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Episode 69: Animal haters, Porn in long term relationship, Being a nicer person, Decision fatigue and Netflix
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all right excellent how's everybody doing today hopefully I'll do in today I'm good you know I had this audio clip that I'm trying to press play on it's just not playing so but let's see if I try it again here you know it's a funny kind of a thing but you know I feel better after I got all that off my chest I feel like I like a load mouths off my shoulders you're good hey fuck Thank You mr. Feeny I didn't do it oh you did some like it did some I'd it alone God where is it Donald you're good nah nah you're good like you're good I'm gonna because of touch with you tell or just one more thing if I talk to you and you turn me into a fag I'm gonna kill you you understand did we define fag you know every time I hear me tell if I think about you dr. Lyle and how straight I still am you know and I just want to thank you I have this deep appreciation for for everything we talk about here on the show and how I consider me my sin there you go well everyone here this is Nate Meiji dr. Lyle here with the beat Eugene podcast and dr. Lyle and I are here every week to talk about evolutionary psychology and how it applies to life love sex dating friends relationships and happiness and now you the listener can call in and speak with us about whatever is on your mind you can ask us some questions tell us an embarrassing story or two or three at six five seven three eight three zero seven five one or maybe me and dr. Lau should just leave the embarrassing stories to us how's that sound dr. Lau that sounds reasonable well speaking of embarrassing stories I actually I got a ticket as a traffic ticket a couple months ago I was in court last night trying to plead my case you know and the here's the problem is I had missed my court unfortunately I messed up the dates and the cop didn't show up to that court date so I was like you know I got super lucky but not that lucky because I didn't actually come so I'm there in court trying to ask the judge if I can if I can come in again and he's seeing everybody and there's one lady who's who gets up and she tells him he reads the charges talks about the ticket to her and it was a you know proof of insurance and don't have a driver's license and he says you know do you have proof of insurance now and she does no I don't have it with me he says well I can extend the court date for you you can bring it and that'll save you like eight hundred dollars in court fees she goes no it's okay I'll just plead guilty and and it was just he was arguing with her about well why don't you want to why don't you want to to bring your proof of insurance and proof over drive your license like it's going to save you so much money and it just kind of struck me as an evolutionary psychology example it's here she is in front of a village elder with the whole village watching telling him oh I have it I just I just can't bring it when in fact it just became clear to me she doesn't actually have it at all and she just didn't want to lie to him in front of everybody and he just couldn't understand it so it was really lying how that played out yeah embarrassment very very costly you know it bares bent signalling high cost and so she was caught in a quandary and you know just did a mealy-mouthed job and that was that mm-hmm yeah is is just interesting that he couldn't understand it was just uh yeah he was just so so into trying to help her that he didn't realize oh okay she actually doesn't have you know proof that she she had insurance though mercenary yeah yeah look a remarkable remarkable what we're going to call will actually call that that's egocentric bias it's an egocentric bias on his part he's trying to see things he's looking at her situation from his perspective is if it were him and he cannot actually understand he's missing a whole other motivational process there very interesting yeah hmm all right yeah we've got actually a name for an egocentric bias I like that yeah all right well so this week on the podcast we're going to answer a couple of questions from some listener emails and we're going to talk from our listener who calls himself animal hater yes it's a lesson about about animals in the West we've got a question about a lady who asked about your stance on her partner watching porn in a long-term relationship then we've got a lady who is self describing herself as a 70/30 trader in essence be disagreeable and she's asking how can she be a nicer person and then we've got a listener who is asking about pair bonds and how he's got an example as a not as attractive female as with a pretty attractive male and it's not making sense to our listener and then we've got a question about decision fatigue and how to overcome the allure of Netflix and all the other things that are built on our modern world when it comes to competing competing risks and cost benefits of doing that rather than working the on say a project and then we've got a question from one of our listeners about evolutionary psychology for female homosexuality rather than male homosexuality which we've gone about a couple of times it's pod and then we have some more questions about relationships so we're going to try to get to a call we can and then go from there I'm going to hold the rest of the hold the rest of the audio clips cat's-eye head alright so dear dr. Lyle this is from mr. animal hater if evolutionary psychology considers parental investment theory and the investment in near kin as essential why stay people in the West keep dogs who do no work and yet they still treat them like family members they pay expensive medical bills even take them to dog cardiologists and even leave them vast fortunes yeah well I think we always begin yet every question with the issue of that there's exactly two reasons two overarching reasons why but but you you will see a universal