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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2021-06-03
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all right you've been promoted all right very good all right how is it going we're good I gotta a cat that's begging for treats here oh which one is uh stalking you today we'll see uh we'll probably she'll probably make an appearance here yeah it's well I I think people would demand no less I've got I've got both in here so I'm sure they'll make a nuisance of themselves at some point yeah all right all right well let's see if there's anything in yet oh I need to fix something really quick okay all right well we can just kind of go to whatever I need to I need to figure out a way with Sam um to when we um when we have an answered question in the queue it's still there and it still floats to the top um and I don't want to I don't want to Archive them because I want people to be able to see them but I also don't want them to I don't have to scroll through and kind of figure oh yeah we answered that one and right there has to be a better way yeah um let's see you totally did that one unless I just want to set you to uh rant mode kick back and relax we've gotten some feedback that people are enjoying your rants lately so okay here's my per I don't think we've gotten this one specifically this is procrastination and perfectionism I'm a chronic procrastinator and a perfectionist on top of it could I be that I procrastinate due to my perfectionism I'm a freelance translator juggling work and family I used to be a people pleaser who said yes to every assignment but that's no longer the case I generally get very good feedback and sometimes praise from clients but some of them never come back because of my lateness I'm at the 95th percentile in openness which in my case manifests thirst for knowledge I will often distract myself by reading books telling myself I'm doing background reading I think this person is this is I promise I didn't ask this on behalf of myself this sounds just like me I end up working last minute to meet deadlines and sometimes fail to meet them I'm often dissatisfied with the final product what can I do to complete my work on time and not be so hard on myself is this some version of the ego trap I I think I I I got to watch this I mean I think all uh people who would be yeah we'd have to look at some combination person about technology variables there's analase there we go all right right oh my goodness look at that cat but yeah let me think about that I think a lot of times uh what we're gonna find is that that uh there's several several little things that that get involved there uh a lot of little pieces of that and one of them is um uh one of them is is that you uh the so sometimes there's a there's a problem down deep inside of whatever the assignment is that we're not quite sure that we can handle or it's obscure you just don't you you kind of can't there's some mysterious step in the middle of all the steps you know what Jen that's fantastic that you just said that because we've just named something that's actually yeah a very important component in motivation I want to get this out of here no no she's an important contributor let's name something that I have that I've known has been a major concept actually that that nobody's ever named the mysterious step okay and the Mysterious step is is that that your mind is sufficiently sophisticated as it looks at a at a relationship between you and the environment and it it knows that from the from a sort of global analysis of the problem but it knows that other people have solved this problem that are no better than you and knows that you are capable of solving the problem so therefore this is a legitimate goal state so to understand what goals are goals are spontaneously generated tension systems inside the organism where the organism uh makes inferences that there's a better State over here and we are here and therefore there is some survival reproductive amount of chips that will take place if we can maneuver our situation to get from here to here and so that is uh it becomes a goal when the efficiency ratio of the uh of the uh of the expected amount of energy that will be required to get here so there's going to be a ratio of how many chips am I going to gain versus how much energy do I think it's going to take okay and then a key variable in that equation is the perceived probability of success so essentially it's perceived probability success which Albert bandura would call perceived self-efficacy uh he considered that to be the central uh issue in motivation but he was wrong uh the truth of the matter is it's an essential critical component of motivation but it's not it's actually he's missing very important uh parts of this that he glossed over and never gave any uh deep thought to and that is that he didn't understand uh on a as a not not thinking like an evolutionary biologist because he refused to think that way because he didn't want to think that way because it flew in the face of social learning theory so he shed his mind and put his hand in his ears I saw that happen with my own eyes by the way okay because I was at Stanford when he was there we had old man of Stanford and I watched him put his fingers in his ears and not want to hear anything about genetics okay so that was fine no common story yeah the story of social science Okay so the uh but the point is is that as you can imagine what there is is that there's a discrepancy uh in the state that you're in now versus the state that you can imagine or plot or make if you're in a simple animal you are making some kind of rudimentary uh rudimentary inference if you're a cat that's that's here thinking that may be better out the door you start heading for the door and give me a squawk okay why did you do that that's because your assessment that there's more food or or uh improved situation she can tell there's no food in here so the thing is I already gave her the treats that were here and she swapped and weren't anymore so she legitimately is is essentially she's not thinking this through in any kind of conscious fashion it's an inference mechanism that basically says well that's about all the food that there is in here so she starts heading towards the door okay food and attention because she knows you're are going to be distracted for the next X amount of time she's got little correlations but when you when he sits in this position and talks to nobody he's probably going to be doing that for a while yeah that's right so let's go seek Adventure elsewhere let's see if there's anything in the bowl so the point is is that that that's what's going on