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Episode 77: Child prodigies, Cat-fishing, Being born w a deformity
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all right good evening everybody good evening dr. Lyle how you doing today hey Dad get excellent well today on the show we are going to be talking about child prodigies we're going to get to catfishing which we didn't get to last week as well as how the questionnaire from listener about childhood experiences and overbearing parent and then we're going to go with a another listeners questions who has a congenital disease and then if we can get to the next couple of questions if we've got time we're going to be talking about sibling birth order and then talking about death so a couple of things that will lighten up our evening today oh yeah so alright well let's get started dr. Lau you ready to power I'm ready okay so here's a question from one of our listeners dear dr. Lyle what is the deal with child prodigies four-year-olds who can compose and perform music in a way that makes our jaws drop or they might paint with mature skills how does that happen are there cellular memories like the way some species are born with the knowledge of where to find the feeding grounds of their ancestors or is this just some sort of scam that we see on pop psychology and TV alright what it is is it's it's simply the normal acquisition of skill and it's going to turn out that the way brains are built yeah there there are no prodigies in the way that we did that people might think in other words there are not people that are born with skill that is impossible the the reason why I say that it's impossible is that the construction of the nervous system is is such that it has to be very flexible about what motor skills that it can but it's going to learn so the way in other words it doesn't know what kinds of motor skills it's going to need in order to efficiently navigate the environment so it doesn't know that if it needs to get really good at picking blueberries or doesn't know that it needs to might be needing to carve elephants out of wood it doesn't know whether or not it needs to be throwing projectiles with accuracy in other words it doesn't have any idea at birth what on earth is going to serve this human best in terms of motor movements and so it has to be very flexible so that means it begins its life with essentially no ability at all it has it barely has any control over what it's doing it does have some control but it doesn't have a lot and so you can see this in in walking behavior and and talking behavior so they make a tremendous amount of mistakes look at a one-year-old as its learning how to walk it can do it but it's not very good at it and it will it will over excite some muscles and under excite others and it'll get its timing a little bit off and it'll fall okay and so it's making mistakes all over the place now what's happening is that as it exercises those capacities over and over again it's actually doing something mechanically to the nervous system itself and that is as you repetitively contract muscles or you have a neuron fire that contracts a muscle what happens is is that that neuron nearby cells that support the architecture of that neuron that it's basically scaffolding in the nervous system are called glia cells which means glue that sort of hang help help the brain structure hold together and what happens is is that those glia cells if nearby neurons keep firing over and over again because it's being used then what happens is is that the glia cells will manufacture a material called myelin it's like a waxy type of a substance it acts as an insulator and it will cut itself into little sheets and wrap itself around that neuron now when it does that what happens is is that it insulates that neuron and an insulated neuron just like an insulated electric wire will not leak electricity to nearby neurons so when you're watching a little kid learn how to walk you're watching that it wants to fire some neurons but the problem is is that electricity is leak two nearby neurons because it's not yet myelinated and so that's why the kid over excites things and then winds up falling on his rear end this is precisely why this is happening now the the more and more it fires the neurons the way it wants and gets feedback that that's true the myelin sheath will start wrapping around the neurons in a certain way so that it wants 20 wiggle it's bright big toe it can wiggle it's right big toe and not wiggle its other toes so this starts to isolate neural circuits in a way that the individual becomes much more accurate at activating essentially contracting the muscles that it wants to contract and not contracting other muscles that it doesn't want to contract so this is how you develop skill okay so no human being is born learning to play a piano now I've got a friend of mine that keeps swearing up and down that her son can just sit down and listen to some music and then play it and he just could do this and he's never had any lessons well she's just totally lying okay I haven't confronted her on it just because I you know I don't want to like burst her bubble but all she's really doing is telling me that her genes are so fantastic that she deposited these genes in her son and her son at ten years old as a prodigy and he can just do this well I know it's completely a lie there's no way that it cannot be a lie in other words that that child cannot have known how to move those fingers in a coordinated fashion in order to reproduce that music without having had a phenomenal amount of practice at doing it it's simply not possible you you need to have a phenomenal amount of practice in order to myelinate those neurons so that when it wants to move those specific fingers it's not leaking electricity to nearby neurons and therefore activating nearby neurons to fire and therefore fire off the other fingers okay it's simply not possible so that's why anybody that has ever learned any motor skill understands that you must begin by doing it slowly incorrectly and you have to do it slowly incorrectly over and over and over again and as you do it slowly incorrectly what weapons is is you wrap the myelin sheath into creating neural circuits that they they leak less electricity and then they fire not only more accurately folks but they fire faster so it's going to turn out that the more you practice the more myelin you wrap and if you look at a neuron of a highly wrapped highly used neuron so