behavior in a species and that is the behavior is either associated with survival or it's associated with reproduction so it's likely that early in the domestication of animals that the domesticated animals were for some reason they were more benefit than cost so maybe they maybe they kept pests away etc so that that they probably you know began began their domestication there where they were for some reason they were tolerated because it appeared to be that they were a net benefit the then probably what happens is is that that you wind up what clearly happens is is that we wind up with a a parent offspring style of attachment between between humans and pets so the pets wind up essentially becoming like children and so they're they're psychologies and they're even their sounds are mimicking or they're triangulating on a lot of characteristics of human infants and young children and so as a result of that we we start to get you know essentially oxytocin level attachments that that we see today that are akin to the same kinds of attachments that people have their children in fact I will I will argue that children are very much like pets with our genes inside of them that the best kind of children are kind of the same process with a little extra kicker in it that it's our genes in there the finally I would also argue that that there is likely to be reproductive benefits for having these oxytocin based attachments to pets the and that's because people are looking at each other's behavior and analyzing it in the context of what kind of parent they will be most specifically women are looking at men's behavior and to try to figure out whether or not they are going to be attached doting fathers that's going to be an important consideration when it comes to analyzing how much net benefit they're going to see out of that male and for how long you know essentially what is the total net benefit of a relationship with this guy how much how much total resources am I going to see flow from that man's muscles in his brain into any offspring of mine and so incidentally and not coincidentally it's going to turn out that in match.com there's been analysis of photography men with pets and it turns out that when men take pictures of themselves particularly with their dogs this is very very positive females consider the male much more attractive and interesting when when they take pictures with dogs so this is clearly an evolved mechanism where where the attachment to dogs winds up being favored in in reproductive with sexual selection so all of this goes together to to say that if you're desperate get a dog because it goes if it doesn't get you a date at least it it's get you a friend I wonder if they if they did they do the same thing with men and their cats I don't know probably not because I've tried to sell the notion that I have cats and it isn't getting me anywhere so I I suspect it's not as good that's what you get because cats are a cut-rate version of dogs because there's so much less hassle and and I just wonder if that female machinery has sniffed that out [Laughter] all right I always get out brentwood i always my friends with pets that that you know between children and pets depends on what you want because with pets at least up children you know but that's wet with with pets at least you can sell their children ah right there you go all right all right next round right dear dr. Lyle I'd be interested in your stance on watching porn when you are in a long-term relationship I used to get really upset when my partner watched porn and he would hide and lie about it I have now since relaxed and feel like in the grand scheme of things it's not the worst he can do and will not end my relationship so I shouldn't get upset but what do you think this is a great question and I probably have you know I have a diversity of thinking that goes on about this the let's let's talk about porn in principle for just a second now porn is mostly all about the male casual mating strategy that's effectively what porn is pornography is the whole idea that highly attractive females are going to be very promiscuous they're going to require essentially zero investment that they're highly sexualized and that they it will take almost no effort to get them heated up and willing to have sex so that's that's clearly the ideal situation inside the male's head in terms of how life ought to be now the the the equivalent of that on the other side is a romance novel and life oh sorry does yeah the requital on the other side is you know Lifetime Television for women where it's all about so romantic thing and and what he call it you know commitment and all that sort of jobs now the so what's happening here is again what we're going to see the egocentric bias raising its head as people have a tendency to see things from their own perspective it's better than nothing but it is not it's not necessarily accurate so when the female seasoned male attracted to pornography a lot of times a woman will build be thinking this through from her own perspective which would be this that if she were looking for outside sexual activity then it would mean that the relationship would be in pretty bad shape and therefore the relationship would be under tremendous threat so that that's actually her way of thinking or feeling about this situation typically that would be true in in most cases so it's so therefore her egocentric bias is going to tend to let her down here and not actually see things from the male's perspective which is that that isn't necessarily the case at all but the male's perspective a male could be quite happily pair-bonded but still very interested in periodic sexual liaisons outside of the relationship so that that doesn't fit square with female psychology very well and so typically female seeing a woman seeing her man interested in pornography is pretty upset about it and feels pretty intensively threatened now this particular listener you know is sort of through her own experience has