so there's a certain it's it's a certain amount of energy a certain Delta in in the the circumstances the potential Improvement of circumstances and the perceived probability of success that the energy uh applied to it uh will so it's the amount of energy and the amount of payoff and the probability of efficiency so that's exactly what's happening and so what Jen and I have talked about over the years uh she just said it the mysterious step and I've said that in a hundred words instead of two okay but what it is is it somewhere in there you're mind can sense that you know I know that I could get here but I also know that I've got a vague sense that there's something in the middle of the subroutines because all that the only the only thing that stands between us and this is a series of logical operations about the structure of nature vis-a-vis my natural abilities okay so that cat knows that she can run down the stairs and check the food bowl so that's why she is motivated to to give up here and head elsewhere so there's some set of steps but somewhere in there when we find ourselves procrastinating oftentimes there's some step and it's the mysterious step where we are vaguely aware that as as our mind is cast around that that process uh from getting from here to here we're not entirely sure how easy in other words we may know that we can do it but they're the mysterious step may have a a high variant in how much energy it's going to take to actually get get through it so what is it going to take to call to a lawyer what is it going to take you know 350 bucks then we're going to have to do it's like whoa who knows what the mysterious step is and so the mysterious step though can be vaguely recognized and therefore uh cast a Paul over our ability to make a crisp um a crisp analytic on what the payoff of this thing is and therefore we're putting on hold okay and so a lot of times we'll put things on hold uh as we as we let the Mind sort of um work around and maybe without much effort find its way to the mysterious step and then get get it parameterized okay so that's what will happen so you can imagine somebody staring at a mess of a house and they're kind of worried about some of the plumbing and they fiddle around and Fiddle around and Fiddle around and Fiddle around and there's all kinds of things to be done but they're like yeah unless I could get past that plumbing problem I'm not even willing to do all the rest of the stuff and so then what happens is one day their friend comes over and their friend says oh well my brother's a plumber I've seen him do that without any problem he'd be happy he's a really good guy for 100 bucks he'd solve that problem oh my God suddenly we removed the mysterious step it's an impediment and now we are charging on our way towards the goal okay so that happens constantly and so often um I so I think one of the things that's involved sometimes with this kind of personality Jen interestingly enough it's it's more than one thing it can actually be agreeableness okay if you're agreeable you don't want to go ask somebody the cost of actually uh what the what's going to take to to Traverse the mysterious step and then have them tell you and then have them have you tell them no I can't afford it or I don't want to vote for you so so that can stop you I that stopped me a bunch of times right agreeableness and and conscientiousness you don't want to look stupid you know you don't want to look like you don't know how so it's it's sort of like I should be able to figure this out myself um rather than go ask somebody who would know and and it's a very checkmating Force if you've got the sucker Triad characteristics yes and you probably over committed so because you've got sucker Triads so you've probably over committed bitten off more than you can chew and in principle you could break it down into Little Steps if you humbled yourself and went and looked stupid to somebody who knows better uh what to how to approach it um but you're you're being all kinds of forces are uh imposing on you to prevent you from doing that yes I can actually hypothetically yes I could think of two people gosh I can't remember his name it'll come to me uh he was a office mate of mine at prison uh a uh he's a psychologist and to him and Alan both of them were Relentless both very disagreeable and um and pretty stable and so they uh disagreeable stable reasonably conscientious but not out of sight conscientious and those guys both of them when they had a goal that would occur to them and there were some I.E mysterious step they picked up the phone that just without hesitation and I remember I remember this guy thinking about joining the military to get a bunch of free money you know as a psychologist and he picked up the phone and uh I thought his name's gonna come back to me I just can't remember it he picked up the phone and got people just you know called until he got himself some uh no no problem he had been amazingly uh I learned later he had been the director the sales director for Miata uh Toyota before he had become a psychologist it's like if you uh know what that means that that guy had gotten to the top of the dominance hierarchy in the Audi Auto industry that is a tough character and so he he picked up the phone and he starts talking to these people uh and pushing about well now what if I joined him what would my bonus be and then uh and then he says and then I'm I've listened to this just crack it up like you got to be kidding me you're not gonna join the military and do this three years in the military and take this bonus money and uh and then bail out or however this thing worked and so he goes uh and I was right there in the room with him and I couldn't believe what I was hearing he goes he got real nice because normally you talk like a alpha male but then when he's talking on the phone he talked like a kid like a real sweet person so I just disgusting it was hilarious and he would say okay well now suppose that um that that you know I joined and then and then uh it turned out that if they wanted to deploy me I felt like I couldn't do it you know for some reason uh would could I be let out of my contract then and they're like yeah you could he goes oh and then the bonus money though would I still get the bonus money and I'm like you have the audacity and you know what they said yes and I sat there in that office with my mouth open like I can't believe what just transpired in a thousand years I wouldn't have had that conversation and a thousand years in that conversation I would have never assumed that I could take the money and then if the going got tough bail out and keep it that's incredible not a chance but that's the kind of