for example if you were to look at I don't know Eric Clapton's you know neurons around moving his fingers to play the guitar if you were to look at those you would find out that he has wrapped 250 sheets of myelin sheath around specific neurons which is unbelievable so that means that he's going to be able to move those hands with phenomenal speed and accuracy and and not leak any movement to other nearby neurons he won't he'll be impeccable in those movements as efficient as a human being can possibly be that's what you're watching when you're watching a concert pianist that's what you're watching when you're watching a match master carver you can't just wake up at birth and be a master carver it's not possible you must wrap the myelin sheath Michelangelo you couldn't have handed him a guitar and say well you're so good at carving marble that should be child's play for you to play like Eric Clapton why don't you just do this impossible he would have to go through the very slow movements thousands and thousands of times in order to wrap the myelin sheath in order to isolate those neural circuits this is the nature of adaptive skill in humans so you aren't born with these skills you must you must adapt them by repetition and the only way it works is by repetition so there are no child prodigies that are born into this world to have any skill at all the when you're looking at a four-year-old that's really good at something believe me this had some parent breathing down its neck and all probability making sure that that it had the tools to to do this thing if it's a violin or it's a golf club whatever it is and it has all the time it doesn't have to go work in the field and pick berries this thing is firing these neurons over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and the kids that are the developed great skill by age four are actually kids that have some particular fascination with that movement so in the case of Tiger Woods he was just fascinated with hitting golf balls in the case of Tara Lipinski she was very interested in in you know ice skating and so this is what it is it's just child prodigies have simply spent the in the case of you know not very many four year olds are very good but they might be because from the time they're 2 they can start doing these repetitive actions and if they do those repetitive actions for let's say a thousand hours a year or 2,000 hours a year potentially some little crazy kid that just keeps doing this these movements over and over and over again eight hours a day for 365 days a year they could potentially put 2,500 hours in and in a couple of years if they're come they've got a rage to master or they could have put in five thousand hours of repetitive actions if they do this they can have wrapped a tremendous amount of myelin sheath around certain movements and they can be highly competent they're not going to be as good as someone who's ten years old and has been wrapping the myelin sheath for for several years they will not be as good the so everybody talks about how Mozart was this child genius and age poor he's writing music but he was lousy at it okay so he was I'm sure a fine little pianist but being a pianist is an awful lot different than writing music so Mozart wasn't worth a damn as a music writer until he got older as that would make sense he had a great deal to learn so yeah child prodigies do not have any quote cellular memories that isn't how this works they don't have they weren't born with any specific skill whatsoever they may have been born and probably were in a lot of cases born with unusually good hand-eye coordination for example if that's what they're into or we doesn't just can't eye coordination they're probably born with very coordinated nervous systems so they might turned out to be a tremendous skateboarder for example etc the world won't of them and all probability because we don't care that much about that but they might or they might if there's some Hawaiian kid they might get out there and just surf like crazy and get extremely good at surfing and rap a bunch of myelin sheath around those problems so you can you can see that there is no mystery here it's literally how much myelin sheath have you wrapped and and essentially the only way to wrap the myelin sheath is to earn it and you earn it by repetitive actions focused very carefully on making the movements as accurately as you can and doing them hundreds of thousands of times the the great NBA all-star Bernard King in the nineteen I think 70s and 80s once gave an interview that said he actually intentionally knew that he wanted to add a new move every summer to his NBA repertoire NBA players usually have a few go-to moves that they have done so many times that even if you Scout it it's happening so fast that the defense may not be able to wrap quickly enough to to stop the move and so Bernard King you know in trying to keep ahead of the game and obviously because they're filming you and they're scouting your tendencies so the players in the NBA all get to know each other and they get to know you know what the other person's go-to moves are and try to anticipate those and take those away and make them beat you with something else Bernard had figured out that in order for him to get a new move ready for the NBA it took 100 thousand repetitions and before it was NBA ready so that's what he would do all summer long he would do a hundred thousand repetitions to bring in the new move and that is how you make an NBA all-star Wow well I'm really interesting so yeah the myelin sheets so you know when I was in high school I I started learning magic and you know it's just a something to do and it's really interesting but what I noticed was I was no longer interested in being a spectator of magic because it was just no longer fascinating for me yeah you see where I'm going with this I'm wondering doctor do you use this how you look at the world now where where is not as fascinating because you kind of understand you know because it's myelin sheath it's not the you know the fantasy of like some kid who just happen to have this cool nervous system that he just learn to do things yeah no I I'm I am respectful of people that have gone to the trouble to wrap the myelin sheath and and I now I now look at the NBA for example a sport that that requires phenomenal skill and they have to be incredibly unusual athletes they have to be really tall they have to be really really quick you have to have great endurance they have