started to find out that that doesn't appear to be the case in her relationship and so as a result she sort of settled down about this and which is good I mean if if a woman can actually figure this out and it she turns out to be accurate if he's still interested in her and the relationship is still satisfying then the pornography is not threatening the relationship or and it's not indicating a problem with relationship now there is some evidence which of course would make some sense that pornography could be because it's a supernormal stimuli it could wind up being something that we do is the appeal of the current relationship for that male and he may actually wind up being significantly less interested in his mate then he would have been had he refrained from the pornography so that's a that's something that that people have to consider and they have to they you know they need to kind of gauge that about whether that's going on and so that's a that's a thing for the the male to be figuring out so if the pornography is is replacing the his interest in the relationship itself then we've got a problem all right now that doesn't necessarily mean just because that's going on let's suppose a woman's in a relationship and the guys doesn't seem into her and he's looking at a lot of porn that doesn't mean it's the porns fault it could be that the relationship itself that she may no longer qualify for whatever reasons and that could be the situation so there's a there's a variety of perspectives here but it in principle I am you know neither for nor against porn I see that there are potential problems with it and I also see the disruption in a relationship that can come behind it because so often the woman is can be more intensively threatened than would be then is actually warranted by the situation can be itself you know a big problem so looks like our listeners got that pretty well worked out and so in her in her case my attitude is be as as long as the relationship is is humming along well enough then the point isn't doing any damage mm-hmm yeah a few years ago I saw a TED talk and then TED talk was called the great porn experiment and I talked about the evolutionary psychology behind porn and it was a similar similar TED talk to your pleasure trap TED talk except it just had to do with ography and one of the things that I still remember from neces is the author I think his name is Gary Wilson he was saying that what happens when you drop a male rat into a cage with the receptor female rat well first you see like a friend's youth copulation and then the male is tires of that particular female even if she wants more he's kind of like done with it but if he's right replaced the original female with a fresh one then immediately he revives and then tries to fertilize her and you can keep doing this with new fresh females and he'll always be ready until he's completely wiped out and what this good Gary Wilson was suggesting was that when we do that with porn then it creates a very very similar effect and that's how people get right on it right yeah that's actually called the Coolidge effect and so that yeah it's that was named for Calvin Coolidge and his wife that visited a farm in the 1920s and this rooster was copulating vigorously with the hen and and the the mrs. Coolidge actually turned to the farmer and said is he always like that and the farmer said yes ma'am and she said well could you pass that on to mr. Coolidge and this is a grand story and so the farmer does that and Coolidge says does he always that way with the same hen and he said no it's always with a different end and and Coolidge said well please pass that along to mrs. Coolidge and hence this is known as the Coolidge effect later okay so very good let's go on what else we have all right so our next question is is it sandy we have a fog along a bit yeah go ahead yeah we have a few more questions yes go ahead so this was in it this was a couple parts okay so yes dear dr. Lisle a couple of questions here can a person's placing on the agree ability continuum be situational for example I believe I'm more or less disagreeable depending on the dynamics of different relationships in work as a manager I was feisty aloof bullish and opinionated but with certain friends groups I'm more or less disagreeable depending on group dynamics and on the personalities in the group I have a very agreeable mother and half-lit half siblings and we often fight with each other as to can help each other the most although they are all way more agreeable than I am with my narcissist a real father I'm very compliant and agreeable and in my relationship with my husband who's big five profile is akin to Steve Jobs's profile mentioned in an earlier podcast I believe that I am about a 70/30 trader and in some social situations I sort of overcompensate with people to try to mediate his brusque in contrary manner he is of course not remotely concerned about his impact on others I love him as the funny loving and smart guy he is and we are very fortunate to have found each other and hey at least by being together were not making too agreeable people's lives of misery is it possible that my agree ability can change or is my view somehow skewed secondly is there anything a disagreeable person like myself can do to beat my genes and become a nicer person throughout my life I've often resolved to be a better person and change my behavior towards love Dunn's and others but find myself eventually repeating the same old mistakes I'm an introvert and based a bit of a socially awkward person I often say the wrong things fail to recognize my impact on others and I'm too dogmatic and opinionated but often these behaviors and reactions are automatic knee-jerk please help an old gal to live out her days as a better human being doesn't sound very disagreeable to me but who know what do I know yeah she's probably got it right you know she's somewhat disagreeable the remarkable thing is she's got a good relationship with a guy who's also