question that Alan will ask just absolutely you know Shameless and that that is so different than you and I yeah right and so this is and those guys don't procrastinate no no it's straight ahead okay whatever the secret step is we're asking somebody and we are Shameless about it and we're gonna we're gonna push as as hard as hell to get it as cheap as possible and and forward we go oh yeah somebody's saying a military recruiters uh deserve Flack or or whatever yeah we don't I actually didn't trust that the recruiter was telling the truth but but this guy was fully capable of pinning them to the wall on any contract so I mean it's probably you know there's probably some lost leader percentage of people who do that and it's just built into the system it's just throw tax dollars at the problem you've got enough kind of social pressure on people to not do that um once they're once they're embedded in the institution that they they probably just recognize I mean that's calculated into the amount of the bonus that oh you know 14 of people are gonna bail I I keep one that says snack name is Tom vu H he's looked a lot like taboo and uh but uh he was I I it's gonna come to me I can't remember his name all right yeah but yeah not not intimidated by The Unknown by the end I'm gonna barge right through so our person is asking the question you know your jeans are your jeans and I I would say that knowing about I mean this isn't the only factor in your mess uh the over commitment all that kind of stuff these are all parts of it and so learning how to blame big Louie and uh all over your personal fractured Village I have a um this uh this concept of the fractured Village flaming big Louie Etc is is in a a webinar at a speech that I gave called success forces that should be on the front side of the free side of the website so you may want to look at that um but in here the uh the mysterious step that Jen is just just uh christened uh is actually a super important concept it's important enough that that I have it in my head conceptually and I now now uh push harder at the mysterious step myself now that I know that it's there and I know how my brain is working so I'm like richer teeth Doug even though it's uncomfortable and and push and discover the parameters around the mysterious step uh very often when I find myself procrastinating uh that that is a huge reason why that's true and I am a little bit better at it as a result of knowing that that dynamic yeah yeah cool but yeah the probably the you know treat the cause not the symptom at the level of taking on more than your your really should be taking on over committing yourself over over committing deadlines um and then the other piece I mean is is just the uh the sort of the general path out of the ego trap you know you don't want to miss the you know once you have these small steps identified um break it down as as Tiny as you possibly can because this is just a series of small things so that's that's really the answer to Ego trap driven procrastination without all of these other kind of you know bells and whistles that we're talking about if it's just an ego trial if you're just intimidated and you're just feeling like people are expecting more from you than you think you can deliver um and you've got each of the steps identified you probably still have those steps too big um if the if the next step in the list is intimidating you just break that down even more so this is where my story of writing my dissertation 500 words at a time time really comes in and and you know there were times during that process where uh you know because my first step is like oh I just have to write chapter one well that's ridiculous you know it's way too big of a project to take on so then it's like I'm just gonna break chapter one into X number of sections and I'm just going to write the first section and then that's still too big and so it's like okay how about three bullet points for what I want to cover in section one of chapter one can I write a sentence about each of those bullet points so this is how you just like slice that onion thinner and thinner until the next step is just like you you can't talk your nervous system your nervous system can't hug you out of it because it's so easy it's it's almost it would be a mistake not to do it because it's so it's not going to take much time and energy so if it's still intimidating you've got it the steps are too big is the is the general rule there so beautiful yeah fantastic that's just great stuff all right all right okay so we've got um I'm gonna ask this question then I have to fix something with a dog so I'm going to set you up on this and then uh disappear for a second but I'll come back so um he was just he was barking his head off at the extremely handsome UPS man I had a really exceptionally good looking UPS man today yeah I gotta go check that out gotta go give him a tip or something so um okay so Dean is saying A friend of mine has a 15 year old kid that was just diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and is extremely rebellious well those two those are synonyms um this kid is also transgender and anorexic by the way any recommendation on how to approach dealing with this we've got we've got uh some personality problems yeah okay I'll be right back sure yeah yeah um let's think about things so I got almost have to write that down so we have uh anorexic transgender transgender and Oppositional Defiant yeah um how to deal with them uh once again let's let's uh we've got some sub taking our own advice uh we would take these things sort of one little step at a time so there's a different set of problems there uh the problem that I'm the least concerned about is the Oppositional Defiant Disorder um that's that's not as as we know that's not a disorder in the sense that Psychiatry thinks about this so let's uh so let's not forget this but I'm gonna I'm gonna cover that just in case I haven't covered it before I'm sure that I have but but I don't want to uh I want to make sure we have Clarity on the notion of a disorder because that is a step one is to understand that anybody that has made that diagnosis is already making a fairly serious mistake in their understanding of reality and therefore from there they make mistakes in terms of quote treatment okay so um so we have that we have anorexia transgender I I don't even necessarily know what that means these days so Jen uh help me understand does that mean some kids heading for an operation or does it mean that they identify themselves as the opposite sex I don't even know quite frankly it can mean it can mean a lot of different things so um it just means that the this kid does not strictly identify as the