to be strong they always have to be mentally tough they have to be extremely competitive they have to have they have to bring a tremendous amount of unusual characteristics to the table but that's not enough they have to wrap the myelin sheath or they're going to be dead so you can be six foot nine can jump really high quick tough strong willing but if you have not wrapped the myelin sheath you're probably going to be out of the league and so you will sometime if you watch the NBA you watch the speed of the movements and the skills that the players use you are watching the myelin sheath that's what's very interesting so you you're literally watching a chess game of the myelin sheath because the muscles and the bones that are involved here are just the mechanical operations by how it works but what you're watching is you're watching the myelin that the person either earned or did not earn through repetitive actions being very very careful to not just goof around in the gym but spend every minute that they could about wrapping the myelin sheath and that's you know when people watch Steph Curry now and watch klay Thompson and watch these phenomenal you know once-in-a-lifetime shooters on the same team you are watching the myelin sheath those guys didn't just happen that way they they have systematically learned how to shoot a basketball you know better than other people have ever learned how to shoot it and that did not happen by accident that happened by design and you will find that with the incredible amount of incentive that people have today the old days forty years ago if you're a professional athlete you made the equivalent of today what would be 250 or 300 thousand dollars in other words it was a lot of incentive for for you know people from lower and middle economic situations if you had that kind of talent that it was worth trying to pursue that because you could make a lot of money you know you for five or six or seven years you might make the quarter of a quarter million dollars a year it wouldn't set you up for life but it would be a very good situation it's entirely different today if you are a very fine athlete today than the professional ranks it's very likely that you will come away with a fortune you know between twenty-five and fifty million dollars and that's if you're just real average so that kind of a fortune now everybody on earth knows that these fortunes are now astronomical and now the the incentive to wrap the myelin sheath is now through the roof and so you you are watching the development of skills triangulate on the maximum possible for human nature and so I don't I don't think I will ever see a better shooter in my life than Steph Curry I don't think we will in other words I think he has probably wrapped the myelin sheet as well as it can be wrapped in a nervous system that is genetically as the the the sensitivity of feedback mechanisms to hand-eye coordination that is probably at the 99 percentile he if if not better his father Dell curry was an absolute phenomenal shooter himself so the kid walked into the genetic game with probably one in 3,000 coordination and then we wrapped the Milan sheet brilliantly for 25 years and this is what we get that is that's the apex of humanity in terms of that particular skill it's like watching an Arturo Rubinstein play the piano it basically can't be done any better okay so the that that's what it is and so progenies are are fascinating because it Stokes our concept that there's some kind of magic out there but folks there is no magic to great skill what there is is tremendously driven effort that's what results in great skill fantastic all right well before we get to our next question on catfishing we actually have a caller on hold right now I'm going to put the mark and uh sure all right caller how you doing today what's your name and where are you calling from yeah it's Rob coming from Boston the place where dr. Lau's childhood dreams a crush because it's okay that just beautiful is it Rob yes yeah Rob very good yeah go to hell Rob yeah I now go ahead I talk I talk to Doug Lyall once and he told he debunked this book called The Four Agreements and I think it's worth just running over quick in the podcast for everyone to hear specifically one part where Don Juan Ruiz says don't take anything personal because I said to dr. Lisle well he says don't take anything personal for something of someone's being mean to someone's crazy towards you oh don't take it personal what if someone's you know being you know what if for the positive oh so you can't take anything present okay so you can't take anything personal for the bad but but only take it personal for the good it makes no sense doctor well can you please debunk this yeah I I don't even yeah it's a good question I don't I don't even really I think I once because I got so many questions about this book that I I went online and looked at Wikipedia for about two minutes to to look at it obviously it's some little pop psychology deal and and so I read through it and I don't really remember it very well but the concept of don't they take anything personal in some ways I could I could in some ways see a point of what anybody of what someone is trying to be saying which is something that I will try to encourage people in certain situations but let me give you an example so of what what you're getting out of what I would get at let's suppose the you are being rejected in a in a romantic situation where you're interested in their they don't seem to be interested in you now in principle we would say don't take anything personal don't take it personally but how personal can it get it doesn't get any more personal than us this is this is what it's all about is our genes are being rejected as as not up to somebody else's standards the how is it that we do not take it personally is like almost psycho to think that you could have that attitude now you could have another attitude that would be slightly different which would be to say that hey obviously I being personally and in an isolated fashion rejected by this human who is saying I am NOT up to their standards okay however I could take it in the following way that is that this does not mean that everybody of that person's gene caliber will always reject me in other words this is not an objective assessment and rejection this is a subjective assessment and rejection and so I need to isolate out this feedback to this specific individual and not necessarily generalize it to all other