disagreeable and too disagreeable 'he's usually don't get along very well so fair enough and good good for them and they're very fortunate there the I would say that that of course you don't change your personality that the the basic tendencies are never going to change now you can you can do a few things that can make you quote a better person in other words you you can have certain practices a certain any kind of behavior change obviously needs to be sitting sitting aside a cost-benefit analysis that makes it worth it the now certain there's certain things that will alter my psychology in terms of how well I treat people I generally treat people quite well I'm pretty quite empathic and you know I'm a reasonably agreeable the good thing is a psychologist it helps to be at least reasonably empathic however the what happens is and if I get a little rushed or I'm you know under some kind of a little bit of stress I can you know I can feel the tension of time pressure or other sorts of pressure or I can be fatigued and I can get you know I have I have some disagree ability in me that will start to be get pushing more assertive and less sensitive and so the and once in a blue moon you know if I feel like I've been mistreated by in some situation I'd get my nose a little bit out of joint and the those situations are generally short-lived I will tell you some things that I notice that that I have filed away in my own head that that I retrieve in order to keep my own perspective on the grand fairness of life and then when I feel like I've got some grievance and I'm about to get pushy about something and that is when I see as I saw today and I usually do probably once or twice a month I will see right there on the open sunshine on a sidewalk somewhere crossing a street I'll see somebody in a wheelchair and that person might be you know 17 years old 37 years old 57 years old etc and I will recognize that what I need to be doing is counting my blessings and that I'm incredibly fortunate and that there are people many of them that were living these lives side by side with that have no chance to have many of the experiences that we have the opportunities for and that essentially two two two interrelated concepts life not only his life not fair it's not even remotely fair it's not even close and second of all it has been more than fair to me and so I would I would have this person essentially have a few of these very simple ideas in her head and that is that as you're about to start to get pushy with somebody to negotiate them out of a little poker pot you know just a little pushy with her with the waitress or a little pushy with a friend or a little pushy with something just about the time we're about to bump our chests into somebody and knock them out of something and essentially chisel their day a little bit for our benefit which is standard for describing people and behind it we have a sense of entitlement behind that because after all seen from this or that perspective you know they owe us this or they owe is that that's that's what's essentially always driving disagreeable behavior is this the about the time the disagreeable person is going to rev up some irritation and therefore some threat in order to negotiate other people this is what's behind it is a sense that know what's fair is fair and I've been cheated a little bit here I need to push back I can't be taken advantage of and so is we is we can get inside of our heads if you can a little resident memory that says I've been treated more than fairly way more than fairly in this life and if you look at this life if you are if you if your life hasn't been full of tragedy you have been treated way more than fairly most most of the people listening to the show that will be the case and maybe not all of them but many of them and so in this case something that might make you effectively a better person even though it's not going to change your personality we you can essentially shift your behavior a little bit and change we may change how it is that you behave and it may turn out that if you do this the upside to it is I have a feeling that what happens afterwards in the aftermath of of analyzing those incidences that that this individual is pretty sophisticated and walks away knowing that they that they got the upper hand the situation and that they got it at somebody else's expense and they're kind of okay with it but it's an interesting interesting comment that she wants to be quote a better person and she set that goal for herself so there's just enough empathy circuits in here that she senses the possibility that if she were to do things differently her internal audience would actually reward her with higher self esteem and by self esteem I do not mean self confidence so the self esteem is self confidence are two different things self confidence is perceived self-efficacy to achieve something self esteem is the internal audiences observation and feedback to the esteem mater that it thinks that you have done a good job relative to what you could have done and so part of that a big piece of that is actually a commentary on your conscientiousness and and part of being conscientious is is not just that we are following the rules or doing things properly but sometimes the reason for the rules themselves have to do with a moral compass which which includes the impact of our actions on other people and so for bigger stronger more intelligent tougher than other people it is easy enough for the the essentially less pleasant side of our nature to take advantage of that and it requires the better angels of our nature to to turn away from that and be more empathic about how it is that we treat other people and if we are then and one of the things that you can reach for is the notion that life has been more than fair to you and has been considerably less fair to that waitress who isn't that smart and doesn't have any money saved and doesn't have a college education and really has no other options and her