gender it was assigned at Birth so this is the language that we're using so let's say this is this was a you know the when when born the doctor said congratulations it's a girl um that that girl now either identifies as a boy or identifies as gender fluid genderqueer um non-binary there could be a lot of different things and maybe is interested in surgery or hormone um therapy or maybe not so it's really any anywhere on the Spectrum so we don't know in this particular case we know whether this is a biological girl or a boy from this question we don't know from the question of sort of inferring girl um or biological girl but um we're supposed to call it he is that the deal maybe maybe or another pronoun or they or it could be could be any number of things so the odds are overwhelming it's a biological girl uh who wants to be known as he yeah that would be the most common case yeah and also almost all anorexics are girls okay that's the reason I'm making that inference yeah so uh so we've got an anorexic girl uh who's 15 years old Oppositional Defiant and what what else is the problem there's one other problem oh just the transgender okay rebellious yeah I couldn't care less so really I couldn't care less uh a a transgender girl anorexia um that that is uh I'm not concerned about the transgender hopefully because hopefully she doesn't have the resources to start hacking up her body at 15 years old if you if you're not going to do any uh help her maybe she will maybe there's a government grant I don't know how that works but we have we have a update so actually biological boy who identifies this girl has been dressing as a girl for four to five years and has um recently started hormonal therapy so okay uh that's interesting I would uh uh uh my my guess is is that uh some significant part of that is my the statistical likelihood is that that the the child is gay and yet is also a uh a very uh it's a very extremely disagreeable human is looking to shove a bunch of things in everybody's face and um and therefore is looking for a fight and so therefore I wouldn't give it the fight I would I would be careful about essentially dropping the Rope I wouldn't be pulling on the other side I would be shrugging my shoulders and say hey whatever works for you okay and basically try to pull the teeth of the status game that the child is attempting to get by is shockingly okay so that's what I would do and I would uh my strategy as a parent or clinically would be well it's your life you got to live with the consequences I wouldn't want to do it that way and it'd be like a super signal that that hey if you want to go out in that little tiny row boat on the on the Ocean by yourself you go right ahead it's not going to bother me any okay and essentially that that's a a very um it goes against your your DNA is apparent to want to pull on that rope really hard try to pull them in the right direction but in this particular case with this kind a child I wouldn't do it I would essentially chuckle at them okay I would I would I would give a knowing smile and roll my eyes and I'd let him see it okay and the reason is I would I would essentially cause them to go ballistic in their anger at the fact that I wasn't upset about what they were doing and therefore I would want to take the air take the wind out of their sails you want to know the truth that is actually how I would handle such a child okay now um the anorexia is interesting and it's uh extremely rare that you would get anorexia in a boy the the anorexia is um it's it's it's not super dangerous uh it's not as dangerous as people think it is it's not as dangerous as Naomi wolf said in her in the beauty myth where she was like 200 000 people die a year like that's ridiculous it's not that's the the stuff that you'll find online about that is really inaccurate um she just made that up yeah it's not uh and it's likely to be transient uh so again with this individual I would I I would uh I would shrug my shoulders at it and and essentially say Hey you know it's uh uh whatever whatever works for you the uh it's it's likely there's not likely to be the teeth uh in that anorexia that there would be in a girl so who knows we would be watching it uh but uh we'd be watching it carefully but I be interesting if there was a there's a there's a paper for sure about hormone therapy um you know sort of being a contributor to that or if if transgender biological boys are more likely to develop anorexia if they've if they've had hormone replacement therapy or if they're if they like that's a really interesting empirical question I don't know if anybody's looked at that that's fascinating uh it it wouldn't surprise me if that were true um uh so the boy themselves probably has pretty low body fat so the uh a combination of very low body fat with a bunch of estrogen being pumped in there could essentially activate that process because that's kind of what what initiates it in girls is this kind of adolescent process yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a really interesting research question I have to that's actually super interesting and this parent uh May if this is this apparent to that individual or is this just somebody talking it's a friend of those parents parents the parents may want to look up and have a conversation with uh an evolutionary psychologist by the name of Shan Geisinger and talk to Chan yeah she's in Montana and uh Shan is an expert in anorexia and so if anybody would know about that Dynamic about a transgender boy headed to girl thin body weight now on S children and now that activating uh could be the activating Force actually of an anorexia it would be Shan and Shan uh might be a magnificent resource for those parents to talk through uh things with so that is something that uh that that person uh ought to considered doing the very very uh warm person and easy to talk to so let's think about uh what else so we got the anorexia we got the tangent and then the Oppositional Defiant is just um uh disagreeable yeah that's just disagreeable people that's all that is that's not a that's just a 99th percentile disagreeable human and so that that's why when we have somebody that's so far out on the edge in terms of that personality characteristic that's why some of these other techniques start to a different strategy for dealing with them uh becomes increasingly legitimate drop the road you know basically gentle uh gentle dis detached sarcasm is like exactly the kind of thing that I would use with somebody like that I don't care if they blow their stack that way I know I've got some power with that technique okay so you you can't be afraid of really pissing off a kid like that or an individual like that