such individuals now the truth is is that we should generalize it to all other individuals to a degree because this is in fact an N of one and this person is representative of of the marketplace that we are seeking to trade in and so of course it's going to impact our self-assessment to some degree but that degree should be limited and we should keep an open mind as to what it is that this means so this is the the when particularly when we're young in life and we have not been rejected 50 times the way I have the first few rejections Kensie at least 50 times the first few rejections can be pretty tough on us because particularly if we're not we're expecting to be able to qualify and we would only approach people to food to qualify and then it turns out that we don't qualify and this is going to be this can be hard feedback this is going to be some ice cold water in our face too to have a smug concept of not taking this personally would be of course absurd however the other side of it is course we're going to take it very personally but we can also understand that this person is not the end-all be-all authority of our gene value whether it's in whether it's with respect to our work or with respect to our friendship or with respect to our sex appeal and mate appeal okay that they're not the end-all be-all judge and although we will take the the rejection as a cue that that we may have reached you high or we may have not reached intelligently enough or maybe we just simply don't qualify for this specific individual there's three very different hypotheses here we want to consider all of them and but yes it's not it's not nearly as simple as the Four Agreements but a very good question Rob and thanks for calling on asking is there anything else we don't do for you Oh Nick has a real quick follow-up sure absolutely uh I was asked this and hang up dr. Lao what do you think of the idea when I heard many women say in my life I'm like I'm thirty but I've heard many women say it um oh I only go out I don't go out to meet guys I just want to go out and and you know dance with my friends and have a good time and have a drink I don't want to meet at one right yeah okay so what's going on here is the following process there's all kinds of tough stuff that can be going on but one of the things is is that human beings are not necessarily at all they're not even unconsciously motivated to do things and not be aware of them it turns out that they simply like to do things but wind up being causally related to being successful genetically and that's what they're going to call fun okay so it's going to turn out that guys like to Russell and they like to fight and they like to do sports and they they at some point will start to figure out that if they get a bunch of glory from being successful then the girls will went on it will increase their likelihood of you know they're going to increase their mating cachet they do learn this but the truth is is that they could have been the case that the species could have been obtuse enough to not even know that that was true and they would still like to do it okay they would just like to do it because it is in fact causally related and it may never have developed a brain smart enough to understand why it's a good idea it would simply do it because it's a good idea I mean because it's success in that arena does in fact is in fact causally related to mating success so with with chicks and going out and hanging out with their friends at a bar and dancing and listening to live music these chicks can be sufficiently obtuse as to not actually know why the hell they're there okay that of course they like if you were to ask oh then it probably in that case you probably don't pay any attention at all to what you look like when you go and you probably doesn't even cross your mind I'm sure you always forget your makeup when you're in this when you're in a little bit of a rush and you don't think the slightest bit about the the clothes that you wear or your hair right okay this is insane they they are just like athletes and this kind of thing is like the chick Super Bowl and they're they're you know they're into it in the way that because this is an arena by which they display their sexuality they display what it is that they have to trade they they may not actually want anybody in that bar but they're interested in seeing if there is anybody in that bar or place and whether or not the someone is making eyes at them etc or who they can someone is making eyes that they're doing all sorts of calibration activity they are also doing coalition building and maintenance activity with their friends so that can be an independent survival and reproductive issue but of course there's a reason they are there and not at a picnic table out of the park they're there where they are because they are in the middle of a swirling cauldron of sexual of sexual dynamics and feedback and of course they are interested in getting hit on so ridiculous and you're right and they're all lying okay good job Rob thanks for callin thanks Rob really appreciate the call would love it when you call yeah dr. Lee I was thinking about that too kid it could be the female in Rob's case could she be signalling to him you know oh look how conscientious I am or look how humble I am I'm not actually going to find mates I'm just going to have fun oh yeah I'm not doing this um you know so don't quite fit I'm promiscuous or anything like that yes that's what I say it's actually a major signal to for someone in a relationship that's saying that they're saying oh no no no I'm not interested in in fishing around for other any other partners but the truth is they're interested in going out there and calibrating okay so calibration is a it's a critical part of appropriate utilization of your resources so that's like saying like oh I'd never want to leave that firm but I certainly will go talk to that other firm if they're calling me up and going to make me an offer you know can't hurt to talk to the guy okay so so that's certainly of course in the equation and and then the other thing that you're discussing there Nate which is that that you they would want to signal that they are not promiscuous because being promiscuous would reduce their mate value as a pair bond and so as a result they would want to say oh no no no sexuality is not even on my mind okay we know that sexuality is on females minds because they're far more likely to wind up at place like that when they're fertile