relationship is probably not going that well and she only has so much stress tolerance and she's she's struggling this thing out at $13 an hour and when we when we keep that in context whoever it is the lady behind the counter at Macy's the the gal that's behind the desk at your dentist's office these people are you know they are usually not in in the most benign of circumstances their stress tolerances are limited and if we are tougher than they are we can push them around and if we don't push them around if we answer to our better nature then your self-esteem mechanism will recognize it and it will reward you with a dose of pride that came with doing the right thing and so I would alert you to that possibility a famous scene in Schindler's List actually speaks to this that Schindler was trying to get this nutcase from shooting people in the in the camp and he would say oh it takes a big man to not shoot him he was really trying to play this up is beautifully done and the guy did it for a little while for a couple of days and then he just threw it over started shooting people again and it really showed us that that despite the best sales job that Schindler could make on this guy the problem is the guy was just a total sociopath and so he the guy tried actually to find within him any benefit from being a pleasant human and he just couldn't find it but the the author of this question can find it and can find it quite easily and so that's what I would say is that count your blessings life has been more than fair and remember that there are people around that we would we would essentially take advantage of that our and maybe not brutally and not badly and not outside the rules but just a little you know the natural desire to get an edge and if we put that away and instead treat them more than fairly then then we have done something that our self-esteem mechanism will recognize and it will reward you I believe with a with a feeling of being a good human so that's what I would say to that thank you all right and she has a final just for fun question for you dr. Lyle yeah so dr. Lally you've been appointed as a consultant to match.com to re-engineer its systems to enable best find their magic 10% how do you do it yeah by the way she had her visit up there she met her husband through internet dating about 13 years ago one week after joining and she said instantly found there found her matches total fluke Wow miracle rare very cool that's the that's the beauty of the of the the modern age that all kinds of people can confine each other that never would good for her and no unfortunately there is no magic trick the magic the magic 10% that we're seeking resides in the fact that people that there is both objectivity and subjectivity and mid value and the objectivity dominates the show and so this is what I mean by this is that when when a 9 meter 7 9 is there a 9 and the 7 knows there were 7 and therefore it's exceedingly unlikely that the 9 would ever be interested in the 7 and it's exceedingly likely that the 7 will be very interested in the 9 that degree of objectivity means that the vast majority of people are or will not qualify for the people that they want to qualify for and the vast majority of people that are interested in you are people that you are not going to be interested in we are looking for a very small subset where it turns out that the subjectivity actually rules the wrist were actually causes the generation of mutual attraction you can understand that in a in a world where everybody was analyzing everybody's mate value objectively literally nobody would be mating okay because if you are a nine point nine you'd be saying well I'm only interested in a ten and the tens would say well I'm only interested in a ten and you know I'm interested in a ten plus some kicker which there's in principle no such thing and so you can see that it would work if people were willing to trade even but when you can see that the genes are designed by nature to try to get the better end of a deal that in fact if if everybody were carrying around perfect objectivity as to their mate value there'd be no mating at all so the the may not not on a pair bond situation there could be in casual mating in principle the but the notion here is that this will begin to work when there is subjectivity we're - AIDS meet and each one thinks that the other one is a nine and yet each one of those in their own heart that they are an eight and they know they're an eight because that has been characteristic of the feedback that they've received up to now in this lifetime so a person could be calibrated to an eight but they meet an eight who they themselves think of themselves as an eight but they view you as a nine and so essentially it is the unusual or the subjective distortions away from the mean that two people can have about each other that is the most likely generator of romance in the system which is kind of entertaining in its own right to think of it from that perspective so yeah there there will be no way to engineer that that is a in principle that is a flukish situation for for everybody that's below say the 90th percentile or the 95th percentile for people that wind up being extremely attractive they have no difficulty finding very interesting people because because you cannot get 10% better than the 96 percentile in principle so it's going to turn out that as you get up into the high ranks of human nature for sex appeal you're going to wind up with those people are almost always in relationships and they're almost always in relationships with people that they find very physically appealing at least at the beginning that they're not actually compromising anything in their search for those mates what happens is is that the grinding on the relationship then takes place under under brains and personality and then those relationships have great threat from outside influences because everybody in that relationship is highly attractive and therefore has tremendous options so