that is that is a legitimate technique uh because you essentially want to cool their Jets because they are they are riding high on that narcissism about everybody being upset and shocked and appalled but cowed by their moral High Ground we pull their moral High Ground away from them by basically saying whatever it's not my not my body my life you get to do you get to mess it up any way you want okay you go ahead and do that and that that will we want to shock that child into thinking that maybe they're not getting the big awesome status shocking that they think they're getting okay that's a that's a a better strategy okay you do that and that kid thinks twice about the whole strategy and likely to abandon it more quickly so anyway those are some thoughts uh that I would have about dealing with the child like that yeah a little a little complicated for them because presumably they've been really trying to be diligent supportive of this transition you know kind of buying into it for years now um and so to kind of drop the Rope now and to Pivot the strategy so quickly is um you know putting them in a rough position I would in addition to looking up Shan's work and even reaching out to her I'd look um I don't know if she talks about anorexia specifically in her book but um Abby schreier has a book called irreversible damage um which is a very good book on the I think the subtitle is the transgender craze seducing our daughters or some something something sort of shock value like that and she's mostly looking at um you know FTM transitions so the sort of the contagion that exists in adolescent girls which anyone who has been an adolescent girl or who spent much time around them is very I mean this is the uh Salem Witch Trials effect you know the sort of teenage girls have this very this predisposition to have social contagion around trend around all sorts of things Sharon is talking about Glenn Greenwald in the comments here I think he's been in conversation with that I mean there's we're not seeing I think a lot of parents are earnestly believing that there is this legitimate increase in true transgenderism in the in the genetic pool um over the last you know five years or whatever it is and that's just that's not what it is this is a there's a social process here that's mostly affecting um young women but of course young men are susceptible to that too especially a young man that's likely to be gay um who's kind of getting pulled into this uh there was an amazing amazing piece that got pulled for medium it got banned for medium I have a copy of it I think um it was posted elsewhere uh if you want to reach out to me I can I can dig up the PDF and send it to you but it was a letter from a mother to a son um saying darling you're not you're not transgender you're just weird and it was sort of had this really loving really sort of like let's go back through your history and I'm sitting here I think I sent it to you Doug before it was deleted um that I'm watching you struggle competitively like you you um you're you're kind of unsure of your sexuality girls don't respond to you like they respond to other boys um I can see strategically why you would feel more at home with adopting this sort of identity uh and it got you know banned for being transphobic and anti-transition and unsupportive and everything but it's a really interesting perspective on a parent that's really paying attention to the the ways in which that kid is ego trapped and um competitively cornered in in a really difficult market during a very sensitive developmental time um and that's I think something that is very common for girls especially if they're kind of following the trend um so I think Abby talks about the this one town that she goes really deep it's this mix of quantitative and qualitative um where uh the number of young women who were coming into this Clinic that did transition counseling and transition referrals it was it was something like 30 of the of the teenage girls in that town and this is just this isn't because we have more plastic in the water you know this is this is maybe there's a combination of some environmental Force um that is that is having an expression you know having an effect on hormonal expression but mostly I think you're looking at a social situation and there are stories I mean if you start to look into Abby's work and others um Glenn greenwald's as well uh of a lot of of people who regret it who want to de-transition when they're when they get you know out of acute adolescence um and have really compelling stories to tell about that and the most common refrain is why didn't anybody stop me why did you just let me do this why did you let me you know in the case of women why did you let me cut off my breasts and do this like you know all like why did you how how were you bullied by my 15 year old self you so that's a really common um you know you're seeing a lot of that and it's really really tragic this is sort of one of these things which is like what's the more costly mistake you know what's the more like going along with us and and letting someone interrupt their their adolescence putting putting a 15 year old into menopause um you know preventing that you know making rendering them infertile for the rest of their lives or kind of being an [ __ ] parrot who is uh you know not not being supportive in the short term um or or being this kind of what Doug is describing this kind of distanced rope dropping like okay we'll do what you want um but not actively supporting it so it's a tough tough question um and you know this is uh I think we need there's a lot there's a real lack of honesty in this whole space and and a real uh high amount of confusion on the part of parents who are trying to do the right thing who were right um confused by misleading literature I mean you've got Scientific American talking about the gender spectrum and um it's uh it's really easy to get LED down the wrong road on this so wow just to clarify me I would first uh I.E I'm going to use that distant issue with a highly Oppositional Defiant human person right not not any other kind okay the other kind I would be calmly pleasantly respectful and then I would be an [ __ ] parent that would say nope when you're 18 do what you want you know when you're 18 you've got rights that you don't have now when you're under my roof No Deal but they have doctors they I mean what Abby talks about in her book and and other interviews she had a great interview at Jordan Peterson if it hasn't been put down the memory hole um but she these doctors are are you know recommending oh well we've got to act quickly because if we let puberty take its course then it's going to be much harder to you know