right and not only that we know that when they are fertile and they wind up at such places they show more square inches of skin than when they are not fertile so this cannot be happening by biological accident so they their their minds and their behavior are actually biasing this behavior in such a way to to be more sexually attractive in there and the only reason to be sexually attractive is to dig up responses from males so whether or not you follow through on those or irrelevant the point is is that there's an underlying biological process that's at work here and people are not insensitive or blind to it well speaking of minds and bodies our next question has to do with catfishing and so this is our listener has actually witnessed their roommate who's catfishing men online and she would use an attractive drug yeah I got a story to tell you about this I dare that piston maybe about two years ago so I was um you know met this girl online she looked chill out she looked attractive and what was the kicker was in her profile she talked about how she was a vegan how she works out five or six times a week how she does marathons how she knows all these all these things and I could see by her pictures she was a little bit overweight but it wasn't that bad so it was you know and with all the things that she was doing it was it just seemed like she was paying attention to her health well yeah when I when I invited her out we we were talking a little bit and I said well do you want to go grab you wanna go grab a drink or you want to grab coffee no I don't drink coffee but I always offer it because you know that's kind of a normal thing to do and she says I don't drink coffee I only drink water and I don't drink I don't drink alcohol so I was like Oh even better you know somebody somebody who's very conscientious about what they're drinking so I suggested we go get some smoothies so I get her and I'm a lot more alright right yeah so on the corner she comes to the she's on the way and I'm texting her saying oh there's hard to find she's walking walking up and think I saw her but there was this lady who's about maybe ninety or hundred pounds overweight and I'm and she's smiling at me and in my - ly awkward moment I just I look and I said god I hope that's not her and I said it too loud and oh my god it was it was just terrible I she didn't I don't think she heard me but but yeah it was not very well never now let me go so anyway oh that's a tough one yeah that's a really tough situation yeah I've been I've been catfished probably half a dozen times in my life man um it's a it's a it's a tough it's a tough situation and the times I've been catfished was always about weight you know I've been on obviously first time match.com dates and and the person the pictures are 50 pounds lighter than the individual that shows up I'm not you know it doesn't happen often but it happens you know enough that these are these are very tough things so let me let's continue on with this question and let's try to get to our our questioners uh you know what the rid of the question is go ahead okay so this is about my roommate who's catfishing men online she would use an attractive girls pictures to lure presumably more attractive men into talking with her while in reality these men never would have been interested in her as she was severely overweight and to my knowledge she had no intention of meeting the men in person so I have a hard time understanding what would motivate her to continue catfishing speaking generally are women who catfish making an error in thinking that the more attractive man could fall in love with their personality first before revealing their subpar looks as for my roommate she's since stopped catfishing but has yet to find a suitable pair bound and is very picky with men is it possible that her past fishing trips have messed with her self calibration mechanism because of the positive feedback she was receiving from the attractive males how can someone retune this type of Miss calibration uh really good questions and there's a few there's a few little suppositions there that we'll pick apart here for a minute first of all the again the catfishing is is not not a surprise this is human beings essentially knowing that they're in trouble for a competitive situation let's take someone who is as a six they really would like to be with the ten however they know they can't be with the ten but they would they feel like well I could settle for an eight and and as a result they know that if they present themselves as they are they're not going to get an eight so if they present themselves as an eight maybe they got a shot at an eight and therefore that's how they're going to do this ie false advertising okay now makes complete sense so people would be very motivated to do this and knowing that that there is more to the story than just your looks that a considerable amount of your mate value has to do with your mind then it would make sense to try to to try to at least engage somebody that would that you would be excited about try to engage them in dialogue so that they could see your insides and that they could fall in love with your inner beauty so I have no doubt that this was part of this woman's motivation she was probably also just curious about whether or not she could pull this thing off and also curious about just being able to interact with highly attractive males and to understand them etc so this is part of this is being driven by what I call the myth of inner beauty which is the notion that that our inner beauty can trump our outsides and that people you know that we can get a great deal of credit for the stuff that is inside of us now there is a little bit of truth to the myth of inner beauty but the myth is is that it's a bit it's a very big deal and that is that asmath the it's also going to be the case that it wouldn't surprise me that uh that a woman could make this mistake in a bigger way than a male would for the following reason and that is that for men it is in fact true that they probably have a 20 percentile upside that they can they can fish a little bit out of their league if they bring tremendous mental psychological and financial assets and so that's because men do men are have a differential option with respect to how much they provision offspring so males that could provision offspring a great deal and would provision offspring a great deal that those males would be more valuable than a male who could not or would not okay so