hence Hollywood alright alright I'm go ahead go on it's a good question read oh yeah you know I'm just interested in you know if people on dating sites would take the big five test then you know they may not to get the looks part down but if they took the big five test and IQ test then they can they just be matched within the 10% of their own where wherever they are with some of the attraction you know agreeable disagree dental extraversion introversion openness unison yeah whatever we've already seen that the personality characteristics aren't that important in other words what's happened and they are important but it's going to turn out that people are so feverishly pursuing attractiveness that they must have what they will they have a word for it they call it quote chemistry okay we'll see if we have chemistry well we'll have chemistry means that we both think that the other one is sexually attractive well that is not an easy situation for the most of the people up and down the scale and so so that that is that stops the action that the magic here is less to do with brains and personality fitting than it is to do with sexual attractiveness fitting and so so that's so match.com is not going to solve this problem can figure out brands very quickly that you can figure out brains in a matter literally in a matter of less than a couple of minutes you can figure out looks in less than a second personality you know certainly can take quite a bit longer it doesn't take that long but it certainly takes longer if it's a little dicey and the reason why it may be a little dicey is they're not obviously crazy but it turns out that you're you've got a good deal here what looks like a really good deal an exciting deal with respect to looks and brains and so therefore therefore the personality people will give a lot of rope to personality they'll put up with a lot of crap if they feel like they're skinning their cat the cat on the other characteristics okay all right all right our next question speaking of relationships and trading up and turning down here are some burning questions from the listener dr. Lyle you stated before that the only thing that matters for a woman's pair-bond value is her physical attractiveness and that in chair incidentally hold on stop right there that is crazy I never said that if you if you if you listen to me what I say is that that what counts and pair-bond are three factors looks brains and personality that's what I say okay and second of all what I say is that the looks of a female are a greater percentage of her mate value than it is true for the males and that is because for the very simple biological reason that the female is dependent upon the male for resources to increase the statistical likelihood of survival of Roffe spring whereas a male knows for sure that that woman is going to be heavily invested in our offspring and therefore he does not have to guess about whether or not she's going to be a doting mother he already knows it that that's part of the characteristic of a human female in general and so the the issue here then is that statistically speaking when a male looks at a female from in one second into the assessment he is looking at a greater percentage of her made value than the female is when she is looking at the male okay so so I never said that the only factor involved in her made value is her looks I said that the dominant factor is the user looks alright so now let's continue now let's start at the beginning and then I'll shut up and you can read through the rest of the question okay no it's fine dear daesil all you've stated before about the woman's pair-bond value and that impair bond strategy the female is objectively rating more attractive than the male who comes with more resources than the female while I've observed this to be true much of the time I know a few couples where the male is significantly more attractive than the female and in which the female has greater resources to offer than the male one famous example is Amy Schumer and Ben Hanish Amy is an a-list comedian actress and writer with sixteen million dollars of net worth while Ben is just a regular person who's now become famous as a result of their relationship they started dating once her fame exploded and have been together for over a year now now Ben is an 8 or 9 while amy is not a 9 or a 10 given her facial characteristics and that she fluctuates between somewhere around 20 to 40 pounds overweight to me it looks like Amy brings resources fame and social status while Ben brings the looks this sort of pair-bonding relationship should not happen according to you what's going on here okay first of all we have to remember that that I explained that as I just explained there's both objectivity to made value and there's subjectivity and a big part of that mate value is going to be a physical attractiveness so there's objectivity to the physical attractiveness and there's subjectivity to the prod to this and so it's going to turn out that in this particular case let's suppose in principle that the person here that's writing this has it has it accurate okay so that they are that they've that it is true that the male is objectively more attractive than the scene in this case and now there could be a variety of reasons for this but the most obvious reason for this is that the subjective view of this mail is that that the female is that he finds her very attractive and so this could easily be the case and and so this there's no there's no contradiction here at all the the fact that that she is bringing more resources to the table she wouldn't be ruled out from this the issue is simply that it's actually interesting that this guy doesn't bring a lot of resources to the table but he brings better looks to the table because it looks like the female is willing to forego resources because she knows she doesn't need him from him and that because she's got her own resources and therefore she can essentially you know trade she doesn't have to trade