effectively transition you're going to have a different you know you're going to have to have plastic surgery to re you know feminize your face or whatever it is wherever people are coming from and so it's better to nip it in the bud now so you have a more androgynous Blank Slate upon which you can be whatever there's there's even this rise there there was a uh an AMA sanctioned page um on a clinic that was doing gender nullifying surgery so like you know essentially making making the person look like a Ken doll um to be kind of kind of you know whatever you want to be you're completely gender neutral and it's like at some point you've got to stand back and be like this is madness what are we doing this is this is not the species biological sex is reality um where a dimorphic species like it's there there are some exceptions of course there are exceptions but it's a tiny tiny percentage and most most of us because the percentage is so small would never meet a legitimately transgender person uh in our life or maybe one you know and and we wouldn't we wouldn't meet them there wouldn't be five or six of them in a classroom at you know Central Middle School like it's not this is not normal it's not uh not a biological process uh we have a wonderful question from Vadim so this is this is just too great so there's a theory that humans are not monogamous or or polygamous animals yeah polyamorous maybe um but we got stuck exactly in the middle in the course of evolution at least I'm stuck for sure in every relationship I'm torn between these two opposites on the one hand I want to stay with one partner and reproduce on the other hand I feel like I'm in prison suppressing my desires at the same time I don't really believe in open relationships and my high conscientiousness prevents me from cheating dear doctors do you have any idea about how I can beat my jeans this is like this is this is the question that gets put on on the plaque in bronze like this is so perfect fabulous yeah a good way to think about evolution is uh that I I learned from Jeffrey Miller and that is uh Jeffrey Miller is the is the first time you know I think I read about runaway in Richard Dawkins somewhere it was probably in a blind watchmaker I can't remember the but it was the concept of runaways and spirals how you get a peacock's tail and how you get some of the spectacular uh bizarre things that you see in human nature like uh the massive antlers you know what I mean on a on a moose and so the um but then 10 20 years later I am I'm reading uh Jeffrey Miller and Jeffrey Miller is talking about runaway as explaining uh runaway sexual selection uh Major Force that led to human nature emerging with a massive rent and uh and then all kinds of other things uh about uh about nature about why you uh why Jen's hair is the way that it is like no other primate has has hair like that and uh all sorts of things and so then he finally comes to uh one of these big high Concepts uh that obviously he didn't come up with it but this is Jeffrey Miller being a grand scholar of biology saying guess what it turns out that every species is either in a runaway just got out of a runaway or heading into a runaway in other words it's a constant process evolution is not static so the what has happened is is that uh proto-humans you know two two or three million years ago started to become parabonders um that that wasn't happening five million years ago and eight million years ago when our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee clearly uh was not a pair bonder because chimpanzees are not pair bonders to this day and so the uh so clearly we are not a parabiner species we don't look like a pair of water species you can tell how much of a parabonder's thesis a species is by looking at how sexually dimorphic it is if you can't tell the difference between a male and a female then you've got a parabonder species so if you get if you get sexual dimorphism that means means that the two genders or at least one of them the female has started to select the male for certain characteristics uh and grab those genes at the expense of of uh uh if the female is being titillated by the male characteristics and they're willing to take those and not wind up with resources okay well so our species clearly is caught in the middle it's obviously true the uh we are somewhat sexually dimorphic uh I've talked about there's some famous log linear plot that Edward Wilson talked about where it looks like that the average male of our species typically was having 1.3 relationships at any given time and you can tell this uh by looking at the size of the the gonads relative to the body weight okay oh yeah I've lost your sound Jen oh yeah I muted myself for dog barking that's my favorite EP tidbit I try to break that out in every talk I ever give is uh there you go that's your that's your proxy how much of a parabonder you got it yeah I called I call it wife wife chippy and I've had conversations with young men that were facing marriage and basically saying to me uh well you know this is why I just have this I just got this cognitive I.E they don't use the word cognitive dissonance because they're not grad students psychology but they're sweating this issue and I tell them about wife wife chippy and I said and I'll you know say the following thing what if you know what if you've got this relationship that two or three times a year you're flirting with somebody or you're at a conference or you're you've got some co-worker and you you uh have a a three-week fling where you sleep with that person four or five times and this was cool with your wife and you did this you know that you limited it to three times a year uh how would you feel about that I mean the answer is usually one time a year would be fine in other words we're watching the fact that the male motivation is wife wife wife chippy and therefore the the drive for casual mating strategy in addition to parabon strategy is alive and well and this wine set being Center of uh that that fact winds up being center of the Dynamics that you're going to see between males and females interestingly enough uh for fascinating reasons uh the the female side of this that is most comfortable for females which is fair bonding has become the cultural icon it has become the moral High Ground I I think that this is actually quite amazing that this is true that that this is why you don't have strip clubs okay this is why prostitution is illegal uh this these are this is all about stopping males from doing anything and this is why porn is quote bad and sneaky and you know Etc dirty uh literally dirty okay is the this concept and it's like this is pretty amazing and that uh I think there