females are looking males over not just from the genes from looking at the outside but also from the notion of protection and provisioning and therefore the male has an upside with respect to his inner beauty now a female might infer behind the ego-centered bias that she also has an upside to her inner beauty this would be a mistake okay the females upside with respect to inner beauty is very small and the reason why it's small is because of the fact that men can count on women to be very very high investors in their offspring now this is not the same thing as the idea that a woman might find a male that's more handsome than she is and he might be into her that's the notion of the subjectivity that sits inside these problems that's different okay so that's a different issue what I'm arguing is is that women are not more sexually appealing because of their inner beauty under their psychology they simply do not get ruled out behind psychological issues men will rule women out psychologically who in fact are are acceptable physically but if you have great inner beauty as a female you will not get ruled out on that issue and so but it's not going to add points to your sexual appeal so this but females could make this mistake very easily particularly in this case I'm suspecting some narcissism in this girl so I heard that the notion is is that like let's let's sort of look at what we heard she was willing to lure men into this she had some notion that this might work etc so it it looks to me like someone who would be be willing to pull this thing off and think that it might pull off I think that she's she's got a narcissistic streak so now we we see that we see that later she quote can't find a guy and she's very picky with men so the question on the table is did the catfishing and all the positive feedback make her picky my suggestion is that probably she was already very picky narcissistic had herself over calibrated in the first place got nothing but cold water thrown in her face in her own mating range decided to catfish in order to get some positive feedback hopefully sell the myth of inner beauty and try to snag somebody 20 or 30 percentile fancier than herself or 50 percent fancier and didn't fly so it fell flat on its face as a strategy and now she winds up you know by herself with nowhere to go so I think that this was a doomed Enterprise from the beginning probably driven by some narcissism now the the question on the table though is if you pulled such a stunt and got yourself potentially miscalibrated behind a bunch of positive feedback from people that didn't you know they didn't know who they were dealing with would this potentially mess up your calibration mechanism maybe a little bit not much folks the truth of the matter is is that the whole whole point of calibration mechanisms is to be accurate and so as a result you you could be potentially in a little bit of lala land as a result of some sort of false feedback that you're getting for a little while but you can retune a calibration mechanism in about 15 seconds by finding out that the next three guys you're interested in roll their eyes and walk away okay so Cal raishin mechanisms are pretty relentless and they need to be and they want to be they set the bar high for us because they don't want us wasting our genes unnecessarily on on draft picks that are potentially beneath us so they set the bar high and they set us up for a fair amount of failure feedback that we're going to have to endure before we finally find the person who is who has a subjective rating system where we happen to qualify high and that subjection subjective rating system so that is that is how that works and that's how we're built and we're built to finally have mutual excitement when two people feel like they both killed the bear okay that's that's how this works the bet the system is capable of lowering our self-esteem or lowering our notion of our own I should say more correctly lowering or our self calibration of our mate value in the teeth of a bunch of repetitive negative feedback in order to get us calibrated lower so that we can be excited for a prospect that may in fact find us acceptable at some point so that that's how that would work ie this is just you know put this in terms of money in a job if the system if you think that somehow you're worth 60,000 a year and you keep trying to get a job and everybody says no will op you're 42 and you keep trying to get 60 no will offer you 43 no will offer you 38 okay sooner or later when somebody offers you 44 you're pretty damn happy about it you finally got it through your head okay so you may have started out with lofty ideas about what it is that you thought you could get but the feedback system will not allow you to go through this life and say well forget it I'm not going to work for a dime under 60,000 it won't do that when if you keep playing the game the feedback systems will eventually calibrate you down that is a provided of course that you are making the best of your own job at presenting yourself well if you no you're doing a lousy job presenting yourself and you've got more genetic chips to play but you're not playing them then the system may sit right there and say I'm 1/8 I look like a six nobody's interested in me that's an 8 I'll just sit here and someday I may get my due or someday I may get off my Def and in fact get myself out there in the game of the eights and and play with with a full complement of tools and so people can sit on the sidelines particularly in the pleasure trap particularly with respect to being overweight or possibly underemployed or thermal and those those two issues can sit there as essentially frustrating and energy-sapping goals that they don't want to put in a time and energy and commitment to to traverse and as a result of that people could sit on the sidelines in this game of life for a long time as a result of this all right interesting so we say that in in terms of a track ok terms of attractive guy that if a female has gained too much weight she is just the equivalent in males as being without a job or underemployed yeah yeah I think that's that's right I think if let's say young ladies 30 34 pounds 30 40 pounds overweight that would be the equivalent of a guy who could make 60,000 a year but he's making 30 so he might say well I'm pretty good I mean it's not too bad it's like it's not too bad but the truth is is that you're not going to be able to play at the upper ranges of your trading ability at that