looking forward to it so Eddie right the point is is that you hike up they hike up I don't know to 14,000 feet through some pass and they had these Sherpas these guys that you know calling all their equipment up and my friend somebody that you and I both know Nate a hell of a hell of a doctor and a hell of a physical specimen the guy was a serious track runner this guy basically had to work extremely hard to get himself just up the mountain I couldn't carry anything sure was carried everything he says when we got to the top of the mountain all of us are gasping and all of us are pretty athletic people or we wouldn't even been on that trip the Sherpas meanwhile put down these 80 pound packs and drop a soccer ball and start to play all right so the point is is that the these guys are a lot closer to the stone-age environment and obviously they're adopting the L altitude but the issue is here that yes people can as a result of moderate circumstances they can make less of their physical being than it should be behind essentially energy conservation programming or laziness allows this to happen and energy conservation programming leads them deep very very rich foods consistently and then get out of shape and then lose their sex appeal in the same way the circumstances can conspire in an individual's life to make it so that they do not have to make very much of themselves and the same kind of energy conservation programming as well as a multitude of other factors can drive them to not actualize as much of their potential as they would have had to actualize in the Stone Age just to participate in the village in normal commercial transactions for food and protection and as a result they can be by not actualizing their capabilities reasonably they can be handicapping themselves in normal human relationship advertisements so that can hurt them as well so that that would be equivalent so I wouldn't go so far as to say it's quote personality because the personality isn't changing but the circumstances are conspiring to make the person make less of their their native abilities than they would otherwise have done hmm so they can no longer appropriately display their personality characteristics oh no that's correct doctor fashion you're right Orly Zeenat yeah they're not yes okay okay makes that deadbeat dad be the right way to put it excellent okay all right I got a caller here we have a caller here so let's uh let's see let's see we have here all right color you're on with dr. with dr. Lyle and Nate here what's your name hey name Doug this is Rob Colin from Hawaii cool hey Rob hey Todd thank you Doug that video that chef AJ put up a few days ago weight loss wisdom with with Doug Lyall yessing there with your legs spread open I don't know if you know jog that's called man spreading oh god not only not only were you man spreading but you then went on to man splain thing you went man explain thing so all right oh thank you I just want I just wanted to ask you Doug real quick oh yeah I'm not I'm not vegan but I obviously it was influenced by you and many people to you know eat healthier die and stuff but I was surprised by what you said on a couple of shows ago about veganism I think a lot of people perceive you as one of like the quote unquote famous vegans know do you still believe in like like your continuum of evil and like the a.2d a2f rating and you know eating like what you said to John Mackey and that interview of a few he was asking about salmon and you were like oh yeah if you eat that you're going to greatly you're going to increase your chance of a major tragedy do you still believe in all that stuff yeah this is uh we'll just take a little Sidewinder that's good good questions here the yeah some people do know me from the vegetarian and vegan world and and in in that world there's a there's legitimate there's legitimate concern and some questions and people can get people can wander off and get a little bit doctrinaire about their position when it comes to what's the healthiest way of eating and so on and so forth I don't have a strong position about this the I I would say that so just to to take this question a little bit I would say that the evidence suggests by by the studies done by Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn that it's clear that if you have serious pathology in a ocarina which is the number one cause of death and disability in the United States that that a vegan or near vegan diet is they've been the only mechanism shown to reverse that pathology now it does not follow that that means that you have to eat a vegan diet in order to prevent that pathology it just indicates that the vegan diet is extraordinarily clean with respect to that problem whereas nobody has been able to show well Dean Ornish's researches in pure vegan it was 97% vegan so he had 3% of their calories came from like low-fat yogurt pretty close to a pure vegan diet so nobody has had a diet that the paleo people would like the looks of that has been able to show the reversal of Appler genesis so the so I believe that when we look at different kinds of foods we we can look at the evidence from multitudes of studies and we can sort of line up how problematic different foods are and put it on a continuum so I put whole natural vegetable food at in the a range as we start to process the food I move it down the down the chain as we move into animal food is if we have fried animal food for example with the heated oils rancid become rancid and wind up causing the development of free radical formation as well as the problematic issues of animal food you wind up with what I call an F the worst food that you can eat now in between those ranges there there's plenty of room for debate and so I could not tell you and I don't know that I believe that if you had a diet that was 10 or 20 percent of calories from animal food that were where the animals were very healthy in stone-age terms and you had eighty percent of your calories for example from home natural plant food I believe that that would be a very healthy diet whether or not that would be a better diet or how close that diet would be to a modern very healthy vegan diet I don't know if it would be superior inferior or very close my tells me looking at the evidence that it would be close and I don't think it would be quite as good but I think it would be close so I use my lecture called the continuum of evil which is I believe on my website for free this is essentially the story of grading food along and continuum rather than what happens to people when they start to learn about dietary issues they get very emotional about the concept of whether something is right wrong black white legal illegal you know a sinner or a saint Lee behavior