was a show on television Men Behaving Badly it was you know I don't know what it was about probably all kinds of things but that the notion that men are behaving badly when they have a roving eye and sneaking around etc etc and this drives females nuts because from their standpoint this is quote wrong okay with a big M moral morally wrong this is uh but yet amazingly this is human biology and so this is a tension system that's going to exist in every relationship in some capacity so you can hope that somehow the guy that that you've met that is handsome and Suave and the females love this guy and he's happens to be into you and he happens to be so into you that he looks like he's pair bonded to you and you are extremely attracted to him because he's got the Suave genes that would pass on to his son that he'd be the next Dawn one okay but your particular guy doesn't seem to have that one last Gene that causes it to be that way because he's totally committed to you and as he's the oh you're the only person he thinks about in any sexual context good freaking luck there's a reason that that is the plot of every romance novel it's oh you found yourself that like this swaggering Alpha who's got testosterone for days um and you know all this pent-up angst and he wants to just focus all of it on this one innocent virginal Target of his of his love and affection and so he's like super pair bonded I mean whether it's um 50 Shades of Gray or it's a story about some uh you know bad boy pirate in some medieval story it's always the same essential story this is female porn um that's what it is and it's it really doesn't exist in nature that you're gonna find the exciting uh Alpha out there with you know exclusive pair bond Tendencies that's a real that is that is a a very rare combo this is like well The Princess Bride which is a movie that I I love that movie I mean in other words it's beautiful story because at the end of it there's no conflict of interest and so as a result it's a great story notice we don't have a princess wide story where the guy like you know we got a girl she really likes him he he has tumble in the hay then he dumps her he goes on to the next one she's in love with him he has a lot of nice things to say about her and talks about the future then he dumps her then he goes down to we don't have that story no one would buy it like they would kill that in Hollywood you take that script into Hollywood and you are done there's no they'd laugh you out of the room okay so no that's immoral that's bad okay I always get a kick out of people uh uh you know skewering modern male politicians like oh we're looking at it for when you you know chipping with the secretary it's like why do you think they're there the highest mountain they could find so they would have those options okay they they they didn't have the chops to be a surgeon okay they they couldn't sing they couldn't dance this was the only Mountain left okay they weren't that confident in business so what did they do it's it's it's the Last Vestige for you know ambitious males of intermediate level confidence well they can be professors oh don't forget that that's surprised then a long ago and you know what they better have pretty good looks so usually not screaming Great Looks yeah but usually pretty good looks so so there they go there they are grandstanding you know in front of God and everybody for what the wife wife chippy and the joke is is that they've got to look like they're a pair bonder that's hilarious of course it's the hypocrisy that gets to be so much fun it's like they're up there with one hand on the Bible uh swearing up a dab that they're a parabonder and here's their here's their wife named Kate who's a school teacher that's been with them Faithfully for the last 27 years and here's their Good Wife on your blue-eyed children okay and now what are we gonna do and now we're surprised that there's dirt are you kidding so anyway that that uh I I remember uh two two lines come to mind Wilt Chamberlain getting criticized for his behavior and he talked to somebody and he uh quietly and he said wow what's all this backlash you know we were athletes that that's what we were supposed to be doing isn't it like that's what we were all up to we we'd see the great looking girl in the stands and we'd show off and do some moves and we hope that we could meet her later like that's what the point was but you think we're just playing a game right right and then another great line at a casino the the uh the little guy Joe Pesci who's a master collector has a line when he's you know breaking into uh to jewelry stores Etc and the mob is upset with him because he's a little mob hit guy and he and he's getting negative feedback from Kansas City about this and he's like this is Las Vegas we're supposed to be robbing people that's what that's how this is so yeah it's a great question and we are stuck in between we are we are in the middle of a process and that process could essentially reach a reasonably steady state which it probably has for the last several hundred thousand years uh and that's about where we are we're in a uh a fairly evolutionarily stable strategy where the the females are somewhat subject to Casual mating under the right conditions and the males will take advantage of councilmating under the right conditions and against it all there there is a parabond strategy that exists inside the nervous systems as a potential so do the other strategies and so as a result this is Rife for something that is now a component of the book that Jen and I are now writing that we didn't see coming which is the uh uh that we're working on now which is why it's delayed there's always reason why there's always good reason this is that we're now understanding more deeply than we'd ever thought through the critical importance of deception and and particularly self-deception so uh the male faces pretty interesting self-deceptive qualities in this that they can really think that this is the girl and they're all in on her but they don't know that they're actually being self-deceptive and females can be very self-deceptive in thinking that hey they're just loose and having fun and they're into the guy and they like him and no worries at all about any commitment but it turns out that she's actually got a total unconscious strategy uh uh that she's absolutely going for commitment so when it goes to health three months later she's all been out of shape okay and that it becomes as one of Jen's favorite political uh concept is quote Mission Creek it all starts out as fun in the sun and then suddenly we get Mission creep and uh yeah and now now and it isn't the male getting Mission creep uh on his end