level okay you will not be able to and if you're a woman that's 30 pounds overweight or quite frankly 20 pounds overweight it's going to be very difficult for you to play at the upper ranges of your trading ability so it's going to be harder for you to find somebody that you're excited about that is excited about you and that's that's just the name of the game that's how it works so so my curiosity is I agree with you and it makes a lot of sense about the the character you know that men can overcome some of their their lower attractiveness with some of their character and ability to provide I'm sure but I always think of you know a girl who might be super attractive but if she's very narcissistic low conscientiousness basically a total bitch you know it doesn't seem like it would be a very pleasant person to be around no matter how cooking she was how varrick Troy is if you and tellers had a girl who wasn't that it wasn't as attractive but she was sweet and kind and honest and basically you know high conscientious meaning you know she'd be taken care of care of her her children and everything else is you know as best as possible yeah yeah yeah here's what here's my point my point is is that that male decisions is how attractive somebody is and whether or not that person meets threshold those are are likely to be fairly fixed decisions that seem to happen very quickly so the male doesn't have a choice as to who it is that he finds attractive physically he just does okay so these are these are sort of automated threshold decisions that are in the system and so if you are below that males threshold I don't care what kind of personality you have you're not it's not going north okay now if you sail over that guy's bar but it turns out that you're an incredible disagreeable bitch the truth of the matter is is that when he finds out you're an incredible disagreeable bitch eventually he'll let go of his fantasy okay so you can rule yourself out by a bad personality but you can't rule yourself in with a great personality that's not that works so when I talk about women you tell them doctor yeah doesn't work the same way in Reverse so a male may not meet criteria when were female meets him he is below her sexual interest threshold but after she gets to know him and it turns out he's got a golden personality he make me meet criteria so this is because females cannot know their own sexual responsiveness to a male at first meeting because so much of a male's genetic value to her has to do with his psychology she doesn't she cannot tell when she meets him how kind how reliable and responsible intelligent and hardworking and pair-bond oriented he is she cannot know this however each of those characteristics is a critical component as to how many resources her children by him will likely get okay and so as a result the female has to go through an assessment process in order to determine this now a female can also meet a male who she finds screamingly sexual attractive and be interested immediately all right so she can have the same kind of immediate experience that a male does but what she doesn't know typically she doesn't know that she can have an B find somebody sexually acceptable once she discovers their inner psychology and if it turns out they have great psychological assets which most people don't have okay but if the person has great unusually strong psychological assets it improves their sexual attractiveness with repeat exposure it may or may not improve it enough to meet threshold for that female okay but it might and so this is something that females know this happens they've had it happen to them they've had some kid in art class that when they met him they weren't into him but after a couple of months of painting next to each other he's such a nice guy he's so pleasant and he's so committed to her and he really likes her blah blah suddenly she's finding like well you know add this is a possibility and he's funny and he's interesting and he's got some talent and hey her nervous system finally he meets threshold surprise surprise well the females have had that happen to them from time from time to time in life and so as a result they have often the inference that the same thing can happen the other direction and this is where they make a mistake so this is why our girl is catfishing you know thinking that some man is going to fall in love with her inner beauty you know good luck it's not good I'm not saying this is impossible I'm just saying that I've never seen it hmm whereas I have seen many situations where it goes the other direction where the male was not in immediately interesting to the female they she was he was below her threshold and after he she got to know him her interest in him grew over a modest amount of time that that's well documented in the scientific literature and has been documented in my life experience doing therapy with more couple of thousand people and so this is a not an uncommon story from that direction but the other direction is at best rare and do your clients who you explain this to they get pretty disappointed dub dia it seems unfair but I'm sure you know I think it's fair enough you know works itself out but after it's biology you know biology is what it is and this is all this is all just the way that the game is set up genetically and nobody has ultimately the upper hand everybody's got their own brutal problems to deal with and it's not easy on anybody fantastic well yeah it's easier the more attractive you are which is why it's no surprise that attractiveness is a significant predictor of how happy people are hmm okay yeah all right well only 17 more question pick one more okay which people pick one more all right we're gonna we're going to take one with the congenital disease and we'll get to the other ones that I didn't get you next time okay you're about to Lao here's my scenario I have a congenital vascular disease that affects the size and appearance of my entire right lower extremity my right leg looks similar to a port wine stain birthmark with varicose veins and is visibly larger than my left leg but thanks to my plant-based diet I'm very healthy other than pain in a deema and swelling I don't have many of the terrible complications that others do I do have a restored greatly with the vanity of it which seems to be worsening as I age I'm fortunate enough that I don't recall getting teased or bullied for it during my life I was never self-conscious throughout high school I began to feel