any chips away at all in the looks department she can grab for the best looks that she can get and doesn't have to worry about whether the male brings resources so this all this all looks perfectly reasonable to me I can tell you that in my experience I don't know who this person is I don't know who these people are at all but when if this is striking which I don't know if it's striking at all is as striking as as being suggested here but in my experience when actually there's research evidence that supports this that when the male is objectively more attractive than the female it is usually the case that that the male does not put out a heck of a lot of effort and I usually I will very often see situations when this has taken place where the females got a real narcissistic streak in there and she is uh very desperate to display to the world that she is actually a very high quality highly attractive female by virtue of parading her fancy mail her fancy looking mail in front of the world and show that she's a para blunder of him and so and so therefore she's willing to sell out the fact you know the guy's ambition whether or not he's got any money whether he's got any teeth in his head in other words she's willing to sell out a lot of normal male mid value in order to grandstand this so I have seen this pattern you know repetitively throughout my career I'm not going to say that it is you know it always strikes me whenever the male is twenty or thirty percentile better-looking than the female and I'm not just talking about that she'd gained 50 pounds you know in the last ten years I'm talking about just straight up you know from the jump when there's a difference like this it's always striking and odd and I the male is usually pretty quiet not very ambitious doesn't have it a lot of steam in him and the female kind of steam rolls her way into the relationship grabs them by the throat you can't get out of there and and that's kind of and there will be a tendency for the male to be lazy and in some way exploiting the females hard hard work ethic and her resources now this sounds to be like a fantastical psychologist just talking off the cuff however there is startling research evidence that supports it and that is that it turns out that in objective measurements of male versus female attractiveness where the male is judged to be more attractive than the female in the para bond where there's child it turns out that the males on average will do 1/10 of the child care that a normal male will do in in such a relationship so this is a stunning effect size that basically the attractive male knows he's more attractive the female knows he's more attractive and she puts up with the fact that he is not going to change those diapers there is no way what he brings to the table is his superior looks and he's going to damn well just sit down and watch the game and she better have a good job and she better keep it and so good luck to Amy or whatever her name is we're only a year into this we'll see what do you think you think you know uh it's going to fizzle out pretty soon who knows I wouldn't know but I mean some Hollywood thing that they inherently have a lot of have a lot of disruption there I have no idea what this guy really thinks to this girl and whether or not he thinks he's got a good deal or whether he's got stars in his eyes because this person is you know you know becoming very famous very fast I have to tell you a similar situation I mean not similar to this one because I don't know these people but all of us that are old enough remember Tom Tom Marr Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold was he was no prize but he was like a decent looking guy and Roseanne Barr was Roseanne Barr I mean like her or don't like her Roseanne was enormous ly talented but let's face it that this is no beauty queen and so we were all looking at this thing like this is this is a funny-looking situation here is this guy really interested in her and what we found was soon as Tom got his own fame and fortune and got himself into a few movies and actually you know essentially cornered some wealth for himself pretty soon he was dating tens that is what happened to Tom Arnold so Tom Arnold's behavior you know followed exactly what I would have expected was going on whether that's happening in this situation I have no idea what's interesting because i needled it I googled it as we were talking about it turns out Amy and Ben just broke up like two weeks ago yeah well until our podcast becomes The Enquirer right there you go fair enough yeah all right so okay so our next next question dear dr. Lau what can people do to defeat decision fatigue and overcome the lure of Netflix I have an entrepreneurial project that I've been slowly working on but after work I'm too tired to work on and on weekend so overwhelmed by decision fatigue about whether to do more pressing errands like cooking creating a budget and shopping or devote time them a project that I end up neglecting everything and just staying on the couch and watching TV please help well I don't know that I have any help for this I think that that there's little there's little pieces to Medivation motivation is determined by an overall cost-benefit analysis of whether or not the endeavor is going to be worthwhile and so you've got an entrepreneurial project there that you are thinking you've got some imagination that's telling you that it may be worthwhile but you're really not sure and if you were sure if you had more confidence then there'd be a lot more energy being poured into it so what's happening here is that the person actually doesn't have high confidence that this is going to work and they could also if they've announced it to anybody and that they've they've got anything on the line here they could be ego trapped to some extent and so there could be some countervailing pressures that are essentially making this less attractive to invest any time or energy in this thing so I would my goal for attacking