they they divided the world into right and wrong and they have a problem seeing things on a continuum and yet reality is almost always on a continuum and it is not on on a categorical right and wrong and we believe we probably know why human beings do this they probably do this because you could not communicate with each other without the use of words which define discrete categories so we talked about red yellow blue etc we don't start talking about microns of the difference of the wavelength of light that's not how we're built we use a word to describe a category and so as such we tend to think in categories because of the way the brain was designed for that problem and as a result people start thinking in terms of good bad in terms of food instead of on a continuum so I want people my the continuum of evil was specifically directed at that problem and it was trying to get people to say look just do better than you're doing know how to score the food and I believe animal food is is on the lower end of the continuum there's some disagreement it depends upon how healthy the animal is it depends on how you prepare it and I believe that whole natural vegetable food unprocessed but vegetable material is outstanding for people and I say that not out of opinion but I can again look at the number one killer in the United States and look at about the only studies that have shown to be able to reverse that process even deep into people's troubles onto death door is a vegan diet no oil you know devoid of sugar fat salt etc added sugar salt these kinds of diets very pristine have have a stunning track record and that that's why they belong in a range so good question and thanks for asking and I and I I have I haven't watched that thing from each I'm not sure I want to watch it but thank you thanks Rob Rob thank you very much for the call we really appreciate it thank you guys okay good all right go on okay and you know also to your point of you know using language to talk about certain categories you know it seems like people are starting to use language that indicates that things are on a continuum like hey I saw that color it was like red ish you know I'm vegan ish yeah and that there's a lot of ambiguity in there so that so that people say like hey hey don't put me into any boxes here yeah I'm sort of committed ish to the relationship alright let's see well right speaking of relationships we've got it we've got a question about a relationship okay okay this girl wrote to us excuse me okay dr. Lyle I have an unusual question for you I'm in my mid-20s and I've been on and off with my ex-boyfriend for the past five years he was my first love and my first real relationship and I was devastated when it ended approximately one and a half years into our relationship and although it ended at the time we always found ourselves coming back to each other both him and I dated other people in this time but we both have never felt the same connection that we felt for each other because we've been on and off so many times I don't have well wishes from my family and friends for continuing this relationship and as a result I don't share this part of my life with them anymore on to my sex life my sex life with him is very spontaneous exciting and passionate I've never had such passionate sex with anyone else he has discussed the idea of marriage with me however it's based on the agreement that we have a polyamorous relationship where we keep things exciting by having threesomes we recently tried this together and I didn't feel jealousy but I found the experience exciting and he was very considerate of my feelings and my overall experience his argument is that this will keep our relationship passionate moving forward as I have fears of being cheated on not necessarily by him but in general he says we would only have threesomes if we are open and honest with each other and have sex with others outside our relationship together only with that said I don't know what to do while I did enjoy the experience I'm still hesitant for the future not only have we had a rocky past I don't know if I will have my family's approval if we decide to remain together but I also don't know what effect having threesomes will have if we decide to get married have a family together and what the effect would be if we introduce others into our relationship basically strictly based certainly on a sexual basis you know this would have been so much more exciting through the female reading this to me I don't think I have the genetics to it to read it like that I can order the list but that's alright let's look at this the good question and obviously a young person how old was she she's in her mid 20s mid 20s okay the what we're I'm hearing some outlines of some dynamics here number one I'm hearing that there's an openness to experience on both of these peoples parts so these are these are not conventional people they are somewhat in unconventional people for the the I'm also hearing from what I can hear is how she was devastated when this relationship ended after a year and a half it that suggests to me that he dumped her so it and and his he we haven't heard about what the threesomes are but it sniffs to me like it's a third female I guess I mean the second female as opposed to a second male in this thing so I don't know if that's true but if it's were true this would suggest that that he is essentially and her talking about how great the sex is for her so wonderful and fantastic etc this this has the magic 10% stamped all over it from her perspective so the fact that that she is open and willing to follow to potentially follow him down a road of this kind of experimentation suggests to me that she may feel over awarded in the relationship and is is aware of this but is trying to essentially give rope here and see whether or not the relationship can can survive it the now what to do about this the several things first of all I can completely understand keeping it from your family because your family watched the girl go through all this devastation and obviously if they knew what the real dynamics were happening if they're not the wide open hippies they don't have too many hippy chips in there they're not going to like the sound of anything like this now my my take on this looks like as follows the I wouldn't be worried about I wouldn't worry too much about family approval so I would continue on in doing whatever it is that you want to do and keep your family at a distance as far as this issue is concerned the I have essentially two problems with young people and I tell parents you know they've got some young kid flunking out of school or whatever it is I say look you've only got two problems or they've got a bad attitude there's