embarrassed in my early 20s now I'll nearing my 30 and I find that I'm becoming increasingly self-conscious and insecure about it I never wear shorts I never wear swimsuits in public and I avoid social situations when my leg would be exposed like going to the beach it's affected my social life and I don't feel confident that I would qualify for a pair bond that would excite my own nervous system because of the physical appearance of my leg so two questions number one how does this a-thank affect my ranking if I'm otherwise a seven does it make me at five and number two how do I go about beating my genes in this situation as it is a permanent disfigurement okay great question and very interesting problem and let's let's look at this so we have this is a again the issue of the objectivity and the subjectivity so this is an this is an objective negative there's no question about it so the issue is is that how negative it is is going to be subjective for every single male that's going to be looking at this so one male is going to find this intolerable and there's no way it's an instant rule out somebody else would find it a chink in your in your presentation but not that big of a deal where I could say hmm who knows quarter of a point okay so somebody else it might as well be the whole enchilada they forget it they're squeamish they look at it it bothers them these are individual differences in humans and this is this is exactly like trying to say you know the you know how bad is it if I put cilantro in your taco if you put cilantro in my taco it's like send it back okay I have no interest in this taco I don't care how hungry I am I don't care that it was made by you know Juan Valdez but the Wonder chef okay who knows everything about Mexican food and that tacos like seventy seven dollars I'm not interested send it back okay pat pack it up we'll take it home and feed it to my cat I'm not interrupting two cilantro okay so this is individual differences and so what I would probably do if I was this person is I would encourage her if she's you know trying to date on match.com type of profiles that I would comment on it in the profile I would talk about who it is that you are and I would talk about somewhere in this couple paragraphs down I would say you know I have a congenital problem with one of my legs it's uh it's not progressive or whatever it is and and this is this is what it is and it's uh it's it's got these issues that she describes okay and so and you know some in you know some people you know find this some people find this difficult to your would be uncomfortable with this and some people wouldn't so but I want to be upfront about this I would say this and I would have maybe one picture where you're not in long pants where they can see some amount of it so we're not throwing it all over the internet for everybody to see in gawk at but we have one picture where you may have a low-cut sock and then you have a some short you know shorts that go about to your knee or so maybe a little above the knee and you're sort of crossing your legs or you're just you've got two legs side by side and you're sitting back with a mint julep or whatever it is that you're drinking and that's what's going on you got a couple friends you might even cue people that by having a picture with two or three friends that they're not looking at your leg and they're not freaking out that they're just looking at you as a person and everybody's having a good time but there it is okay now the the truth is is that if you do this you will certainly reduce the number responses that you get however there will be people who will look at this as an opportunity okay as for example I would I'm always interested in somebody that's got some chink in their armor somewhere and the reason is huh maybe it's something I don't care so much about but the rest of the market does so there's jeans on sale okay and so this is I'm not the only one that thinks this way and so this is so when you say how far does it hurt you does it take you to a seven to a five no I don't think so I think it makes you a if you're a seven it makes you a bargain seven for somebody is what it is and so that's but we should we want to access that market and we don't want to waste our time trying to appeal to as many people as possible and thereby waste our time and then try to win them in and reel them in and get a relationship a little bit going before they find out we have this liability that is a tremendous waste of your life so instead we're going to advertise more honestly and we're going to do it in this essentially unashamed fashion very adult direct fashion it's not front and center and it's not front and center because it's not the most important thing about you the most important thing about you is the rest of what you look like and who it is that you are but we're going to put that in there okay and that way when people contact you they have they have been vetted for their ability to to tolerate that that issue and now we are not wasting our time that makes sense it's perfect sense talk about a difference between the catfishing and being dishonest and now here yeah we're actually being extremely honest and and yet and getting rewarded as a result because we don't waste our time that's correct folks all you have in this life is you've got time and energy that's what you have and you are going to make you know if you make fifty decisions a day of any significance that are essentially decisions about how you're going to spend some of your existence then that means in a lifetime you're going to make about a million decisions and your health will largely depend upon the nature of the million decisions about the ones that are related to your health and your happiness will be pretty much related to the nature of those decisions the quality of those decisions with respect to other issues in your life and if we are we do a good job of being honest we do a good job of working hard to achieve the things that we need to do in order to put ourselves in a good competitive standing and we we do we do this solidly and we do this life well and we do it with integrity then it's very likely that we will live a life that does a good job of optimizing our happiness potential and so all we can do is to try to make good decisions so that we don't do not waste the opportunities of our time and our energy and this is a perfect example of how it is that we try to do this well
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