the ego trap as a as a force and procrastination is to break this down not to the grand outcomes that we're seeking but break this down to the fundamentals and the the basic practice of chipping away at small details and that our job is to make a master a list of tiny little details of what it is that you should be doing and then essentially knock off a small number of them you know Saturday and a small number of them Sunday and the the notion is that that all we're going to do is chip and we're going to chip chip chip chip chip away and in doing so we're going to be watching for something interesting not for us to miraculously have a bunch of motivation fire up and then have the grand project work brilliantly and then be rich and then be able to quit our job and then have a big bow on the balcony that we did this that's what you're mad for and it's looking out there I want you to look for something else I want you to look for as you do those you organized a little checklist of tiny little things to be done and we hit a few of those things and we make a commitment to ourselves that we're going to hit a few of those things even if it's only 20 or 30 minutes worth on a Saturday and 20 or 30 minutes on the Sunday because we is we put a master list together and that's your first project and then we start hitting little pieces of it then I want you to watch for what happens to your self-esteem mechanism as you get it done and I want you to see that you feel better about yourself and somewhat excited about the process and that that is how we generate the momentum for something like this so we want to essentially not have the entire incentive for this action to be the grand victory that's going to take place if it all works out we want us to have an additional benefit that is in the cost benefit analysis which is the learning of the process of how it is that we do things like this in order to have a lever on our self-esteem mechanism and so that this is a way that we earn a wave of pride that comes into this that comes into the system as a result of investing energy in a worthwhile long-term project okay so this is this is how I would attack this project and so good luck to that individual if you if you want a more detailed explanation of that I think I've done it in previous podcasts it's the way this is precisely how I attack the problem of changing diet and weight management and you can see that in a MacDougal webinar for free that was done last spring on John MacDougall's website you have to search for it the the webinar is called the slow fast way and the principles that are involved in the slow fast way or exactly what I'm talking about tonight fantastic well I think we will leave it at that for tonight and unless there you think we have time for one more question or you want to leave them for next week I'll go ahead throw it out there let's see what we got oh okay we'll do the the last question here okay so in episode 19 dr. Lyle you made a self effacing remark basically saying that your lack of status seeking keeps you from qualifying in the minds of many women that you'd be interested in so I'm wondering how common this is and if this is the route of women telling a guy that they just want to be friends or they think of him like a brother if so other than being the best renditions of our respective selves what can one do to build up their perceived status in the village I want you to back up and read the whole thing from the beginning because I want to make sure I understand it go ahead okay in episode 19 around the 16 minute mark dr. Lyle makes a self-effacing remark basically saying that his lack of status seeking keeps him from qualifying in the minds of many women that he would be interested at stop right there that is not what I that I can't imagine and I said that so it's not a lack of status seeking that stops me from qualifying for women in the village no it's a lot of ineffective steps okay so it's through no lack of effort now as we go on with this question what we're seeing is you know what else could a person do to qualify to their words I as I point is I probably was pointing out that in principle because of the striking objectivity in the middle world for made value it is inherent in that mathematics that most of the people that you would want will not want you and most of the people to want you you don't want that is a that is a necessary byproduct of the degree of objectivity that exists in made value assessment if it were not that way if it was way sloppier then it would be an inner staying problem of people just needing to run into enough people then pretty soon they'd have a grand deal and they'd be all excited about it that's not what happens okay so we can see in the difficulty that people have in finding partners that make them excited we can see that the objectivity there must be by definition by mathematical definition the objectivity must be very high so behind that what we all do is we seek status so we seek to be to demonstrate value to the to the village any way we can so we try to enhance our sex appeal directly we also try to enhance our or appeal more broadly and generally not just in our looks but also in demonstrating the applications of our brains and also demonstrating our personality by having our pictures taken with dogs okay so these are all the things that people do they're trying to demonstrate increased increased values so now the so what could you do other than being the best renditions that you can think of yourself really there isn't that is your job is to try to figure out what is my highest and best use to the village what how can I be the best person I can be and how can I advertise it and that is what we do and you know after a lifetime of this I would tell any young thoughtful friendly you know is psychologists with some with some angst and and insight into his own soul now what one needs to do is to learn to play the guitar all right this
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