it's the female getting Mission creep on her end so the male's missing is uh uh is hey how can I get out of this because I can't very well turn this from a fake uh Paramount strategy into cowsmetic and get away with it that's not going to happen so you're you're about to have a getting scratch marks on your face pretty quickly so the time is to get out of Dodge but he I think people really need to internalize that he it's very possible that he was legitimately self-deceptive early in that relationship so you know all of the you know the sitting below your window with his guitar singing new songs and and you know I've never felt this way and I've never met anybody like you like he's he's believing that he could only sell it to you at the level he's selling it to you if he believed it and then he just wakes up one day and he's like huh too uh maybe it's time to start sending some some you know some departure signals um and see what happens um and uh you know he sees how alarmed she gets by defection signals and then um you know then it goes to hell then because she gets she probably picks up on them and gets doubles down on clingy and jealous and all the things and um and she was genuinely self-deceptive about her oh we're just having fun and it's not serious and you know we're not committed but this is part of why on the female side women need to be careful this is why 10 pay dates is a thing so 10 pay dates or or some version of it you know that sort of follows the the spirit if not the letter of the law of tempeh dates you're giving any potential romantic Prospect a good amount of rope to hang himself so you're you're sort of waiting to see if you start getting those signals of casual mating before you get all bonded up with them um and that gives you time to kind of sort out your own feelings too and then women especially in the in the online dating realm need to readjust their expectations because if they're only going out with guys that have them all hot under the collar from the very beginning they're probably aiming too high they're probably aiming for a guy who is going to be um deceiving them on some level and maybe self-deceiving himself and then they think oh I've I've I'm The Princess Bride look what I won um and then lo and behold in a few months the the mechanics do what the mechanics do and they find themselves feeling rejected um so this all we've talked about this in many contexts it's funny that you use the phrase Men Behaving bad lakes that's actually the name of David buss's new book which I haven't read yet but why men behave badly is his brand new came out just like within the last week or two um so that's for for people to kind of educate themselves on this I'm sure that's a treasure Trove of great citations and good info he is the person to go to um but the follow-up question is how to make a wife accept wife wife the typo cheapy those ladies that that charges people fifty thousand dollars and and tells them that they can that she can guarantee that they're gonna lose a lot of weight she'll remain right but uh uh that is uh people do that kind of thing which is really sleazy yeah uh so if we were in the sleaze ball realm we'd say oh no problem you write me a check for 10 grand sure schedule a private consult and we'll we'll yeah no you can't do it you can't do it you gotta you've gotta I I do think men underestimate the variation in female psychology though I mean there are a lot of women out there who are tolerant of it um not not the majority of women by any means but there's some significant percentage of the bell curve that is is gonna be okay with a strategy like that or at least to some degree um so this is about you know Finding finding the right person if you if you know that this is going to have to be part of a sustainable long-term relationship for you then you then you want to get into a long-term relationship with somebody who's at least you know talks the talk about being open to it and then you just find out you just find out when you're three six nine months in like how how is she responding if you're flirting with the waitress when you go out or you know whatever your kind of rules are if it's something like Doug was talking about earlier where it's this kind of you do what you need to do with it at a conference once or twice a year and I don't want to know anything about it some women totally okay with that some women are totally okay with with some degree of I know you said in your the first question that you're you don't believe in open relationships but they um if if you would believe in one if you're if you're pair bond believed in one there are all kinds of degrees of openness there's no there's no you're not in an open relationship or not an open relationship there's there's you you make the rules up as you go along and a lot of women are receptive to that so I would just you know be open about that from early in the relationship maybe not on the first date but [Laughter] if you know that you're just you're gonna be in an impossible situation otherwise and you're gonna be the kind of guy who is going to eventually cheat or blow up the relationship because you can't handle the exclusive pair bond then then you start you know figuring out how you can make it work so um plenty of women have zero tolerance for it so you know I talk to lots of women who get uh really upset if their mate even compliments a movie star in a film um you know said something like oh you know sort of Scarlett Johansson's looking really good and that you like that's threatening to them um and so there's women all along the Continuum but for for every woman who's threatened by a comment about a movie star there's a woman who's like oh you think she's hot that's you know that's pretty sexy tell me more about that so like just have open conversations and figure out how to design your relationship all good like stuck's like yeah likely story yeah all right well we've got more stuff but I think we need to we need to wrap up because I've got some consults coming but um we always have leftover questions so come back next that time no no Wuhan pun intended um but thanks thanks for uh all of you oh we're getting another complaint we we have this uh all the time that our our sound is different um I think you're further from your mic than I am is usually the problem oh well yeah yeah um yeah oh well yeah sorry I'm talking my audio is coming through my headphones today usually I have the standing mic but um that I didn't get that set up in time today so yeah but we're not we're not super professional all right well we'll see you guys next time all right have a good one see everybody bye
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