only two problems with young people drugs and pregnancy everything else you can fix drug addiction is a monster and if it turns out that you wind up an addict that could be a devastating battle for the rest of your life you have some kid get pregnant 17 18 19 that can be a life-changing event that if they if they don't feel like terminating that pregnancy this could wind up I'm not saying devastating their life at all it could be a fantastic thing they could they could have great joy having having a child but the point of the matter is is it alters the trajectory of their options and this is why it is that we don't want to see it okay so I would say the same thing to this young woman that the openness should end at drugs we do add the openness we also don't want to wind up with some nasty disease obviously so you want to play very safe and you sure as hell don't want to get pregnant in the context of relationship that is inherently unstable it's two young people finding their way and I would add a third thing along the line of drugs and pregnancy to this and that would be marriage okay now ah this one right before Thanksgiving I'm going to have some great discussions tomorrow the reason why I say this is because in this situation we are a hell of a long way from getting married the the it doesn't matter what the family says the this culture you know as we talked about this before the entire evolution of marriage cultural evolution of marriage all came about from essentially trying to protect the DNA's interest in a as we came to have wealth and so we're not going to go back through this today but what I would also say is that the world is now in the process of a phenomenal metamorphosis where we are able to start to separate that back out to some degree so that in in the old old days ie before 1960 the a pregnant young woman was in our excuse me praying a young woman out to out of wedlock was a tragic set a circle census because of the financial implications most people people have no idea what was happening economically in the United States people that are living today don't remember it turns out is late as the late 1960s something like half of the of the labor force was making minimum wage that's unbelievable it's nothing like that today minimum wage is the is the arena of young people working at Starbucks this was not the average wage earner that came home and tried to raise children okay that is not what what what is going on today those people the backbone of America do not make minimum wage today they did so you can imagine how devastating would be to try to be a single mother in 1957 staring at minimum wage and single motherhood unbelievable problem so that's why marriage was pounded pounded pounded pounded into everybody's skull but that's what you better do before you start having sex because then you're going to have pregnancy and then you're going to be economically devastated unless you've got two people facing this problem instead of one okay now the so what we don't need to do is we don't need to have marriage in this mess so I would tell this young woman I have no issue with the openness to experience that you have the fact that we you are the that you're your guy has a curiosity about sexuality that that he feels like he would like to essentially not get caught in a in a in a situation where he is exclusive and that he wants to tickle what I call the chip that says wife wife wife chippy which is what we can see resides in most males of the species and we can tell by the log-linear plots that we do of testicle size against body size in all the primates and we can see that the human male on average comes from a long line of male ancestors that had more than one mating partner at a time in at any given time in their life so they were mating a primary female and then getting a little action on the side how could this be true because it turns out that you folks if you're alive today you come from a long line of the winners you come from a line of the male's that got more than their share of the female DNA and so they did this not by being stand-up little guys who had one sexual partner they were stand-up guys that worked hard and provided assets for females and fell in love with them but they also tried to get some action on the side and did okay so our little gal here in this circumstances has a guy that says you know what I'd kind of like to have a wife wife wife chippy that's exactly what he's saying and she's saying boy feels a little scary okay which it should I should feel a little scary because he's and she probably feels a little scared to say no because she's probably a little bit feels over rewarded the so the dynamics here are I would say not that stable and so my attitude is if you're 25 years old no rush you don't get pregnant don't do drugs don't get married you will discover in the next two three four years whether or not you are married you don't get married you find out if you are and you'll find out if you are if it turns out that the way this this unravels or the way this this sort of comes to pass that it winds up being stable winds up being unthreatening winds up being a little novelty that the two of you can share and handle and the rest of the world would look down on and say that's too wild but you know what it doesn't matter if it works for you it works for you so but don't try to determine in advance whether it works for you you you have to discover whether it does if it turns out that jealousies and instability and problems result then you have things to talk about and then we can then we can discuss and figure out where we are from there so right now it sounds like life is good life feels good life feels exciting and the experiment that you had did not blow up in your face so that that just like just like anything in life if it worked and it seemed to work there's no reason not to try it again but I understand that we don't we're not even thinking about marriage and children right now because this relationship is way not a marriage it's not close okay we will discover in the next few years whether it is if it is then it's easy and if it's not then we haven't locked ourselves in with a with expectations from the from the social environment and in a church and the government and everything else into the Sun that essentially puts up a barrier to exit to a relationship that keeps a lot of people locked in to things that they wish they hadn't been in fantastic alright great all right we got one word we got two more questions so let's see even though we'll answer one and then if you have time to get the last one in then we'll go from there all right this is now from the other side I am a 55 year old healthy male how does evolutionary psychology affect me in the dating market well it's kind of an interesting question I'm not sure what he's asking how does it affect them in the dating market as evolutionary psychology well evolutionary psychology doesn't affect you in the dating market evolutionary psychology is just is is simply psychology we just call it evolutionary psychology because everybody that doesn't understand evolutionary psychology that's in the field has an incorrect theory of human nature so evolutionary psychology we should drop that solution but we signal who we are by using it ie they should call in no they should call it revolutionary psychology doesn't matter yeah the so how does it affect you well the real question is you know what are your circle you know how could it benefit you to know evolutionary psychology the would be a good question and it could benefit you in a number of ways that we've talked about in this program before so it's useful to know looking inside yourself what is it you're trying to accomplish with respect to any given female what do you want most what is the end that we see do we seek casual mating partners do we seek something in between to not fall into our own categorical paradigm here the relationships are on a continuum and on one end of the continuum it is the ultimate of casual mating strategy which is going to be what we call the he-man strategy which is where women are throwing hotel keys at Elvis or Mick UNITA mean etc that ie no paternal investment is even remotely signaled by the female for the male to be acceptable on the other end of the continuum is the the the female who is demanding the moon just to give her a kiss on the cheek ie you are outclassed and there's no way you're going to get to these eggs so this is that this is a continuum and so what we have to do is if you're a 55 year old guy the first question we ask is what is it that you want most do you want a pear bond relationship where you are where you feel the romantic love process as fully as you can or are you more interested in causal mating and the reason why we ask that question and try to face it squarely is that in order to make the most of our lives it helps to know what which of our values is the one that is the most important your values are all inherently in conflict with each other you can't both eat steak you know I'm saying and and be a vegan you can't do that you got to get to do one or the other you can't have a you know have a banana shake and then have an orange shake as well you can't buy the red Honda and then also buy the black BMW you you have limited where you could if you're rich enough but you can't drive them both at the same time so inherently everything that you see comes at the expense of an alternative option and so it's useful to understand that in your brain it's a male you have two very different mating strategies and to understand clearly that when you meet somebody if you're iffy about her that means that all she qualifies for casual mating strategy and so we have to be clear with ourselves if that's really not what we want then you are that you are wasting time in your pursuit of a parable and strategy and on this program I'm not particularly interested in trying to delineate the optimal techniques for males to pursue counseled mating strategy either there's the pickup artist website and there's all kinds of you know all kinds of ways to try to go about that process usually in a feeble manner the what I'm interested in is the the most exquisite experiences of human life which are romantic relationships and those relationships require that we meet people for whom we feel like we are at the upper limits of what it is that we could reasonably trade for the magic 10% and so evolutionary psychology will tell us what is on the other side of the table and as a man we should know that it is reasonably likely to be the case that if we are very interested in a female from the jump it is exceedingly likely that they are not very interested in us from the jump and it is also very likely to be the case that they think that they are seeking a situation where they are extremely interested in us from the jump and they're going to rule us out if they do not feel that from the jump and so females not knowing their own psychology very well have very often been the target of the causal mating strategy of men that are their genetic superiors and so they have felt weaken the knees in giddy and they feel like that's what true love is that's when they've had some very exciting sex that then turned into a broken heart six weeks or six days later or six hours later and so it's going to turn out that if you're a male listening to this program what we are what we will try to do from time to time is explain the optimal strategies for you as you go about the process of trying to find a female who it has the magic 10% within here for you and knowing full well that you are not going to you are very unlikely to qualify at that level very quickly and your job then is to sell your inner beauty and you don't have a lot of time so she's got a list full of prospects that are equal or superior to you in terms of you there her initial screening people wealthier taller smaller muscular younger handsome or whatever okay there are people that are your superior who are looking to pick her off as a casual mating strategy target and will float the idea that they could be seriously interested with her in order to get into her pants that is a routine situation on the part of the female that you would be interested in that would not will not be true if you are a 10 10 10 and you have no superiors but if you are 10 10 10 you aren't single alright so so as a result what we're doing here is we try to get inside the female mind we try to figure out how it is that she works how it is that she makes her decisions and most importantly where she makes her mistakes and so we're going to try to step her around those errors as we give her every opportunity to see our inner beauty and our worthiness as a pair bond partner so that she can join with us in life's most exquisite adventure wonderful I think we will end there and we will save the rest of the questions for our you give us a few more episodes and then we'll do this again with any more listener questions comments and emails excellent dr. Lyle thank you very much again right before the holiday we'll have plenty of stuff to talk about with with family members friends and anybody we want to argue with as you said we shouldn't really be arguing that's not that's not happiness comes from L bother all right thanks very much dr. Lyle have a good Thanksgiving and we'll look forward to talking with you next week
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